Before Rosa Parks there was Elizabeth Jennings

Sunday morning service that led to an important Negro advance in citizenship. In the middle of the last century the right of the Negro to ride in car or omnibus depended on the sufferance of driver, conductor, and passenger. Sometimes a car stopped at a Negro's signal, again the driver whipped up his horses, while the conductor yelled to the "nigger" to wait for the next car.

Entrance might always be effected if in the company of a white person, and the small child of a kindly white household would be delegated to accompany the homeward bound black visitor into her car where, after a few minutes, conductor and passengers having become accustomed to her presence, the young protector might slip away. Such a situation was very galling to the self-respecting negro.

In July, 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a colored school-teacher and organist at the Congregational Church, attempted to board a Third Avenue car at Pearl and Chatham Streets. She was hurrying to reach the church to perform her part in the service. The conductor stopped, but as Miss Jennings mounted the platform, he told her that she must wait for the next car, which was reserved for her people.

New York horse drawn streetcars.

"I have no people," Miss Jennings said. "I wish to go to church as I have for six months past, and I do not wish to be detained."

The altercation continued until the car behind came up, and the driver there declaring that he had less room than the car in front, the woman was grudgingly allowed to enter the car.

"Remember," the conductor said, "if any passenger objects, you shall go out, whether or no, or I'll put you out."

"I am a respectable person, born and brought up in New York," said Miss Jennings, "and I was never insulted so before."

This again aroused the conductor. "I was born in Ireland," he said, "and you've got to get out of this car."

He attempted to drag her out. The woman clung to the window, the conductor called in the driver to help him, and together they dragged and pulled and at last threw her into the street. Badly hurt, she nevertheless jumped back into the car. The driver galloped his horses down the street, passing every one until a policeman was found who pushed the woman out, not, however, until she had taken the number of the car.

President Chester A. Arthur

She then made her way home. Elizabeth Jennings took the case into court, and it came before the Supreme Court of the State in February, 1855, Chester A. Arthur, afterwards President of the United States, being one of the lawyers for the plaintiff. The judge's charge was clear on the point that common carriers were bound to carry all respectable people, white or colored, and the plaintiff was given $225 damages, to which the court added ten per cent and costs; and to quote the New York Tribune's comment on the case,1 "Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferryboats will be admonished from this as to the rights of respectable colored people."

When you talk with the elderly educated colored people of New York today, they tell you that before the War were "dark days." The responsibility felt by the thoughtful 1 New York Tribune, February 23, 1855. "The Story of an Old Wrong," in The American Woman's Journal, July, 1895. (source: Negro Artist)

Elizabeth Jennings

New York Slave Laws

Ships flying the Dutch West India flag.

The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery to New York (known then as New Netherland) in 1625 with the importation of eleven black slaves. These early slaves were put to work as farmers, fur traders, and builders. Some were used to build a wall to protect white settlers from the Native American population at the site of today's Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. Although enslaved, the Africans owned by the Dutch enjoyed a few basic rights.

They could be admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church and married by its ministers. Their children could be baptized, and slave families were usually kept intact. Slaves could testify in court, sign legal documents, and bring civil actions against whites. Some slaves were permitted to work after hours earning wages equal to those paid to white workers. When the colony fell to the British in 1864, the Company freed all its slaves-thus establishing early on a nucleus of free African Americans in New York.

English slave laws in the colony were much harsher in comparison to Dutch slave laws. For one thing, slaves were considered chattel or property, and their enslavement ended only with their death or manumission. The earliest slave codes passed in 1664 defined slavery as an inherited racial status-meaning that the children of slaves were also slaves. New York slaveholders could inflict any punishment short of mutilation and death on their human property. Freed blacks were also denied most civil rights under English rule. Any crime committed by a black against a white was severely punished, while white crimes against blacks were largely ignored.

According to the first U.S. Census, the slave population in New York grew to 21,324 by 1790, making New York the largest slave-owning state north of the Mason Dixon line, a distinction it held throughout the two centuries the state practiced slavery. In New York City, a large percentage of the blacks were free-some 33 percent or 1,482 inhabitants by 1820. In the nearby rural area of King County, in what is present day Brooklyn, most of the blacks that lived there were slaves and worked as farm laborers.

