Harmful arrangements: Ethnography at the National Institute and racial violence in Washington, D.C., 1842–1864

ABSTRACT

In 1842, the National Institute for the Promotion of Science installed an eclectic collection of natural science and cultural treasures in the United States Patent Office, a fire-proof building in Washington D.C. Inventories, institutional records, and periodicals indicate that the initial curator of the National Institute, the natural scientist Charles Pickering, arranged display cases at the U.S.’s first national museum according to his ethnographic division of racial types. Pickering’s system remained mostly intact until the galleries closed at the onset of the Civil War. As pro-slavery violence grew increasingly intense, the government-sponsored National Institute presented a narrative of progress that was embroiled in racial politics. The violent context that surrounded prominent objects in federal collections, such as the Declaration of Independence and Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington at Princeton (1779), should be remembered as a significant moment in museum and U.S. history as well as a potential measure of change since the antebellum installation.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• colonialism
• museum
• natural science
• oceania
• race
• slavery
• Smithsonian

Acknowledgements

Thank you to archivists and librarians at the American Philosophical Society, Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, and Woodson Research Center at Rice University. My archival research was funded in part by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Short-Term Resident Research Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum and a Brown Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship in the Rice University Department of Art History.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 R. Gochberg, Useful Objects: Museums, Science, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 122; and L. M. Fink, A History of the Smithsonian American Art Museum: The Intersection of Art, Science, and Bureaucracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), pp. 8–11.

2 Some examples from the robust historiography of the complicity of museums and scientific racism are W. R. Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); A. Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and C. Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). W. S. Walker has charted the Smithsonian's many attempts over the years to rectify the racialized geographies in its museums, especially in the 1960s when it reoccupied the old Patent Office building, A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), pp. 196–226.

3 Thank you to K. F. Davis for helping identify the photographer. On Pickering’s role at the Institute, see G. B. Goode, ‘The Genesis of the National Museum,’ in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution of the Year Ending June 30, 1891. Report of the U.S. National Museum (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), p. 350, <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/14855159> [accessed 13 February 2024]; D. E. Evelyn, ‘The National Gallery in the Patent Office,’ in Magnificent Voyagers: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1942, ed. H. J. Viola and C. Margolis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1985), pp. 234–36; A. Adler, ‘From the Pacific to the Patent Office: The U.S. Exploring Expedition and the Origins of America’s First National Museum,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 1 (2011), pp. 58–63; and G. Isaac and B. Isaac, ‘Uncovering the Demographics of Collecting: A Case Study of the U.S. Exploring Expedition,’ Journal of the History of Collections, 2 (2016), 215. The work of an ethnologist, Pickering, at a government-sponsored museum in Washington D.C. explicitly ties the intertwined histories of display, race, and territorial expansion to an expression of nationalism and state power.

4 Goode, p. 353. The caretaker John Varden’s diaries record an array of visitors from all social classes and around the world, from Ottoman diplomats to local workers employed to arrange the cases and care for the objects, Diary, John Varden Papers RU 7063, Box 1, Folder 5, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.

5 C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1, 27. Also, S. Reis and A. Saladino, ‘Museums of Brazil,’ in Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, ed. C. Smith (New York: Springer, 2020), pp. 7567–7574. However, E. Hooper-Greenhill asks us to consider the classification systems used to organize museums as historically and geographically specific, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 5. For visitors as subject and object of early museum displays more generally, see T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).

6 See, for example, the Charleston Museum in D. N. Livingstone, ‘Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 4 (2005), 396–399. D. M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848–1861 (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

7 ‘United States Exploring Expedition,’ American Journal of Science and Arts, 2 (1843), 398–399. A reprint of this article, which was part of Charles Pickering’s bequest to Harvard, indicates that the article may have been written by Charles Wilkes, <https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:fhcl:1463718> [accessed 4 January 2023]. For more on the politics of space in a museum, see E. Hooper-Greenhill, ‘The Space of the Museum,’ Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 1 (1990), 56–69. Curators’ interest in technological evolution will become even more pronounced after the 1860s, especially in the context of World’s Fairs and temporary expositions.

8 [B. N. Martin], ‘The Original Unity of the Human Race—Pickering, Bachman, Agassiz,’ New Englander, 32 (1850), p. 583. Attributed to Benjamin N. Martin in Sixty-Seventh Annual Report of the Trustees for the New York State Library, For the Year 1884 (Albany: Weed Parsons, 1885), p. 95.

9 See summary in W. S. Frances, ‘Watercolour of a Fijian Man, Painted by Charles Pickering’, in Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of Archaeology in Oceania, ed. H. Howes, T. Jones, and M. Spriggs (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2022), pp. 79–82; and especially B. A. Joyce, The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 21–22, 146–147.

10 L. G. Bunch III, Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on History, Race, and Museums (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2010), p. 57.

11 C. J. Robertson, Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark (London: Scala, 2006), pp. 62–63.

12 M. Owens, ‘Running from the Temple of Liberty: The Pearl Incident’, in The White House Historical Association <https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-pearl-incident> [accessed 26 January 2021]. M. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 403–404.

13 S. C. Harrold, Jr., ‘The Pearl Affair: The Washington Riot of 1848,’ Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., 50 (1980), pp. 145–154. M. B. Corrigan, ‘1848: The Pearl’, Washington History, 1/2 (2020), 24–27.

14 S. Conn, History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 49–54.

15 S. G. Kohlstedt, ‘Place and Museum Space: The Smithsonian Institution, National Identity, and the American West, 1846–1896,’ in Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 399–438.

