John Mitchell

As a young physician in Urbana, Virginia, with serious interests in exotic botany and human anatomy, John Mitchell undertook an independent but intensive study of geography, eventually creating the most comprehensive map of eastern North America then in existence, the “Mitchell Map.”

Mitchell produced the essay from which these selections are taken in response to a contest that had been announced in 1739 by the Royal Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres, and Arts at Bordeaux on the question “Quelle est la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et de l’autre?” (What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of their hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?). The mysterious source of skin color, and black skin color in particular, was becoming widely discussed in the learned societies of England and France, and the Bordeaux contest received sixteen submissions venturing a wide range of explanations, none of which seem at all plausible today.* Mitchell’s essay is less speculative and more empirical than most of the Bordeaux entries, but it was also written well after the deadline for submissions had passed, so he sent it to Peter Collinson, a friend and a member of the Royal Society in London, which published it.

In his essay, Mitchell describes in remarkable detail a series of experiments performed on human skin that demonstrate that white epidermis is transparent and transmits the color that lies beneath it, while black skin (which he examines on living people rather than risk altering it—and the person—by removing it) is thicker and tougher, and transmits no color, effecting a virtual “Suffocation of the Rays of Light” (123). Exposure to sunlight causes, in addition, “a peculiar Necrosis of the Epidermis, occasioned by the forcible Vibrations, Contractions, and Exsiccations of its Fibres by the Sunbeams, which cause [the skin] to turn black, as these, or the other Parts, do by the Heat of an Inflammation or a Fever, in Gangrenes, black Tongues, etc. From whence only the nervous Parts of the Skin Come to be black, and more hard and callous, and less pellucid, than the rest, and the Skins of Negroes, besides their Callosity, become more insensible than those of Whites” (135).

Mitchell’s essay is a good source of information regarding the terms and concepts used by medical science in the mid-18th century. But as he approaches the end of his discourse, he departs from the clinical to venture speculations about the origin of humanity. In the passage reproduced below, he concludes that the Biblical account of an original pair can be confirmed by science, whereas the “Curse of Ham”—the theory that Africans were black because they were descended from Ham, who was punished for having beheld his father Noah naked—was frivolous and false. The Bordeaux essay contest had asked for speculations about the reasons for the “degeneration” of black skin and hair, but Mitchell argued that blackness was not a curse but a blessing in a torrid climate and that whiteness had to be accounted a degeneration from the original “tawny” complexion of our first ancestors from whom we are all descended. At the very end, Mitchell, the village American with an uncertain grasp of sentence structure, addressing the Royal Society in London, speaks of the “luxurious Customs, or soft and effeminate lives” led by Europeans, who are as a consequence greatly affected by the sun in a way that black people are not (148).

For subsequent discussions of “degeneration,” see Mitchell, Buffon, Kant, Goldsmith, Long, Blumenbach, Stanhope Smith, Charles Hamilton Smith, Kneeland, Gobineau, and Huxley.