In New York City, on the other hand, one third of the black population worked as skilled artisans. Not only did many enslaved Africans live and work in New York prior to the American Revolution, New York City prospered as a thriving center of the slave trade. New York slaving ships made over 150 trips to Africa between 1715 and 1776. Most of the enslaved people brought to Manhattan were transported from New York after a brief time in port to the Caribbean or else to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

(source: New York Slave Law Summary and Record)

The English sweet tooth and the New York slave trade, 1690 - 1725

Race and Antebellum New York City: The New York Manumission Society

John Jay, Founding member of the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves

"The New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves and the Protection of such of them as had been or wanted to be Liberated" was created in 1785 by some of New York's most wealthy and influential white citizens. Its members included luminaries such as John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Their work on behalf of black New Yorkers began with protesting the widespread practice of kidnapping black New Yorkers (both slave and free) and selling them as slaves elsewhere. Later they lobbied to pass the 1799 law which granted gradual manumission to New York's slaves. The organization provided legal assistance to both free and enslaved blacks who were being abused.

Alexander Hamilton, Founding Member of New York's Manumission Society

Historians have sometimes been critical of the Manumission Society's often ambivalent stance towards the very New Yorkers they pledged to help. For instance, many members of the society were slaveholders when they joined the society, and some continued to be slaveholders throughout their tenure. The Society rejected Alexander Hamilton's suggested resolution that anyone who wanted to be a member had to manumit their slaves. The Society fought on behalf of the freedom, and eventual rights, of black New Yorkers, but often disapproved of how black New Yorkers chose to celebrate these victories. For instance, black New Yorkers claimed their right to the streets of New York by holding a lavish parade to celebrate the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. In 1809, the Manumission Society was concerned that "the method of celebrating the abolition of the Slave trade was improper" and worried that such demonstrations would "cause [detrimental] reflections to be made on this Society" demanded that such parades be discontinued.1 Black New Yorkers replied that they would do no such thing.

New York African Free School

In line with the revolutionary beliefs of many of its founders, the New York Manumission Society felt that education was vital to creating citizens that would be capable of sustaining a democracy. The Society founded the New York African Free School two years after the Society itself formed. Members provided or raised funds for teachers' salaries, for supplies, and, eventually, for the creation of new buildings to accommodate a growing student population. In addition, members were responsible for checking in on the school periodically and reporting on the state of the school and the students. (source: New York History)

The New York African Free School

This 1797 depiction of the Tontine Coffee House at Wall and Water streets is among the first images representing African Americans in New York City. (Francis Guy, The Tontine Coffee House (1797). New-York Historical Society)

Preparing young black students for freedom was a complicated task when the New York African Free School was first created in 1787, a time when many African American residents of the city were slaves. Creating and attending an institution dedicated to providing tools of empowerment to young black people was a daring proposition. The task of educating black students for something other than slavery in New York City did not grow any less complicated as the state moved towards abolishing slavery within the state by 1827. Quite simply, no one was sure what citizenship would look like for African Americans, and no one was sure of what path black New Yorkers would—or should—take to get there. Although slavery had been on the wane for decades before official manumission in 1827, removing slavery from the equation substantially shifted social boundaries in a city that was in the midst of tremendous growth and upheaval. New York in the early nineteenth century was awash in social changes, and delineations of class, race, and citizenship were in continual flux. It was a time of tremendous potential, and, for those wary of losing their own hold on power, a time of great anxiety. (source: New York History)

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List of the Founding Members of the New York Manumission Society

• George Clinton
• Alexander Hamilton
• William Shotwell
• Lawrence Embree
• Willet Seaman
• John Keese
• John Jay
• John Murray
• Melancton Smith
• James Duane
• James Cogswell
  

(https://www.nyhistory.org/web/afs/history/manumission-society.html)

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Testimony from Victims of New York’s Draft Riots, July, 1863

“If It Were Not For My Trust in Christ I Do Not Know How I Could Have Endured It”: Testimony from Victims of New York’s Draft Riots, July, 1863

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city’s poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans—their rivals in the city’s labor market—for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York’s devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

Abraham Franklin

This young man who was murdered by the mob on the corner of Twenty-seventh St., and Seventh avenue, was a quiet, inoffensive man, 23 years of age, of unexceptionable character, and a member of the Zion African Church in this city. Although a cripple, he earned a living for himself and his mother by serving a gentleman in the capacity of a coachman. A short time previous to the assault upon his person he called upon his mother to see if anything could be done by him for her safety. The old lady, who is noted for her piety and her Christian deportment, said she considered herself perfectly safe; but if her time to die had come, she was ready to die. Her son then knelt down by her side, and implored the protection of Heaven in behalf of his mother. The old lady was affected to tears, and said to our informant that it seemed to her that good angels were present in the room.

