Latimer’s escape took place in 1842, the same year as Prigg v. Pennsylvania. This decision allowed states to forbid officials from cooperating with federal legislation like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which guaranteed slave owners the right to recover runaway slaves. The Prigg decision was later overturned by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required free states to support the capture and delivery of fugitive slaves, even if it meant deputizing local law enforcement.
In November 1842, Latimer’s supporters in Boston founded a newspaper, the Latimer Journal and North Star. With a circulation of twenty thousand, the Journal sought to raise public support for fugitive slaves among antislavery Bostonians. In an interview, an editor asked Latimer if he had ever led Gray or anyone else to believe that he wanted to return to Norfolk. “No, never,” Latimer declared. “I would rather die than go back.” James Gray tried to get Latimer to return willingly, to avoid all the trouble and the chaos created by the meeting in Faneuil Hall. Gray promised to “serve [Latimer] well.” Latimer turned his back on Gray and stated bluntly: “Mr. Gray, when you get me back to Norfolk you may kill me.”
What about Rebecca? We know very little about her besides what was published in an advertisement after she escaped:
RANAWAY from the subscriber last evening, negro Woman REBECCA, in company (as is supposed) with her husband, George Latimer, belonging to Mr. James B. Gray, of this place. She is about 20 years of age, dark mulatto or copper colored, good countenance, bland voice and self-possessed and easy in her manners when addressed.—She was married in February last [1842] and at this time obviously enceinte [pregnant]. She will in all probability endeavor to reach some one of the free States. All persons are hereby cautioned against harboring said slave, and masters of vessels from carrying her from this port. The above reward [$50] will be paid upon delivery to Mary D. Sayer.
Rebecca must have ached for freedom just as desperately as her husband did, not only for herself but also for the unborn child that she carried on their perilous journey.
Who was Mary D. Sayer? Did she own Rebecca? Perhaps her husband did. Her status as a white woman may have depended on Rebecca’s labor. Perhaps Sayer stood high on the social ladder (but never at the top, a space occupied exclusively by white men). She lived with the discomfort of knowing that, as Painter explains, white men had unfettered sexual access to all women and saw “women—whether slave or free, wealthy or impoverished, cultured or untutored, black or white—as interchangeable.” There was nothing that Mary Sayer could do to prevent her husband from sleeping with enslaved women, who in turn were forced to be readily available sexual partners.
On November 18, 1842, Latimer was finally manumitted for $400 and could not be returned to Virginia. In 1843 approximately sixty-five thousand residents signed a petition, which led to passage of the “Latimer Law,” a liberty law that (1) prevented state officials from assisting in the arrest of fugitive slaves, (2) forbade the use of jails to detain fugitive slaves, and (3) formally separated Massachusetts residents from any connection with slavery. Judges, justices of the peace, and other state officers could not legally assist in the arrest of any fugitive slave.
In an autobiographical sketch published in the same year as the Latimer Law, Latimer wrote that he had always imagined running away, even as a child. He would roll up his sleeve and wonder, “Can this flesh belong to any man as horses do?”
We can only imagine the conversation that George and Rebecca Latimer shared as they lay in the hold of the ship for nine hours during their flight from Norfolk. Maybe they pictured their lives as free people. Maybe they talked about their dreams for their child and touched Rebecca’s growing stomach. Maybe they worried that George’s disguise as a white man might fail. Maybe they did not speak a word to each other. What we do know is that these two souls believed deeply in their humanity, and that they risked everything for it to be recognized.
1844–1849
JAMES MCCUNE SMITH, M.D.
Harriet A. Washington
The Negro “with us” is not an actual physical being of flesh and bones and blood, but a hideous monster of the mind, ugly beyond all physical portraying…that haunts with grim presence the precincts of this republic, shaking his gory locks over legislative halls and family prayers.
—James McCune Smith, M.D.
The University of Glasgow began its 2020–21 academic year with the unveiling of the £90.6 million James McCune Smith Learning Hub. This steel-and-glass shrine to modernity also celebrates the past, because it is named for one of the institution’s most revered alumni—James McCune Smith, M.D. (1813–65), who graduated as valedictorian of the medical school in 1837.
Today thirty annual university scholarships and the annual James McCune Smith Memorial Lecture bear his name, as do signs in Glasgow’s historic “slave walk.” The McCune Smith Café offers Scottish delicacies, an “anticolonialist menu,” and African coffees on the site of his former Duke Street home.
But in New York City, this Renaissance man—erudite classicist, writer, abolitionist, apothecary, and statistician who was also the first African American to be awarded a formal medical degree—is all but forgotten.
He was born to a white father and an enslaved mother who later earned her freedom, as did James. He grew up in Lower Manhattan’s Fourth Ward, where at the African Free School number two on Mulberry Street he earned excellent grades, achieved fluency in Greek and Latin, and displayed a rare facility for writing. He wished to attend university and study medicine, but every U.S. university to which he applied rejected him—evidence of the race-based exclusion that was widely practiced in both Northern and Southern schools, sometimes into the 1960s.
McCune Smith was, however, accepted by the elite University of Glasgow, and local abolitionist groups raised funds that enabled him to sail in 1832 to Scotland. There he earned academic laurels, assumed leadership in the Glasgow Emancipation Society, and inspired the university to eschew its significant profits from enslavement.
Yet McCune Smith was determined to return home after graduation and wield his education against American enslavement. He sailed back to New York City in May 1837.
Once ensconced in New York, McCune Smith proved far more than an incisive abolitionist who wrote for Frederick Douglass’s The North Star. He opened a medical practice in Manhattan, established the nation’s first African American apothecary, and served as the physician of the New York Colored Orphans Asylum. He married Malvina Barnet, and they started a family.
A few years into the 1840s, McCune Smith undertook a key refutation of racial pseudoscience—the U.S. Census of 1840. The “monster of the mind” to which this essay’s epigraph refers was promulgated by our nation’s most influential nineteenth-century scientists, including Louis Agassiz, Samuel Cartwright, Josiah Nott, and Samuel Morton. They pronounced African Americans to be acutely inferior, unintelligent, and animalistic but strong and designed for subtropical servitude. Their screeds lent the weight of medical science to proslavery arguments.