Happy Real James McCune Smith’s Birthday!
I’m sitting here in my little rented room in James McCune Smith’s hometown of New York City, having spent much of my two weeks here buried in the archives doing more research on his life, or when I had the chance, visiting major sites associated with his life. By the time I leave New York on Thursday, it will have been two weeks. I’m tired but happy, and still have two more days in the archives to go. On McCune Smith’s birthday, I’ll be on the second to the last day of this adventure. Among the many wonderful things I got to do here during his birthday month are: read letters that I’ve never seen from people who knew him; find intriguing clues about his family history; visit the places where he and his loved ones lived and worked and see what they look like now; and place a flower and a stone on his gravestone, under the blooming trees in the beautiful old cemetery where he lies at rest. I can’t wait to see what happens today, on his birthday.
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Regular readers of this newsletter may find themselves wondering – why am I writing another piece in remembrance of McCune Smith’s birthday?
Well, I have an apology and a confession to make.
First, the apology: I have not written and published a post for this newsletter on any of my findings as I hoped to within the last couple of weeks. So sorry, and I hope you forgive me – the archives have been incredibly rewarding, and so I’ve been too swamped, or too tired afterward, to write anything. From the time they open to the time they close, I’ve been frantically writing notes, photographing, and downloading as fast as I can. I’ll make it up to you when I get back home and can really start working through the masses of material. I’m so excited to start sharing it with you.
When it comes to the confession, it’s quite embarrassing, actually: when I wrote my last post for this newsletter in the airport about embarking on this research trip to New York, I wrote it as if I was traveling on McCune Smith’s actual birthday. But that’s not true: I was traveling on 1 April, but his birthday is 18 April. He was born this day in 1813,[1] 210 years ago.
The embarrassment I feel as his biographer at having made this silly mistake is a valuable reminder to me to never, ever publish a historical piece of any kind unless I’m where I can double-check and provide the details and my sources for them, calm and collected – not think something like “Wait, it’s April, it’s almost McCune Smith’s birthday, is it today, I have to make sure I don’t miss it” – then do a fast check on Google, get the wrong answer from Wikipedia in a top research result, and post something on the fly. Checking dates carefully is especially important for someone who has always had a terrible memory for them – I regularly forget how old I am and my closest family members are, for goodness’ sake! Being a historian with a lousy memory for dates is terribly annoying, but it also makes me regularly aware that I have to be extra careful about checking them. So – I hope this puts a permanent stop to me doing such silly things as firing off a piece for a historical newsletter in the fog and hurry of travel. If I don’t have time to sit down and carefully check my memory against authoritative sources on every detail, don’t write it - and certainly, don’t publish it!
So, Happy Real James McCune Smith’s Birthday! For myself, I must say it’s a great way to spend it, here in the archives, on a quest to memorialize his amazing life as fully as I can.
[1] Guido Furman, ‘Obituary of James McCune Smith’, The Medical Register of the City of New York for the Year Commencing June 1, 1866, 1866, 201.
Haha. I love the idea of a professional historian with a terrible head for dates.