Scarcely had the supplicant risen from his knees, when the mob broke down the door, seized him, beat him over the head and face with fists and clubs, and then hanged him in the presence of his mother.

While they were engaged, the military came and drove them away, cutting down the body of Franklin who raised his arm once slightly and gave a few signs of life.

The military then moved on to quell other riots, when the mob returned and again suspended the now probably lifeless body of Franklin, cutting out pieces of flesh and otherwise mutilating it.

Peter Heuston.

Peter Heuston, sixty-three years of age, a Mohawk Indian, with dark complexion and straight black hair, who has for several years been a resident of this city, at the corner of Rosevelt and Oak streets, and who has obtained a livelihood as a laborer, proved a victim to the late riots.

His wife died about three weeks before the riots, leaving with her husband an only child, a little girl named Lavinia, aged eight years, whom the Merchants' Committee have undertaken to adopt with a view of affording her a guardianship and an education. Heuston served with the New York Volunteers in the Mexican War, and has always been loyal to our government. He was brutally attacked on the 13th of July by a gang of ruffians who evidently thought him to be of the African race because of his dark complexion. He died within four days at Bellevue hospital from his injuries....

Wm. Henry Nichols

Died July 16th, from injuries received at the hands of the rioters on the 15th of July.

Mrs. Statts, his mother, tells this story:—

The father of Wm. Henry died some years ago, and the boy has since, by good behavior, with persevering industry, earned his own living; he was a communicant of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in good standing. I had arrived from Philadelphia, the previous Monday evening, before any indications of the riot were known, and was temporarily stopping, on Wednesday, July 15th, at the house of my son, No.147 East 28th street.

At 3 o’clock of that day the mob arrived and immediately commenced an attack with terrific yells, and a shower of stones and bricks, upon the house. In the next room to where I was sitting was a poor woman, who had been confined with a child on Sunday, three days previous. Some of the rioters broke through the front door with pick axes, and came rushing into the room where this poor woman lay, and commenced to pull the clothes from off her. Knowing that their rate was chiefly directed against men, I hid my son behind me and ran with him through the back door, down into the basement. In a little while I saw the innocent babe, of three days old, come crashing down into the yard; some of the rioters had dashed it out of the back window, killing it instantly. In a few minutes streams of water came pouring down into the basement, the mob had cut the Croton water-pipes with their axes. Fearing we should be drowned in the cellar, (there were ten of us, mostly women and children, there) I took my boy and flew past the dead body of the babe, out to the rear of the yard, hoping to escape with him through an open lot into 29th street; but here, to our horror and dismay, we met the mob again; I, with my son, had climbed the fence, but the sight of those maddened demons so affected me that I fell back, fainting, into the yard; my son jumped down from the fence to pick me up, and a dozen of the rioters came leaping over the fence after him. As they surrounded us my son exclaimed, “save my mother, gentlemen, if you kill me.” "Well, we will kill you," they answered; and with that two ruffians seized him, each taking hold of an arm, while a third, armed with a crow-bar, calling upon them to stand and hold his arms apart, deliberately struck him a heavy blow over the head, felling him, like a bullock, to the ground. (He died in the N.Y. hospital two days after.) I believe if I were to live a hundred years I would never forget that scene, or cease to hear the horrid voices of that demoniacal mob resounding in my ears.

They then drove me over the fence, and as I was passing over, one of the mob seized a pocket-book, which he saw in my bosom, and in his eagerness to get it tore the dress off my shoulders.

I, with several others, then ran to the 29th street Station House, but we were here refused admittance, and told by the Captain that we were frightened without cause. A gentleman who accompanied us told the Captain of the facts, but we were all turned away.

I then went down to my husband’s, in Broome Street, and there I encountered another mob, who, before I could escape commenced stoning me. They beat me severely.

I reached the house but found my husband had left for Rahway. Scarcely knowing what I did, I then wandered, bewildered and sick, in the direction he had taken, and towards Philadelphia, and reached Jersey City, where a kind, Christian gentleman, Mr. Arthur Lynch, found me, and took me to his house, where his good wife nursed me for over two weeks, while I was very sick.

