The results of the 1840 census, which by the time of McCune Smith’s review in 1844 were under the ultimate control of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, showed data on the health of both white and Black Americans, the latter of which were divided into categories of “free” and “enslaved.” According to these data, enslaved Black Americans enjoyed much better health than free ones, particularly mental health. Free African Americans were eleven times more likely than enslaved ones to be mentally ill, he found. Enslavement was therefore beneficial, according to the census data, and freedom could prove fatal.
Except for protests by one physician, antislavery activists offered only pallid rebuttals, while McCune Smith analyzed the data and found it rife with fraud and error. He demonstrated that many of the figures were specious or invented and that by every meaningful measure, from life expectancy to disease rates to mental health, free Blacks enjoyed far superior health than the enslaved.
McCune Smith presented his detailed report to the U.S. Senate in 1844. Former president John Quincy Adams, then serving in the House of Representatives, ordered an investigation, but Calhoun, a slavery advocate and former medical student, appointed a proslavery crony who pronounced the census flawless. Thus the 1840 census was never formally corrected, and enslavement was held to be necessary for African American health.
McCune Smith continued his abolition work despite snubs. The New York Academy of Medicine refused to consider his fellowship application, a slight that was mitigated by his posthumous acceptance at my request in 2018. After the orphans’ asylum was burned to the ground by rioting whites in the 1863 draft riots, he relocated his family to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for safety. He had planned to leave New York for an academic position at Wilberforce University in Ohio but was unable to do so because of an illness.
James McCune Smith, who fought enslavement valiantly on two continents, lived to see it banned by the Thirteenth Amendment before his 1865 death.
The distortion of medicine to support nineteenth-century enslavement is more than a shameful bit of history. Contemporary research reveals a widespread belief among physicians that, for example, Blacks are impervious to pain. Bias also persists in the dramatic underrepresentation of African American men among the nation’s eighteen thousand medical students: they make up 6 percent of the country’s population but less than 2 percent of medical students. And that number is falling: their peak year for medical school graduation was 1978.
1849–1854
OREGON
Mitchell S. Jackson
Back when I was a youngin living in Portland, Oregon, almost my whole block was Black. There was the old woman across the street, whose blinds were forever cracked, the easier to spy on us juveniles and snitch to our parents or guardians. There was the lil patna Poobear, who lived a couple houses down and whose front porch could’ve doubled as a junkyard. There was Ms. Mary in the middle of the block, whose cherry tree was the most fertile in the land but who would chase you off her lawn with a switch should you dare to pick a single sweet orb. There were the Mayfields at the end of the block, a family with huge Doberman pinschers stalking behind a fence too short to keep them from bounding it and turning canine-petrified me into doggie grub.
In a shabby duplex across from the Mayfields lived a Native American family (foolish me, I called them Indians in those days), whose yard always featured a dismantled car on cinder blocks. Back then, us neighborhood kids would build go-carts and race them down a hill, or we would stage concerts using upturned coffee cans, or on special summer days, we would chase down the ice cream truck and cop frozen treats—ice cream sandwiches were my fave—and lounge in someone’s front yard and hold tacit speed-licking contests. As far as I can recall, there was but one white person on the block, an old woman who didn’t much engage with the rest of us. This was the 1980s, and my block was situated in Northeast Portland, what us denizens came to call the NEP.
The NEP was one of the few mostly Black neighborhoods in the city. Because of that fact, because I didn’t venture much outside my neighborhood as a kid, and because I was ignorant of my state and city’s racial history, I knew not that I was living in a white man’s land, that it had been intended as one from its founding, and that Black folks had long been an unwanted presence.
The lone person, on record, to be expelled from Oregon was a fair-skinned Black man named Jacob Vanderpool, purportedly a sailor from the West Indies. Vanderpool had arrived by ship in what was then the Oregon Territory (Oregon didn’t achieve statehood until 1859) and settled in Oregon City, where he opened a boardinghouse/saloon. Vanderpool must’ve been one helluva businessman because the following year, August 1851, a man named Theophilus Magruder, himself the owner of a hostelry, complained that Vanderpool’s presence in Oregon City was a violation of the territory’s exclusion law, passed in 1844.
The case went to trial later that month. Vanderpool’s lawyer claimed the law violated several provisions of the U.S. Constitution, that the Oregon legislature hadn’t owned the jurisdiction to create it in the first place, and also that the charge itself had not been executed properly. But strong defense be damned, the very next day, August 26, 1851, the judge ruled Vanderpool guilty of violating the exclusion law and ordered him “removed from said territory within thirty days.”
Another expulsion order on Oregon’s historical ledgers occurred in September 1851 and involved brothers O. B. Francis and Abner Hunt Francis, free Blacks who owned a mercantile store in downtown Portland. Abner was also an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Historians theorize that the brothers’ business and antislavery ties aroused the concerns of racist whites, and therefore while Abner was away, O.B. (and his wife) were ordered to leave the territory within six months. On appeal to the Oregon supreme court in September 1851, that judgment was shortened to four months. Abner, implicating himself in the expulsion, published a letter about his and his brother’s plight in Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star: “even in the so-called free territory of Oregon, the colored American citizen, though he may possess all the qualities and qualifications which make a man a good citizen, is driven out like a beast in the forest.” Fortunately for the Francis brothers, 225 local citizens signed a petition that allowed them to remain in Oregon on an exception. Though lawmakers spent beaucoup time debating said petition, in the end, they tabled it and never revisited it.
A third expulsion order targeted a man named Morris Thomas, who was married to a woman named Jane Snowdon. Like those targeted for ousting before him, he was an entrepreneur, his business a barbershop. As in the case of the Francis brothers, local citizens, 128 of them, filed a petition asking that Thomas and his family be spared expulsion.
About the time I reached the era of double-digit birthdays, folks who never had to worry one bit about being kicked out of the state or the city (most often white men in shabby suits) were roaming our neighborhood. They weren’t door-to-door salesmen hawking encyclopedias or water purifiers, but door-to-door home buyers. And they were offering residents, some of them our grand- and great-grandparents, cash for abodes some had owned for decades. Those deals must’ve seemed sweet or else the best of an inevitable swindle, because people started selling.