IJAS Special Issue: New work in 19th-Century Historical and Literary studies
In 1832, nineteen-year-old James McCune Smith (1813-1865) crossed the Atlantic from his native New York City to Glasgow on the ship Caledonia to pursue a university education denied to him in his native country on account of his race. The son of a “self-emancipated bond-woman” (as he described her) and an unknown white father,[1] McCune Smith went on to become the first known African American to practice medicine in the United States, a leading abolitionist and civil rights activist, a co-editor and columnist for the black press, and a prolific author in a wide array of literary, medical, scientific, and cultural topics.[2]
McCune Smith kept a travel journal to record his experiences as he journeyed to the United Kingdom. After his return home to New York City five years later, McCune Smith selected and edited excerpts from his journal for publication in the Colored American, a pioneering African-American newspaper. The original journal is no longer extant, but in these surviving selections from the original, McCune Smith quoted lines from Lord George Gordon Byron’s poems liberally throughout, especially from his widely-read romantic epics The Corsair (1814) and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). As this essay will show, McCune Smith, already intimately familiar with Byron’s poetry, drew on its rich imagery and potent themes to help him describe unfamiliar scenes and emotions he was experiencing on the journey, and to help him convey his thoughts about the personal transformations he was undergoing – from fear to wonder, from loneliness to belonging – as he observed, studied, and reflected while on board ship.
Byron, who traveled abroad and involved himself in foreign freedom movements to avoid developing “the narrow prejudices of an Islander”, did not only provide McCune Smith with language in which to express his own feelings and ideas.[3] Byron’s themes of pilgrimage and exile, and the ship as a site of each, were already ingrained in McCune Smith’s imagination, given that, from the outset, his journal entries quote and adapt lines from Byron’s poetry that explore these themes, suggesting an already deep familiarity with them. They appear to have influenced how McCune Smith perceived the new world he was discovering on his first transatlantic journey. That journey also helped him develop his ideas about exile, the divine and his creation, liberty and freedom, and the strengths, flaws, and hoped-for transformation of his beloved native country as well.
McCune Smith’s role as both exile and pilgrim in his journey across the Atlantic is manifest in his journal entries and his later writings, though he only explicitly described himself as an exile. On one occasion, when the Caledonia was nearing Ireland’s coast, McCune Smith wrote of the rejoicing Irish passengers, “Their exile is at an end. Mine has scarcely begun.”[4] However, though he again described himself as an exile during his sojourn abroad after he returned home, he never explicitly referred to himself as a pilgrim.[5] In fact, he only occasionally used that term throughout his lifetime of writing.[6] Nonetheless, McCune Smith described his experiences and transformations as he crossed the sea in pursuit of his quest for an advanced education in ways that suggest he envisaged himself from his first transatlantic voyage as an African American pilgrim in Britain and beyond.
Though Byron’s dramatic poems provided him with evocative language and imagery to enhance his own account, McCune Smith’s expatriate experience was not like that of Conrad, the piratical hero (or, rather, anti-hero) of The Corsair, who was driven into exile because of misdeeds he committed after becoming hardened by a series of disappointments. As Byron wrote – and as McCune Smith had read – Conrad’s “soul was changed, before his deeds had driven / Him forth to war with man and forfeit heaven.”[7] But McCune Smith didn’t see himself, like Conrad, as driven across the sea only by others’ rejections of him. (In McCune Smith’s case, this rejection came from the colleges that refused to admit him due to prevalent racial prejudices in America.) At a welcome-home reception soon after his return to New York in 1837, McCune Smith told those assembled there that he was not a forced, but rather, “a voluntary exile for the sake of learning.”[8] After all, McCune Smith could have stayed in the United States and continued his education privately or in one of the few out-of-state colleges that would accept him, though probably not as a medical student. But he chose instead to go to the University of Glasgow, where he had the opportunity to pursue three degrees in a much more prestigious institution.