I am a member of the Baptist Church, and if it were not for my trust in Christ I do not know how I could have endured it.

Interesting Statement

I am a whitewasher by trade, and have worked, boy and man, in this city for sixty-three years. On Tuesday afternoon I was standing on the corner of Thirtieth street and Second avenue, when a crowd of young men came running along shouting “Here’s a nigger, here’s a nigger.” Almost before I knew of their intention, I was knocked down, kicked here and there, badgered and battered without mercy, until a cry of “the Peelers are coming” was raised; and I was left almost senseless, with a broken arm and a face covered with blood, on the railroad track. I was helped home on a cart by the officers, who were very kind to me, and gave me some brandy before I got home. I entertain no malice and have no desire for revenge against these people. Why should they hurt me or my colored brethren? We are poor men like them; we work hard and get but little for it. I was born in this State and have lived here all my life, and it seems hard, very hard, that we should be knocked down and kept out of work just to oblige folks who won’t work themselves and don’t want others to work.

We asked him if it was true that the negroes had formed any organization for self-defence, as was rumored. He said no; that, so far as he knew, “they all desire to keep out of the way, to be quiet, and do their best toward allaying the excitement in the City.”

The room in which the old man was lying was small, but it was the kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom and garret of four grown persons and five children.

Instances of this kind might be multiplied by the dozen, gathered from the lips of suffering men, who, though wounded and maimed by ruffians and rioters, are content to be left alone, and wish for no revenge.

Burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum

Our attention was early called to this outrage by a number of letters from the relatives and friends of the children, anxiously inquiring as to the whereabouts of the little ones. It is well known that as soon as the Bull’s Head Hotel had been attacked by the mob, their next destination was the Colored Orphan Asylum, on Fifth Avenue, near Forty-third street. The crowd had swelled to an immense number at this locality, and went professionally to work in order to destroy the building, and, at the same time, to make appropriation of any thing of value by which they might aggrandize themselves. About four hundred entered the house at the time, and immediately proceeded to pitch out beds, chairs, tables, and every species of furniture, which were eagerly seized by the crowd below, and carried off. When all was taken, the house was then set on fire, and shared the fate of the others.

While the rioters were clamoring for admittance at the front door, the Matron and Superintendent were quietly and rapidly conducting the children out the back yard, down to the police station. They remained there until Thursday, (the burning of the Asylum occurred on Monday, July 13th, when they were all removed in safety to Blackwell’s Island, where they still remain.

There were 230 children between the ages of 4 and 12 years in the home at the time of the riot.

...

The buildings were of brick and were substantial and commodious structures. A number of fine shade trees and flowering shrubs adorned the ample play grounds and front court yard, and a well built fence surrounded the whole.

The main buildings were burned. The trees were girdled by cutting with axes; the shrubs uprooted, and the fence carried away. All was destroyed except the residence of Mr. Davis [the superintendent], which was sacked.

White Women

Some four or five white women, wives of colored men applied for relief. In every instance they had been severly dealt with by the mob. One Irish woman, Mrs. C. was so persecuted and shunned by every one, that when she called for aid, she was nearly insane.

[Source: Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering From the Late Riots in the City of New York. (New York, 1863).]

Dr. J. Marion Sims Medical Experiments on Enslaved Women and Children

In an essay entitled, "Father Butcher, " one of Columbia, South Carolina's activist and artist, Wendy Brinker is pens a well researched, pointed account of the life and times of the celebrated "father of gynecology," J. Marion Sims and his medical experiments with enslaved women and children.

Wendy Brinker writes: It was customary for pharaohs coming into power to order that all portraits and mentions of any rival predecessor be erased or destroyed. This would cleanse the land, as they believed if a person’s name or likeness existed somewhere, that person could influence matters of the world from the afterlife. Today we are not as esoteric in our practices, but routinely commission sculptures and monoliths to immortalize people or events we deem worthy of homage and for future generations to ponder. On the shady northwest corner of the statehouse grounds in Columbia, South Carolina, a place wrought with controversy over its harsh, shameful tributes to slavery, sits a monument dedicated to James Marion Sims.

