Antebellum Black Climate Science: The Medical Geography and Emancipatory Politics of James McCune Smith and Martin Delany

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that two prominent antebellum Black physicians—James McCune Smith and Martin Delany—developed competing scientific theories of nature’s impact on the human body in response to the climatic theories of the American Colonization Society, polygenist race scientists, and southern defenders of slavery. It further argues that the physicians’ divergent conclusions regarding nature’s agency played a significant role in underwriting arguably the most important and consequential political debate in antebellum Black America—namely, the dispute between integrationists who advocated remaining in the United States and fighting for equality and emigrationists who argued that America was so hopelessly racist that African Americans should evacuate and even form their own nation. McCune Smith’s rejection of Liberian colonization, his call to stay in the United States and fight for inclusion, and his hopeful vision of the American future rested in large part on his climate science. Employing statistical evidence, he argued that all humans were healthiest in temperate rather than tropical climates and that a beneficial North American natural environment was slowly eliminating the racial distinctions that underwrote American racism and slavery and giving all Americans, regardless of ancestry, the physical features of Native Americans. Delany’s politics were also profoundly shaped by climate science, but, unlike McCune Smith, he agreed with polygenist race scientists that climate could not alter biological race. He further concluded that, while Black people remained healthy in all climates, white people degenerated physically, mentally, and morally when they migrated from a temperate to a subtropical or tropical climate. Since the North American natural environment could not eliminate the racial features referenced by white racists and slaveholders and because enfeebled whites would always need Black labor in the subtropical South, Delany took a pessimistic view of the American future and advocated that African Americans emigrate and form a new Black nation in a tropical location fatal to white people. The article demonstrates that, long before the rise of the environmental justice movement, prominent abolitionists wed the Black freedom struggle to sophisticated and even proto-ecological scientific models of the body’s place in nature.