This voluntariness is one of two qualities that McCune Smith’s exile shared with that of the world-weary Harold of Byron’s Pilgrimage. The other was that the ship was the vehicle, and at times the site of that exile. This was true, at least at first, for Conrad as well. But though Harold chose his own exile, he did so for reasons very different to those that prompted McCune Smith’s departure. Rendered cynical and numb from a life of satiety and self-indulgence, Harold, described as “Self-exiled”, “from his native land resolved to go./ And visit scorching climes beyond the sea.” Yet Byron portrayed Harold not primarily as an exile, but as a pilgrim, as the title of the poem suggests. Harold’s “weary pilgrimage” was an unusual one, having no apparent destination, no motivation other than the journeying itself, and no purpose other than to escape a life that had grown tedious.[9] In fact, Byron’s framing of Harold’s restless wanderings as a pilgrimage appears to be more than a little tongue-in-cheek. By contrast, McCune Smith characterized his own travels as an earnest quest to attain a specified goal.
If a pilgrimage is to be understood as a journey of spiritual or self-discovery, especially one that leads to new ways of seeing, McCune Smith’s voyage across the Atlantic certainly qualifies. He relied on Byron to help him describe the transformations he experienced. One was a deepening of his spirituality through beholding an immensity of nature he had never seen before. The entry for McCune Smith’s first day at sea, on 16 August 1832, reads, “It is impossible to describe the new class of emotions that rush upon the mind, when sea and sky become the sole and sublime objects that meet one’s ardent gaze. The best attempts of the ablest writers signally fail when they essay to describe the magnificent mirror where ‘The Almighty glasses himself in storm.’”[10] This variation on the lines “Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form / Glasses itself in tempests” from Pilgrimage conveys, first, McCune Smith’s wonder at the immense vista he saw from onboard ship, as he watched the land recede entirely from view, and sea and sky appearing to join together as reflected images of each other. As in Byron’s lines from further on in this stanza, the devout McCune Smith was inspired to perceive “The image of Eternity – the throne /Of the Invisible” in the vast, ever-changing aspects of this marine world.[11]
But McCune Smith wasn’t only inspired to see God in a new way: his journey by sea led him to understand God in a way he had not before. Three days into the voyage, McCune Smith witnessed a frightening scene of a man stricken with severe muscle cramps caused by a bout of cholera. Fortunately, the man recovered, and a great sense of relief passed throughout the ship. The following morning, as McCune Smith wrote, he
arose with peculiarly solemn feelings. It was our first Sabbath at sea, and how great the thanksgiving due to Him who had safely conducted as thus far on our solitary way! … Often when amid rural scenery; I have thought that nature helped to solemnize the Lord’s day, but never, until this morning, did I feel and hear the song of thanksgiving which His works can render their Creator.
It was not only his relief at witnessing a near escape from death that transported McCune Smith into a religious revery. It was the grandiosity of the world in which he found himself, where, he wrote, “The circled plane of ocean seemed the floor, the cloudless sky the dome, and the glorious sun the ministering high-priest of Nature’s temple and of Nature’s Sabbath” as the liturgical service was read. Then McCune Smith called on Byron again to help him describe how the day gave way to evening: “The bosom of [the] ocean,” McCune Smith wrote, was – here quoting one of Byron’s untitled “Stanzas for Music” usually known as “There be none of Beauty’s daughters” – “Gently heaving, / Like an infant’s, asleep.” He continued, again offering a variation on lines in Byron’s Pilgrimage, to describe how the “pure sea-breeze blew bravely over our quarter; the phosphoric gleam of our wake, and the deep, blue vault above, studded with the bright stars, that / ‘Are the poetry of Heaven.’”[12] In sum, McCune Smith’s transportation to new forms and heights of spiritual experience as he was being transported across the sea made him a pilgrim in at least this sense.