The monument honoring the South Carolinian from Lancaster County curiously dubbed "The Father of Gynecology" is one of the largest on the site. In front of a large cement archway sits a bronze bust of Sims, looking down with crooked brow and a fatherly grin. Directly beneath his image is a quote from Hippocrates, "Where the love of man is, there is also the love of art." Etched in a panel to the left, an inscription touts, "The first surgeon of the ages in ministry to women, treating alike empress and slave." On the panel to the right, the inscription continues, "He founded the science of gynecology, was honored in all lands and died with the benediction of mankind."

Historians from South Carolina proudly proclaim that Dr. Sims innovated techniques and developed instruments that changed the landscape of women's reproductive health. Outside accounts portray him quite differently. What is not in dispute is that between 1845 and 1849, in a makeshift hospital he built in his backyard, Sims inaugurated a long, drawn-out series of excruciating, experimental gynecological operations on countless enslaved African women. This was all done without the benefit of anesthesia or before any type of antiseptic was used. Many lost their lives to infection. It is their story that history has failed to tell and their legacy of courage and endurance that should be honored, not their captor's. ...

In October of 1835, immediately after the death of the two infants, John Sims took his son to Alabama. It is unclear why the young doctor left Lancaster, but his reputation could not have been favorable. After three weeks by wagon, they made it as far as Mt. Meigs, Alabama, where he apprenticed under two doctors, Dr. Lucas and Dr. Childers. Lucas was a politician and had made his fortune from cotton. Sims was impressed that Lucas owned two to three hundred slaves and had influence and power in the community. Childers was an old-fashioned country doctor that allowed Sims to accompany him on his house calls. After witnessing Childers "bleed" a patient to death, one of his favorite cure-alls, Sims admitted, "I knew nothing about medicine, but I had sense enough to see that doctors were killing their patients; that medicine was not an exact science; that it was wholly empirical, and that it would be better to trust entirely to Nature than to the hazardous skills of the doctors."

A month after arriving, Sims bought out Childers' practice for a two hundred-dollar promissory note. His first patient came while Lucas was away in Tuscaloosa on legislative business. Sims was summoned 40 miles away to the home of a cotton farmer whose sister was running a high fever after delivering. The attending doctor was present, but obviously drunk. Sims refused to take over the care of the woman - again, having no idea what treatment to administer. He returned to Mt. Meigs and the woman died a day after he departed. A month later, with Lucas still away, a request for a doctor came on behalf of an ailing slave overseer. Sims reluctantly departed to examine the man. He found a lump inside his abdomen and explained, "This is matter here and it must come out or this man will die." He was granted permission to operate and described the procedure as such, "We went in to the room - it was before the days of anesthetics - and, pulling out a bistoury (scalpel), I plunged it into his belly. I think it was one of the most happiest moments of my life when I saw the matter flow and come welling up opposite the bistoury." Miraculously, the man eventually made a full recovery. Such was the nature of Sims' first surgical experience as he began to practice medicine.

...

Acting primarily as a plantation physician, Sims became known for operations on clubfeet, cleft palates and crossed eyes. He began to treat enslaved babies suffering from what he called "trismus nascentium,” now known as neonatal tetanus. Tetanus originates in horse manure, and it’s probable the proximity of the slave quarters to the horse stables was the direct cause of the high rate of tetanus in enslaved babies. In an article published by Sims on the subject, he comes to quite another conclusion that offers us a glimpse into his personal views. "Whenever there are poverty, and filth, and laziness, or where the intellectual capacity is cramped, the moral and social feelings blunted, there it will be oftener found. Wealth, a cultivated intellect, a refined mind, an affectionate heart, are comparatively exempt from the ravages of this unmercifully fatal malady. But expose this class to the same physical causes, and they become equal sufferers with the first." Since he attributed the cause of the disease to the moral weakness of the enslaved Africans, he never suggested the need to improve their living conditions.

Sims also argued that the movement of the skull bones during a protracted birth contributed to trismus. Clearly designating patients by class and race, Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on the enslaved infants. He took custody of them and with a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool used for making holes in leather, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment. According to his published articles, this procedure was only practiced on enslaved African babies. Because he "owned" these poor, innocent children, he had free access to their bodies for autopsies, which he usually performed immediately after death. Sims routinely blamed "slave mothers and nurses for infant suffering, especially through their ignorance."

