Free Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder Page B

allow women to keep white men to sleep with and black men to pay for the pleasure. Using the scientific testimony, the defense now attacked the almshouse’s entire case:
    Ten or twelve of the most experienced physicians declare this thing next to impossible. … Some of the professional witnesses have resided long in those countries where, if such facts were natural they must have fallen within theirnotice; but they never saw one such as would warrant their belief in this case—others have practised in that particular and useful branch which enables them to judge with certainty in matters of this nature; and envy cannot deny of them that they have brought more into the world than they have sent out of it. The very gentlemen who ushered into life the babe, whose name will be bright in the annals of zoology, physiology, pathology, and all the
ologies
, (Dr. Secor,) agrees that it is the child of a white man. 14
    The impact of this lampooning became clear when the judges ruled on the evidence. Their decision respected the prestige of science in Atlantic thought, and it exposed their confidence in the capacity of science to find truth. The court maintained an unshaken belief in the provable existence and logical operation of race despite the conflicting arguments, wildly speculative claims, and inconsistent testimony that it had heard.
    The mayor began by restating the conundrum: “The defendant is a negro—the mother a mulattress—and the child has the hair and most of the features of a white, the color, indeed, somewhat darker, but lighter than most of the generality of mulattoes.” The virtually unanimous testimony of the medical experts vindicated Whistelo, Clinton continued. Sir Jay and Dr. Pascalis agreed on this matter and enjoyed the support of “the president of the Medical Society, and several professors and other distinguished physicians.” Mayor Clinton then noted that the court “obviously” had less confidence in the testimony of Lucy Williams than in the statements and conclusions of the experts. Supported only by Senator Mitchill, who had merely shown the improbable to be possible, the almshouse failed to sway the judges, who absolved Alexander Whistelo. 15
THE TRIUMPH OF SCIENCE
    Ecclesiastical courts had routinely handled fornication and adultery cases in the early years of the colonies. Over the next century, civil authorities began determining questions of paternity, whilechurch officials adjudicated sexual morality. Civil courts approached these matters as investigations into paternity rather than sin—the purpose being to establish financial responsibility, not necessarily moral culpability. The mid-eighteenth-century scandal that enveloped the Reverend Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer, accused of fathering a child with his enslaved woman, Margareta Christiaan, was largely resolved within the Lutheran Church of Athens, New York. In that same period, Job Comecho, a Native man from Natick, Massachusetts, was sitting in prison “charged with the maintenance of a Bastard child.” To raise money, Comecho sold five acres of Natick land to Prince Vitto, a black man who formerly had been enslaved to the Reverend Oliver Peabody, Harvard’s missionary to the Natick Indians. The selectmen of Lebanon, Connecticut, seized “two male bastard negro children” from Debb, a Pequot woman, and bound them out until age twenty-five to spare the town the cost of their upkeep. As late as 1803, the church in Groton, Massachusetts, required parents who had children within seven months of their marriage to make public confessions. 16
    One of the
Whistelo
trial’s most modern features was the judicial assumption that questions of generation, or paternity, were beyond the reach of the church and theologians. Questions of faith and morality were not absent at the trial, but research into race had spurred an intellectual revolution in British and American academies that