The ship, a device which allowed McCune Smith to see the world and the divine in new ways, also served as a site of another transformation: that of his native land. But for that transformation, many ships had been and would be involved, carrying pilgrims and exiles, and other travelers as well. The Mayflower carried the Pilgrims, the much-storied English religious dissidents and freedom-seekers, across the Atlantic so they could realize their own vision of an ideal community in the New World, and other ships carrying similar aspirants followed. Many of these pilgrims could be simultaneously considered exiles, driven from their homelands by religious persecution.
Ships carried Africans as well, exiled by being captured, carried across the sea, and sold into slavery, but the Mayflower garnered most of the public’s attention. As Kenyon Gradert writes, McCune Smith came to be “sick of” the narrow focus on that ship in American literature. [13] McCune Smith wrote to his friend Frederick Douglass twenty years after his own transatlantic journey that “Mr. [George Payne Rainsford] James, the novelist, has no sooner promised to abandon his ‘solitary horseman,’ than the vacuum is filled in the literary world by repeating the dose, ad nauseam, of that ‘solitary ship’ which the descendants of the puritans tell us, moved inside of Cape Cod in a ‘certain bleak day in December, two hundred and odd years ago.’ I presume when we blacks get a literature, we may speak with pride of that other ‘solitary ship’ which landed some hundred Africans in the James river in 1622, and which was the source of the contact of the ‘two great races’ of mankind” in America.[14]
As McCune Smith wrote elsewhere, this coming together of these peoples and others would give rise to a new and great civilization there, giving rise to the “composite genius of the American people.”[15] This is not to say that McCune Smith was dismissive of the Mayflower Pilgrims. In fact, not long before he made his complaint to Douglass, McCune Smith had praised the “distinguished example” they and others “who have made this their exile home” had set for African Americans. Like those early pilgrims and exiles, McCune Smith wrote, “we have steadily maintained this birth home-right during the last third of a century, in this our native land, and will continue to maintain it until its ultimate triumph.”[16]
But back on the Caledonia in 1832, McCune Smith wrote of countless other people carried by many other ships across the Atlantic to America. They brought with them their own wide array of talents, skills, and ways of doing things. Ultimately, they did not create the narrowly idealized society that the Mayflower pilgrims envisioned. Nor did they create a state of permanent exile, with the new nation’s founding peoples forever trapped in master-slave relationships. (More on the latter shortly.) Instead, they generated a composite culture of a kind the world had never yet seen.
This culture created, among other things, new and innovative methods of shipbuilding, which exemplified this culture’s “composite genius.” As McCune Smith wrote on 23 August,
an American ship is an epitome of the great and rising country, whose star spangled banner proudly floats o’er her deck. “E Pluribus Unum” “From many nations” were the men gathered who felled the trees and chipped the timbers and moulded them into “one” harmonious and beautiful craft that
quoting Byron’s Corsair, “Walks the waters like a thing of life”. On board the pirate ship, “From many nations” are the men gathered under the command of the captain who “moves the monarch of her peopled deck.”’[17]
Byron’s Harold also praised the craft that carried him swiftly across the sea, declaring, “Our ship is swift and strong: / Our fleetest falcon scarce can fly / More merrily along.” These lines may even have inspired McCune Smith to refer to his ship as the “winged Caledonia.” He lamented, however, that entities such as the Caledonia were not the only representatives of American culture. American ships also “scatter[ed] abroad among the nations the malignant prejudice which is a canker and a curse to the soil, whence she sprung.”[18] This prejudice, a product of American slavery, would long continue to be a malignant force. But McCune Smith also believed that the United States would inevitably rid herself of these malignancies, with African Americans at the forefront of this reformation, so long as they chose to remain there and carry on the struggle. Several years later, he wrote:
By remaining in this country, the scene of our enslavement, we shall overcome slavery… Slavery must cease and over its grave there will grow up to be a pure Republic. …We will save the form of government, and convert it into a substance.[19]
Though pilgrimages usually have one destination, McCune Smith’s could be seen as having two. The first was his arrival on British soil, which he experienced as finally enjoying a state of liberty which he had long sought but never known before. Since McCune Smith believed freedom was a birthright, the natural state for a human being, he compared his elation at reaching Britain, where slavery had been ruled illegal, to the ecstasy of finally coming home. Though McCune Smith was not enslaved, his mother had been, and both suffered the effects of the extension of American slavery that McCune Smith called “caste.”[20] As he wrote on 9 September, the day he first stepped off the ship to set foot on the Liverpool dock,
