On the Road Again, But Not Too Often, Part II
James McCune Smith and the ‘Influence of Climate Upon Civilization’
In my recent deep dive into newspaper databases, I found more articles about James McCune Smith on the road – always notable since, as I wrote in my previous piece for this newsletter on this theme, he did not travel all that often. These were from 1853. They were notices that McCune Smith was due to deliver a lecture on the ‘Influence of Climate Upon Civilization’ in Providence, Rhode Island, on the evening of 15 February 1853. The first that I found was a notice in a Connecticut newspaper that announced that McCune Smith ‘was to deliver a lecture on Tuesday evening at Providence, on “The influence of climate upon civilization.’ The notice, as we can see above, praises his abilities and accomplishments.[1]
‘Was to’? I asked myself. What did that mean? Tuesday evening was 15 February, and this brief editorial appeared in the paper the next day. So did McCune Smith deliver the lecture, or didn’t he? I hoped that one of the other articles that came up in my search would give me the answer. Then, among them, I found this:
Here, in the published proceedings of the Rhode Island state legislature (called the General Assembly), in the 15 February afternoon session (at 3pm) of the House of Representatives, under the heading ‘Continued with Order of Notice’, I saw this: ‘An invitation was received and accepted to attend the Lecture of James McCune Smith this evening.’[2]
So, I kept searching, and found this:
And this:
I searched and searched, in the online newspaper databases I had been looking in and in many others. Try as I might, I could not find a published review of McCune Smith’s lecture, or confirmation of any kind that it took place, in any newspaper, book, or other media, at least not any that had been digitized and made word-searchable.
So, I turned my attention to the question that the last notice I found had raised in my mind: who was ‘Mr. Everett,’ and what was the ‘doctrine’ that the author of this notice wrote was ‘said to be… exhibit[ed]’ in McCune Smith?
I searched, and found this: Edward Everett, Address of the Hon. Edward Everett, at the Anniversary of the American Colonization Society, Washington City, January 18, 1853 (Boston: Massachusetts Colonization Society, 1853), Internet Archive link.
Now that’s really interesting, I thought, for two reasons. First, as you can see in a previous piece for this newsletter, McCune Smith was a long-time foe of the American Colonization Society. He believed – despite the insistence of many of its supporters to the contrary – that its mission of removing African Americans from the United States was ultimately motivated by racial prejudice, and that its project could only serve to strengthen the cruel and dehumanizing institution of chattel slavery. Now, the author of this notice didn’t write that McCune Smith agreed with Everett on anything, only that McCune Smith was a living example of an idea that Everett espoused.
Reading Everett’s published lecture, the only ‘doctrine’ he espoused in it that seems relevant to this notice for McCune Smith’s lecture is that the ‘supposed inbred essential superiority of the European races does not really exist.’ Everett argued that such an assumption, common at that time and often used to justify slavery, made no sense. After all, European people who did not have access to wealth and education displayed the same ‘practical barbarism’ that people of African descent did in the same circumstances.[3] When and where people of African descent had the same opportunities as Europeans, they were just as capable of achieving excellence. Everett offered these examples:
You, Mr. President [of the American Colonization Society], well remember that twenty-one years ago, you and I saw, in one of the committee-rooms of yonder Capitol, a native African, who had been forty years a field slave in the West Indies and in this country, and wrote at the age of seventy the Arabic character, with the fluency and the elegance of a scribe. Why, sir, to give the last test of civilization, Mungo Park tells us in his journal, that in the interior of Africa, lawsuits are argued with as much ability, as much fluency, and at as much length, as in Edinburgh.
Everett concluded that the dire circumstances that millions of people of African descent found themselves in, whether on that continent or elsewhere in the world, was due to the slave trade, just as many millions of European similarly suffered from ignorance, poverty, and other ills wherever they suffered similar forms of oppression and dispossession.[4] The author of that notice, then, seems to have been connecting this argument of Everett’s to McCune Smith: his skill as a lecturer was evidence that anyone, of any race, was capable of great accomplishments, so long as they had the benefits of good education or training.
Secondly, the timing was interesting. Everett’s lecture had been given on 18 January, and McCune Smith was to deliver his on 15 February. Had McCune Smith read Everett’s published lecture and decided to respond to it in his own? It occurred to me that this was a possibility.
