Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder

Author:Craig Steven Wilder
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Dr. Benjamin Rush

SOURCE: University Archives, University of Pennsylvania

A confidence that theology and science had a common social purpose also convinced Rush that the moral currents of human society were converging to end African slavery. “The abolition of domestic Slavery is not a Utopian Scheme,” he promised. He saw the institution faltering under its own economic inefficiencies and growing public hostility.41

The idea can be pushed further. Rush and many of his peers viewed science as rescuing a theology that had been hijacked in defense of slavery. Theological racism hampered Christians’ response to modern social questions. Science could save theology by addressing that failure. The German scientist Carl Vogt, a professor at the University of Geneva, was likely answering this concern when he concluded that “the term ‘race’ expresses, perhaps, only a theological idea.” The origins of racialism were to be found in a theology that had been corrupted by social sins ranging from color prejudice to human bondage.42

“The vulgar notion of their being descended from Cain, who was supposed to have been marked with this color, is too absurd to need a refutation,” Rush had insisted. It was not difficult to expose religion as the primary offender in the emergence of modern racial thought, he continued. The moral silence of American ministers on the issue of slavery was troubling by itself. “But chiefly—ye Ministers of the Gospel, whose dominion over the principles and actions of men is so universally acknowledged and felt,” the doctor demanded, “let your zeal keep pace with your opportunities to put a stop to slavery.” Nor could slavery be rationalized as a mechanism for Christianization, since a just religion could not spread by unjust means. “A Christian Slave is a contradiction in terms,” he concluded.43

Nonetheless, Rush enjoyed broad intellectual influence over medical science in the slave states. In June 1813 the members of the Medical Society of South Carolina gathered in the Circular Church in Charleston to memorialize Benjamin Rush. The Philadelphia physician had taught or mentored half the members of the society, a telling measure of his influence, the reach of the Pennsylvania medical program, and the legacies of Scottish universities in American medicine and science. When Rush began teaching, he had fewer than two dozen students; the year before his death he taught more than four hundred. Dr. David Ramsay, a New Jersey graduate and the son-in-law of John Witherspoon, delivered the eulogy. He recounted Rush’s heroic sacrifices during the yellow fever outbreaks in Philadelphia, his contributions to science and public health, his service in the Continental Congress, and his educational and humanitarian endeavors.44

In fact, southern scholars had routinely and vigorously debated slavery. Student literary societies at the University of Georgia took up the question, and such exchanges were fairly common on southern campuses before the escalation of sectional tensions in the antebellum era. In 1828 Georgia’s Phi Kappas decided that slavery was unjust, and a decade later they debated themselves to an abolitionist conclusion. Another campus society, the Demosthenians, came within a single vote of endorsing abolition.

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