“I am free!” was the thought which flashed through my mind, as I trod the strong wharf with a foot which coveted every inch of the space. Tancredi kissed his natal earth; I could embrace the soil on which I now live, since it yields not only to all who dwell, but to all who may come to it, a greater amount of rational liberty than is secured to man in any other portion of the globe.[21]
Byron’s Harold experienced his arrival to one foreign country in a similar way. As Esther Wohlgemut writes,
Canto Two of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ends with Harold’s arrival in Greece, an event he experiences as a sort of home-coming …While some pilgrims long to return to their native land, Byron’s pilgrim returns ‘home’ to the root of western civilization, Greece. Home in this sense implies a feeling of ease rather than the domestic attachment.[22]
It was in this context, in fact, that Byron penned lines that McCune Smith would quote throughout his lifetime of speaking and writing, verses that figured heavily in the writings of fellow freedom-fighters such as Douglass as well. Addressing Greeks under the “Slavery” of Ottoman rule, Byron wrote the lines that became one of African American abolitionists’ favorite rallying cries: “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”[23] For both McCune Smith and Byron (in the thin disguise of his literary creation Harold), their spiritual homes, in the national sense, were both inside and outside their native lands once they reached these first destinations in their respective pilgrimages. As Wohlgemut writes, “To be an expatriate is to be (voluntarily or involuntarily) outside the nation; at the same time, it is to define oneself according to the nation. It is thus to be both inside and outside national attachment.”[24] McCune Smith’s journal entry and Byron’s poem reveal that they felt that they belonged, simultaneously, to two places at once, since values they prized in the countries of their birth enjoyed fuller expression or deeper origins elsewhere. For McCune Smith, liberty, as a God-given attribute, was now best protected under English common law. For Byron, “sturdy republican[ism]” had its roots in Greece’s traditions of civilizational greatness.[25] For both, it was a ship that brought them ‘home’ to their spiritual-national destinations.
It was not until he returned to his native New York City, however, that McCune Smith’s exile and pilgrimage finally ended by returning home to the land of his birth. His exile ended the moment of his landing, as he told his assembled friends and supporters – in almost as many words – at his welcome-home ceremony. He rejoiced at being “[o]nce more upon my native soil, once more in my native city, and amid those scenes which are endeared to me by the thousand happy recollections of boyhood and of youth.”[26] If Byron’s heroes were only so lucky. As Wohlgemut writes,
Like the ‘fabled Hebrew wanderer’ Cain, Harold is doomed to wander the earth until he dies: ‘What Exile from himself can flee?/ To Zone, though more and more remote,/ Still, still pursues, where-e’er I be,/ The blight of life – the demon, Thought’. Harold’s journey, like Cain’s, has no definitive end.[27]
Nor does Conrad’s. After he is rescued from those who captured him during a raid only to return home to find that his wife, presuming him dead, has died of grief, Conrad, in despair, disappears and is never heard from again. Though the poem is not explicit about Conrad’s end, he either exiles himself from his pirate band, or, more likely, permanently exiles himself from the world by taking his own life.[28] There is one sense, however, in which Harold’s pilgrimage did come to an end. The autobiographical voice of the author emerges in a stanza approaching the end of his poem, as the poet, shedding the thin disguise of Harold, writes at the end of what is cast as the literary pilgrimage of the author, “My pilgrim’s shrine is won. / And he and I must part.” As if to dispel any doubt that’s what he meant by these lines, the final stanza reads: “Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene / Which is his last, if in your memories dwell.”[29]
McCune Smith’s pilgrimage continued to his death. After his return to the United States, he spent the rest of his life applying his transformational experiences of liberty in Britain to his life-long quest to help establish freedom for his people back home. As his friend Douglass later wrote, “James McCune Smith… educated in Scotland, and breathing the free air of that country, …came back to his native land with ideas of liberty which placed him in advance of most of his fellows of African descent.”[30] But Byron too, it seems, made a contribution to McCune Smith’s transformational experiences of liberty and his lifelong efforts to help realize freedom in America by providing poetic language that helped McCune Smith give his early ideas a voice.