Enslaved African midwives were numerous throughout the South. For hundreds of years, childbirth was not considered a "sickness" and for the most part, physicians did not attend births. But in the mid-nineteenth century, the attitude of the white male medical practitioners towards midwifery was changing. Male-dominated medicine was now challenging female-governed childbirth. The African midwife’s spiritual traditions and knowledge of rituals and herbs handed down orally through generations earned her honor and respect among the enslaved. Just as the Southern physician was at the core of his social web, the midwife enjoyed the equivalent status. This could have fueled the white master's need to remove them from positions of prominence. The early obstetricians chose to exclude midwives from their research and utterly dismissed their collective knowledge. Reminiscent of witch-hunts, persecution of midwives by white males was beginning to play out again on southern plantations.

Women were pivotal in slavery’s very definition. Enslavement was perpetuated through the status of the mother. If she was a slave, so were her children. They were frequently the objects of aggressive sexual rapes from those who held power over them. The economy of slavery imposed the role of "breeder" on these women and their ability to reproduce was equated with their worth as property. They never received enhanced diets or lower workloads while pregnant and often endured great hardships during childbirth. Reasons for prolonged labor among African women were probably related to their diet. In a relatively high percentage of Africans, dairy products not only fail to yield calcium in digestion, but can also cause sickness. Calcium deficiencies during childhood often result in rickets. This condition isn't fatal, however it causes skeletal deformities, among them a contracted pelvis that would result in a prolonged delivery. Not surprisingly, a condition known as vesico-vaginal fistulas, or vaginal tears, was prevalent among enslaved women.

One spring afternoon in 1845, Sims was summoned to the Westcott plantation about a mile out of Montgomery. A young, enslaved woman named Anarcha, one of seventy-five Africans held captive there, had been in labor for three days without delivering. Sims tried to aid the birth by applying forceps to the impacted head of the fetus. He recalled having little experience using the instrument. The baby was born - no record if it lived or died - and the mother sustained several fistulas, resulting in incontinence. It is unclear whether Sims inflicted the damage himself while using the unfamiliar forceps or they occurred as a result of the prolonged birth. Several days after Anarcha delivered, she was sent to Sims in hopes he could repair the damage. Sims found her condition repugnant. Her value diminished considerably, and Sims obliged to her master, he attempted to repair Anarcha's badly damaged body.

Sims showed an uncommon willingness to break cultural barriers in his treatment of female disorders. Most physicians in the Victorian period shunned the impropriety of visually examining a woman internally. They generally relied on the use of touch as a more genteel method. Earlier in his career, Sims treated a female patient who had been thrown off a pony. He placed her on her hands and knees and fashioned a crude tool from a pewter spoon to expand the walls of the vagina. This spoon was the first prototype for the speculum, now called the Sims speculum. The patient's relief was immediate, since the change in air pressure successfully relocated her uterus to its proper position. Sims described the moment as if he had a spiritual epiphany. "I cannot, nor is it needful for me to describe, my emotions when the air rushed in and dilated the vagina to its greatest capacity whereby its whole surface was seen at one view, for the first time by any mortal man." His success with this single procedure now convinced Sims he could find a surgical remedy for vesico-vaginal fistulas. Finally, he could make a name for himself.

Eager to devote the rest of his life to this condition, he built a crude sixteen-bed hospital in his backyard. To aid him in his experiments, he fashioned over 71 surgical instruments. Sims sent for as many cases as he could find. Plantation owners were happy to turn their incontinent, damaged female slaves over to Sims for experimentation. They were of little use to their masters in their present condition. Between January 1846 and June 1849, he experimented surgically on as many as eleven patients at one time. Two enslaved women in addition to Anarcha - Betsy and Lucy - were also young women who contracted fistulas giving birth for the first time. Together, these three women endured repeated operations and were patients of Sims for the duration of the hospital's existence. Anarcha is believed to have undergone over thirty operations.

Sims subscribed to a commonly held belief that Africans had a specific physiological tolerance for pain, unknown by whites. He never felt the need to anesthetize his black patients in Montgomery. The white women, who came to him after the surgery was an accepted form of treatment, were unable to withstand the same operation without anesthesia according to Sims. While he never administered anesthesia during the experiments, he did include opium in his postoperative treatment. Opium kept the patients still, aiding the healing process, and Sims found the accompanying constipation a necessity in the aftermath of surgery. He also emphasized giving the patient minimal food and water for a two-week period after surgery.