Yet I also knew McCune Smith had delivered a lecture on the connections between climate and civilization years before. On the evening of 23 December 1845, McCune Smith – in another rare instance of traveling far from home – delivered a lecture at Boston’s Ritchie Hall titled ‘Civilization – in Relation to the Physical Circumstances That Have Contributed Thereto.’[5] This lecture, also, does not survive, at least not in its original form. McCune Smith revised it and published it about a decade and a half after he wrote it in the Anglo-African Magazine under the title ‘Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances.’[6] In another essay published in the Anglo-African a few months later, McCune Smith wrote that his ‘Civilization’ lecture was ‘written in 1844, [and] slightly amended when published in 1859. Its views are mainly the same with those of Mr. [Henry Thomas] Buckle, in his work on “Civilization in England,” and receive support from the higher authority of Mr. [John Stuart] Mill, in his remarkable work on “Liberty,” published recently in London.'’[7] In his introduction to his ‘Civilization’ lecture-turned-essay, McCune Smith summarized his purpose in writing it:
An investigation of the physical circumstances that have contributed to civilization, is [a] matter of importance in at least two points of view. First, an analysis of these circumstances will tend to decide whether human advancement be the result of the innate superiority of any portion of the human race, or whether it result from adventitious phenomena; and secondly, the same analysis may reduce civilization to the condition of a science, successful cultivation of which will rapidly promote human progress.[8]
We can see here that, despite their very different opinions on the project of creating colonies for the purpose of expatriating African Americans to Africa, McCune Smith and Everett both sought to dispel the myth that any population of humans had innate superiority over others, and to demonstrate that disparities between populations were entirely attributable to external circumstances.
But in the 1844-45 ‘Civilization’ lecture that became the 1859 essay, McCune Smith addressed two ‘physical circumstances’ that influenced civilization: climate and geography. Yet we see that multiple sources give the title of McCune Smith’s lecture that he was to give in Providence, RI in 1853 was ‘The Influence of Climate Upon Civilization.’ So why did he only focus in this one on climate’s influence?
It may be because this was a popular topic of scholarly and public discussion; see, for example, this excerpt from an 1851 newspaper article:
…and it continued to be a popular topic of lectures for decades. For example, see:
Rev. Dr. Storrs’ lecture proved to be quite popular, and he gave it repeatedly:
Two University of Chicago lecturers spoke on this topic at length at a commencement dinner about ten years later:
In fact, it was such a ubiquitous topic of discussion and study that the author and humourist Ambrose Bierce joked about it. He wrote: ‘The influence of climate upon civilization has been more exhaustively treated than studied. Otherwise, we should know how it is that some countries that have so much climate have no civilization.’[9]
But it could also be that McCune Smith chose to focus more closely on climate in the lecture he was to deliver in Rhode Island because he had developed a particular interest in the effect of climate on lots of things. As I wrote in my biographical thesis of McCune Smith, he had also written a medical article titled ‘The Influence of Climate on Longevity’ in 1845:
That topic, under that title, was among the 1845 prize questions posed by Harvard’s Boylston Medical Committee in The New York Journal of Medicine and Collateral Sciences. Though McCune Smith’s dissertation did not win that year’s prize the Committee selected it, along with two others, as among the ‘valuable and interesting essays’ they recommended the authors publish. However, ‘Climate’ was not published in a medical journal. It appeared in Freeman Hunt’s The Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review with the subtitle ‘With Special Reference to Life Insurance,’ published in two instalments in April and May 1846. [M]uch of ‘Climate’ is dedicated to analysis of vital statistics and climate data …[as well as] medical theories …focusing particularly on relative susceptibility to certain diseases in early childhood and in various human populations[10]
In any case, though I searched and searched, I never did find any concrete evidence that McCune Smith delivered that lecture in Providence, RI, in 1853, or why it focused on climate but not geography, or why that one notice said that McCune Smith ‘was to’ rather than ‘did’ deliver the lecture. So whether he gave that lecture after all, and how people responded to it if so, remains a mystery. But you can bet that I’ll keep looking.
[1] ‘Dr. James M’Cune Smith’, New-London Daily Chronicle, 16 February 1853.
[2] ‘General Assembly’, Manufacturers and Farmers Journal, 17 February 1853.
[3] Edward Everett, Address of the Hon. Edward Everett, at the Anniversary of the American Colonization Society, Washington City, January 18, 1853 (Boston: Massachusetts Colonization Society, 1853).
[4] Everett, 10.
[5] ‘Adelphic Union Library Association’, The Liberator, 19 December 1845.
[6] James McCune Smith, ‘Civilization: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances’, The Anglo-African Magazine, January 1859.
[7] James McCune Smith, ‘On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia’, The Anglo-African Magazine, August 1859, 237.
[8] McCune Smith, ‘Civilization’, 5.
[9] Ambrose Bierce [as ‘Dod Grile’], The Fiend’s Delight (Chatto and Windus, 1874), 165–66, under 'Laughorisms.’
[10] Amy M. Cools, ‘The Life and Work of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865)’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2021), 141, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/38333.