Notes
[1] “The Poughkeepsie Slave Case”, The Liberator (Boston / New York), 12 September 1851; James McCune Smith, “Letter from Communipaw [4 February 1852]”, Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, NY), 12 February 1852; James McCune Smith, “Introduction”, in My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass (Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), xxxi.
[2] David W. Blight, “In Search of Learning, Liberty, and Self Definition: James McCune Smith and the Ordeal of the Antebellum Black Intellectual”, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 9, no. 2 (1985): 7–26; John Stauffer, “Introduction”, in The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, by James McCune Smith (Oxford University Press, 2006), xiii–xl.
[3] Esther Wohlgemut, “Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World”, in Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009), 95–96. Byron at first channeled his cosmopolitan, adventurist, and revolutionary sensibilities by joining the secretive Carbonari movement in Italy after his move there from his native England. After Austria suppressed insurrectionist activities there, Byron found a worthy cause to join in his beloved Greece, then resisting her subjugation to Turkish rule. Byron departed from Genoa for Greece with a few companions to support the freedom fighters there but died from illness only nine months later, on 19 April 1824. See E. G. Protopsaltis, “Byron and Greece”, in Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Symposium, ed. Paul Graham Trueblood (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1981), 91–104.
[4] James McCune Smith, “Extracts from Dr. Smith’s Journal [5-8 September 1832]”, The Colored American (New York, NY), 16 December 1837.
[5] Ransom F. Wake et al., “Reception of Dr. Smith, By the Colored Citizens of New York”, The Colored American (New York, NY), 28 October 1837.
[6] Examples of his use of “pilgrim” or “pilgrimage” include James McCune Smith and Committee of Thirteen, “Address to His Excellency Governor Louis Kossuth, of Hungary, by the Committee of Thirteen Appointed to Secure the Legal Defense of Persons Claimed as Fugitive Slaves; Presented, New York, Dec 12, 1851”, National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), 18 December 1851; James McCune Smith, “Mr. Editor [November 1852]”, Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, NY), 26 November 1852; James McCune Smith, “Sketch of the Life and Labors of Rev. Henry Highland Garnet”, in A Memorial Discourse; by Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865 (Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 19. “Sketch” is the only work in which McCune Smith employed both the term and concept at length to describe a journey of liberation and transformation – that of his friend and his friend’s family from slavery to freedom.
[7] The Corsair, Canto 1, Stanza 11, in George Gordon Byron, Works, II (John Murray, 1829), 232.
[8] Wake et al., “Reception of Dr. Smith, CA, 28 Oct 1837”.
[9] Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 2, Stanza 16, and Canto I, Stanzas 4 and 6, in George Gordon Byron, Works, I (John Murray, 1829), 12, 13, 184.
[10] James McCune Smith, “Dr. Smith’s Journal [16-19 August 1832]”, The Colored American (New York, NY), 11 November 1837.
[11] Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 4, Stanza 183, in Byron, Works, II, 70; McCune Smith, “Dr. Smith’s Journal [16-19 Aug 1832], CA, 11 Nov 1837”.
[12] George Gordon Byron, Poems (London: John Murray, 1816), 19; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 3, Stanza 88, in Byron, Works, 1829, I:210; McCune Smith, “Journal [16-19 August 1832]”.
