Free Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder Page A

medical journal. Within a decade of the trial, DeWitt Clinton dedicated a public lecture on New York history to the “Honourable Samuel L. Mitchill.” At the time of his testimony, Samuel Mitchill was a United States senator from New York. 10
    Tested repeatedly by the defense, Senator Mitchill was certain that science, history, and religion supported his position. A midwife in New Brunswick, New Jersey, had told a woman in labor about the circumcision of a Jewish infant, he recounted, and the agitated woman then brought forth a boy child with a diseased penile foreskin. A Scottish case involved a man who repeatedly put off the demands of his amorous wife; after he accidentally spilled ink in her shoes, the spurned woman produced a black child. However, by the end of his testimony, the longest examination of the trial, Mitchill’s conclusions hinged on the testimony of Lucy Williams rather than his braiding of literary and historical proofs. 11
    The expert testimony confirmed Whistelo’s innocence. But the court still suspected him, and therefore called two additional experts. The noted Philadelphia physician Felix Pascalis Ouvriere assured the judges that science could solve the riddle of paternity. In 1795 Pascalis had won a prize from the Hartford Medical Society for the best essay on the causes of the yellow fever outbreak in New York, and he also investigated the Philadelphia outbreak of 1797. One aspect of his research was examining the course of disease in black people by exploring the relevant medical and plantation literatures. Africans, he told the judges, had definite characteristics, the three most obvious being their curly hair, dark hue, and elongated heels. In his compendium of the Edinburgh curriculum, William Nesbit identified the latter as a specific skeletal feature of Africans. Pascalis added that at least one of these characteristics was evident even in perfect mulattos and other mixtures. Under cross-examination, Pascalis argued that an emotional or other shock would more likely produce abortion or deformity than a change in complexion. Dr. Pascalis concluded that Whistelo was not the father of the child. Sir James Jay was the last physician to testify. A Columbia graduate and a founder of Physicians and Surgeons, Jay had once served as Columbia’s European fund-raising agent. He definitively informed the court that the child was not Alexander Whistelo’s. 12

    Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, United States Senator,
who testified in the
Whistelo
trial
    The defense’s summation stressed that the great majority of the expert witnesses had scientifically concluded that Alexander Whistelo did not father the child in question. It also attempted to dismantle and ridicule the testimony of Professor Mitchill—the only scientist to openly support the almshouse’s case—accusing him of attacking “the doctors en masse” to defend Lucy Williams’s virtue. A sarcastic assault on her character followed:
    Soon after the vernal equinox, in the year of the vulgar era one thousand eight hundred and six, an Adam-colored damsel submitted to the lewd embraces of a lascivious Moor, and from that mixture sprang three miracles.
    1 st . In the course of one month’s time she quickened and conceived.
    2 d . She bare a child, not of her
primitive
and
proper
color, nor yet of the African—but strange to tell, of the most degenerate white.
    3 d . And the greatest of all these wonders, she remained, as the counsel for the Almshouse charitably testifies, a lady of virtue and unblemished credit! 13
    The almshouse’s attorney had earlier argued that if Williams intended to commit perjury, then she had more incentive to accuse the white man. Whistelo’s lawyer reversed that logic. The defense cautioned that the court risked establishing a dangerous precedent that would make black men forever vulnerable to supporting the bastard children of white men. It urged the judges not to