In the first months of the original surgeries, Sims would invite his colleagues to witness the operations. As the number of operations grew and the failures mounted, Sims soon found himself operating alone. The hospital was "off limits" to Sims’ family so he had to rely on the assistance of the enslaved victims themselves. After a couple of years of repeated surgeries and failures, his wife's brother, Dr. Rush Jones from the neighboring county of Lowndes, implored him to stop his experiments. "We have watched you, and sympathized with you; but your friends here have seen that of late you are doing too much work, and that you are breaking down. And, besides, I must tell you frankly that with your young and growing family, it is unjust to them to continue in this way, and carry on this series of experiments." Sims replied, "I am going on … to the end. It matters not what it costs, if it costs me my life." To those close to Sims, it appeared his preoccupation with the experiments had become an obsession.

Sims had been suturing the vaginal tears with materials common to that era, mostly silk and catgut, which absorbed bodily fluid. This caused inflammation around the wounds, promoting horrible infections that would never heal. It is unclear what prompted Sims to have his jeweler fashion some fine silver wire for suturing wounds. He used it on one of Anarcha's fistulas at the base of her bladder. Days later, when Sims found no infection, he declared that silver sutures were the key to mending vesico-vaginal fistulas. He quickly utilized the metal sutures on all of his captives and claimed to have cured them all, but there is no outside evidence to support his claim. He declared, "I had made, perhaps, one of the most important discoveries of the age for the relief of suffering humanity." Sims never recorded if he was able to heal Anarcha of her other fistulas and to this day, physicians debate the type of suture to use in the operation, although the condition is rarely seen anymore. Sims' success remains unsubstantiated by all medical standards.

In the fall of 1849, Sims was stricken with an intestinal illness and spent several years moving from place to place in search of relief. In 1853, he moved to the cooler climate of New York. While Sims maintained a strong commitment to the morality of owning slaves and held a strong allegiance to the South, he began to revise and moderate his tone for the different political climate he found on Madison Avenue. Sims evaded the issue of slavery and race and never admitted publicly that he experimented on patients who did not own their own bodies. In his use of woodcuts accompanying his lectures, he portrayed his earlier female patients as white. Now that he chose to practice among white women of the upper and middle classes, he stated of his surgeries, "I though only of relieving the loveliest of all God's creation." It seems he'd forgotten his distaste for Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy and all of the other enslaved women he had mutilated or killed over the years.

J. Marion Sims went on to convince a group of philanthropic women of the old New York's elite class that his motives were sincere and his methods proven. He garnered enough enthusiasm and financial support to set up a woman's charity hospital in May of 1855. Sims was once again in business to perform his operations, this time, on poor Irish immigrant women. He is honored with a statue on the corner of 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue for his contributions. He traveled extensively to Europe and enjoyed the reputation of being a famous American doctor. While abroad in 1863, he was asked to examine Empress Eugenie of France. This is how the inscription came to read, "treating alike empress and slave," although he employed very different methods of treatment depending on the patient's social status. He faithfully sent money to support the confederacy, but never returned to the south. He died in New York in 1883.

The success of J. Marion Sims as "the father of gynecology" in the United States solely resulted from the personal sacrifices of the enslaved African women he experimented on from 1845 to 1849. Had they not been his property, giving him carte blanche to cut them open and sew them back up as he saw fit, he could never have devised the surgical technique that brought him international recognition. He never expressed any interest in the cause of vesico-vaginal fistulas or in the health of the women themselves. Nor did he concern himself with the extent of recovery made by the patients. And never did he express moral uncertainty over keeping women captive for the expressed purpose of painful surgical experimentation.

Undeniably, nineteenth century medical practices were crude and painful, but Sims' contemporaries felt him unnecessarily cruel. Since it was illegal for enslaved Africans to read or write, an offense punishable by death, Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy left no account of their ordeal. We can only imagine what they endured at the hands of Sims. All over the world, Sims has been honored and memorialized with statues and plaques. Buildings, hospitals, foundations, schools and streets bare his name. While it is impossible to negate the historical context of his racial, class and gender biases, shouldn't we agree to apply some basic standard of humanity to those we choose to honor?

(source: Wendy Brinker is an activist and artist in Columbia, South Carolina. www.meridiangraphics.net)