[13] Kenyon Gradert, “The Mayflower and the Slave Ship: Pilgrim-Puritan Origins in the Antebellum Black Imagination”, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 44, no. 3 (2019): 63. Gradert focuses on democracy as a central element in McCune Smith’s complaint about the narrow focus on the Mayflower in American literature. In this, he may be influenced by John Stauffer, who writes in his editorial notes to McCune Smith’s journal entry discussed immediately below that “McCune Smith identifies his ship with the ideal of American democracy.” However, neither in the letter to Douglass that Gradert cites, nor in the journal entry that Stauffer annotates and that I discuss here, does McCune Smith allude to democracy, per se. McCune Smith’s focus, as it was in so many of his most influential speeches and writings, was on the multi-ethnic, multi-racial origins of the United States, which he believed was essential to its greatness and whose greatness would be immeasurably enhanced when it rid itself of racial oppression. This may be related to but is distinct from democracy – after all, there have been many democracies with little or no ethnic or racial diversity, including in Ancient Greece. See Amy M. Cools, “The Life and Work of Dr. James McCune Smith (1813-1865)” (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2021), 276–78, https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/38333.
[14] McCune Smith, “Letter from Communipaw, FDP, 12 Feb 1852”.
[15] “The German Invasion”, The Anglo-African Magazine, February 1859, 44, 46.
[16] McCune Smith and Committee of Thirteen, “Address to His Excellency Kossuth, NASS, 18 Dec 1851”. The solitary horseman was a well-known trope in James’s many novels; see “Novels and Novelists: Charles Dickens, Art. V”, The North American Review, October 1849, 383; S. M. Ellis, The Solitary Horseman, or, The Life & Adventures of G. P. R. James (The Cayme Press, 1927), 253. “Certain bleak day in December” and “two hundred and odd years ago” appear to be McCune Smith’s own combination of the two stock phrases on either side of the comma, apparently to underline the theme of tropes.
[17] Byron, Works, 1829, I:16; The Corsair, Canto I, Stanza 3, in Byron, Works, II, 226; James McCune Smith, “Extracts from Dr. Smith’s Journal [23 August – 3 September 1832]”, The Colored American (New York, NY), 2 December 1837.
[18] Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 1, Stanza 3, in Byron, Works, 1829, I:16; James McCune Smith, “Extracts from Dr. Smith’s Journal [23 August – 3 September 1832]”, The Colored American, 2 December 1837.
[19] James McCune Smith, The Destiny of the People of Color: A Lecture, Delivered Before the Philomathean Society and Hamilton Lyceum in January, 1841 (Published by Request, 1843), 6, 10.
[20] See, for example, James McCune Smith, “Address to the Gentlemen of the Legislature of New-York – Extending the Right of Suffrage (From the Albany Argus)”, The National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), 8 May 1845.
[21] James McCune Smith, “Extracts from Dr. Smith’s Journal [9-11 September 1832]”, The Colored American (New York, NY), 3 February 1838.
[22] Wohlgemut, “Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond”, 102. See also Aidan Chalk, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt and the Influence of Local Attachment’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 1 (1998): 64 – “Home for Byron is not a fixed and originary centre”.
[23] Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 2, Stanza 76, in Byron, Works, I, 76.
[24] Wohlgemut, “Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond”, 102.
[25] Byron initially doubted, however, that the Greeks could actually free themselves. In his notes to Canto 2, he writes, “the interposition of foreigners alone can emancipate the Greeks, who, otherwise, appear to have as small a chance of redemption from the Turks, as the Jews have from mankind in general.” See Byron, Works, I, 126. Yet Byron died in Greece thirteen years later, where he had joined them in their fight for independence. For more on Byron’s affinity with Greek history and culture, see Protopsaltis, “Byron and Greece”.
[26] Wake et al., “Reception of Dr. Smith, CA, 28 Oct 1837”.
[27] Wohlgemut, “Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond”, 102.
[28] The Corsair, Canto 3, Stanza 24, in Byron, Works, II, 289.
[29] Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 2, Stanzas 175 and 186, in Byron, Works, II, 67, 71.
[30] Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Park Publishing, 1882), 568.
