The Works of James McCune Smith

 Black Intellectual and Abolitionist

By John Stauffer

The first African American to receive a medical degree, this invaluable collection brings together the writings of James McCune Smith, one of the foremost intellectuals in antebellum America. The Works of James McCune Smith  is one of the first anthologies featuring the works of this illustrious scholar. Perhaps best known for his introduction to Fredrick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, his influence is still found in a number of aspects of modern society and social interactions. And he was considered by many to be a prophet of the twenty-first century. One of the earliest advocates of the use of "black" instead of "colored," McCune Smith treated racial identities as social constructions, arguing that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.

Organized chronologically, the collection covers over 40 years of writing, including speeches, letters, and essays, and begins with McCune Smith's first speech as an 11-year old boy to the Marquis de Lafayette. Providing historical context for McCune Smith's current cultural relevance, this book showcases writings on black education and self-help, citizenship, and the fight against racism.

—Publisher

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James McCune Smith (1813-1865), a dignified and highly trained physician, was the first university-trained black physician. After attending the Free African School of New York where he distinguished himself as a pupil he was helped by a clergyman to matriculate in the University of Glasgow. There he worked with the Glasgow Emancipation Society and completed his MD degree, graduating in 1837. Smith received from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) the A.B., M.A., and M.D. degrees.

His mother was self-emancipated; his father was freed by a New York law passed in 1827. After his graduation, Smith returned to America and established two drugstores in New York City.

Dr. Smith became well-known for his pioneering work in the scientific study of race and for the scholarly treatment of the slavery question. He was a prolific writer on the subject of racial equality and able speaker who fought against the deportation of the Negro.

With skills of a scholar and a knowledge of history, the sciences, languages and literature, he wrote on a remarkable range of subjects concerning the Negro. By his essays and articles, he sought to change attitudes toward the Negro and to direct sober thought to the question of the physical and moral equality of Negro and white.

Dr. Smith was a member of the Committee of Free Colored Citizens that sent a petition to the United States Senate in 1844. This document, which contained facts about the social conditions of Negroes in eleven states of the North, was a scientific protest against derogatory remarks about Negroes that Secretary of State John C. Calhoun had made to the British minister to the United States.

—Wilhemena Robinson, Historical Afro-American Biographies (1978).

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The absence of James McCune Smith in the historiographic and critical literature is even more striking. He was a brilliant scholar, writer, and critic, as well as a first rate physician. In 1882 the black leader Alexander Crummell called him "the most learned Negro of his day," and Frederick Douglass considered him the most important black influence in his life (much as he considered Gerrit Smith the most important white one). Douglass was probably correct when, in 1859, he publicly stated: "No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery, than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding." 

As a prose stylist and original thinker, McCune Smith ranks, at his best, alongside such canonical figures as Emerson and Thoreau. His essays are sophisticated and elegant, his interpretations of American culture are way ahead of his time, and his experimental style and use of dialect anticipates some of the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1920s. Yet McCune Smith has been completely ignored by literary critics; and aside from one article on him, he has remained absent from the historical record.

—John Stauffer. "Introduction" to The Black  Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002)

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JOHN STAUFFER is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.  He received his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 1999, and won the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for the best dissertation in American Studies from the American Studies Association.  His first book, The Black  Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Harvard University Press, 2002) was the co-winner of the 2002 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute; winner of the Avery Craven Book Prize from the OAH; and the Lincoln Prize runner-up.  He is completing an edition of Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom for the Modern Library; editing a collection of John Brown’s writings; and writing a new book, “The American Sublime:  Interracial Friendships and the Dilemma of Democracy.”

The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, And the Ambiguities of American Reform . Edited by Steven Mintz and John Stauffer

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James McCune Smith

(1813-1865)

James McCune Smith (1813-1865), a dignified and highly trained physician, was the first university-trained black physician. After attending the Free African School of New York where he distinguished himself as a pupil he was helped by a clergyman to matriculate in the University of Glasgow. There he worked with the Glasgow Emancipation Society and completed his MD degree, graduating in 1837. Smith received from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) the A.B., M.A., and M.D. degrees. His mother was self-emancipated; his father was freed by a New York law passed in 1827. After his graduation, Smith returned to America and established two drugstores in New York City.

update 4 August 2008