16 A. G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2005); H. Hirayama, “With Éclat:” The Boston Athenaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 2013); and D. R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum at Its Audience (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

17 G. W. Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 150. The 1840s was a time in which museum administrators in the U.S. debated the ideal purposes and audiences for their institutions, J. J. Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740–1870 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), pp. 108–140.

18 J. R. Ingersoll insisted that the National Institute would be “to the benefit and instruction of a republic” with its directive arising from the people rather than from the monarchy, as was the case with many museums in Europe, ‘Preamble’, Special Meeting, December 28, 1843, in Bulletin of the Proceedings of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1841), pp. 334, <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/57829017> [accessed 13 February 2024].

19 See notes 34 and 52.

20 Gochberg, pp. 129–130, and C. Fullilove, ‘The Hair of Distinguished Persons in the Patent Office Building Museum,’ Museum History Journal, 1 (2017), 50–67.

21 A. Adler, pp. 49–74, and G. Issac and B. Issac, pp. 209–223.

22 C. Pickering, Chronological History of Plants: Man’s Record of His Own Existence Illustrated through Their Names, Uses, and Companionship (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1879), pp. vii–xvi, <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/37529004> [accessed 13 February 2024]; as well as D. L. Browman and S. Williams, Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 14–15, 33–37.

23 J. Henry to J. F. Frazer, October 27, 1855, John Fries Frazer Papers B F865, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

24 E. Martin, ‘Museum Ethnography and Creative Practice,’ Journal of Museum Ethnography, 34 (2021), 13–18. Martin’s snapshot of the field follows a robust conversation about contemporary ethnographic and anthropological practice in 2020, see for example D. Thomas, ‘An Interview with the Editor of American Anthropologist about the March 2020 Cover Controversy’, interview with Y. Bonilla, American Anthropologist <https://www.americananthropologist.org/online-content/an-interview-with-the-editor-of-american-anthropologist-about-the-march-2020-cover-controversy> [accessed 22 January 2024].

25 H. Hale, ‘Report on the Department of Philology and Ethnography, November 1842’, in Goode, p. 359. For a recent reflection on this moment in time see, I. X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), pp. 177–190.

26 See, for example, S. J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

27 N. I. Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 190 and 200.

28 C. Pickering, ‘On the Geographical Distribution of Plants. By C. Pickering, M.D.-- Read October 19th 1827,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 3 (1830), 277, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1005138> [accessed 13 February 2024].

29 C. Irmscher, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), pp. 94–96.

30 C. Pickering, United States Exploring Expedition, During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, Under the Command of Charles Wilkes, U.S.N. Vol. IX. The Races of Man: And Their Geographical Distribution (Boston: C. Sherman, 1848), p. 302 <https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.69331> [accessed 13 February 2024].

31 Pickering, United States Exploring Expedition, p. 3.

32 S. Morton, Crania Aegyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History, and the Monuments (Philadelphia: Penington, 1844), p. 67; J. C. Nott and G. R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind; Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1854), pp. 66–67.

33 J. R. Poinsett, ‘Extracts’, Bulletin of the Proceedings of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science, 1 (1841), 21–22, <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/57828734> [accessed 13 February 2024]. See, for example, D. B. Tyler, The Wilkes Expedition: The First United States Exploring Expedition (1838–1842) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), pp. 392–393.

34 C. Wilkes, Synopsis of the cruise of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, during the years 1838, '39, '40, '41 & '42: delivered before the National Institute by its Commander, Charles Wilkes (Washington, D.C.: Peter Force, 1842), pp. 6, 48, <https://doi.org/10.5479/sil.455562.39088007592942> [accessed 13 February 2024].

35 J. R. Poinsett, An Inquiry into the Received Opinions of Philosophers and Historians on the Natural Progress of the Human Race from Barbarism to Civilization/ Read on the Anniversary of the Library and Philosophical Society, by the President, J. R. Poinsett (Charleston, S.C.: J. S. Burges, 1834), pp. 42–43. See, for example, R. Horsman, ‘Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,’ American Quarterly, 2 (1975), 154.

36 Potter, pp. 42–44. For more on Poinsett and his crucial role in this era, see L. Schakenbach Regele, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

37 Congress mandated that the U.S. Ex. Ex. ‘will examine with particular attention, with a view of selecting a harbor for our vessels engaged in the whale fisheries, and general commerce in these seas,’ Wilkes, Synopsis, p. 8, and A. L. Kaeppler, ‘Anthropology and the U.S. Exploring Expedition,’ in Viola and Margolis, pp. 123–126. See, for example, N. Shoemaker, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 14–16; M. A. Verney, A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), pp. 70–71; and S. G. Kohlstedt, ‘Museum Perceptions and Productions: American Migrations of a Maori hei-tiki,’ Endeavor, 1 (2016), 7–23.

38 C. Mason, Synopsis of the Collection in the National Gallery, Patent Office Building; as Originally Arranged by Dr. Chas. Pickering, T. R. Peale, James D. Dana, and Others of the United States Exploring Expedition (Washington, D.C.: Henry Polkinhorn, 1856), p. 6.

39 C. Pickering to S. Morton, August 7 and 8, 1840, Samuel George Morton Papers B M843, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

40 Goode, p. 352. Pickering’s leadership in guiding Hale and Peale in a classificatory system is also suggested in a letter to the Secretary of the Navy, December 26, 1842, Letter 2686, Microfilm 131, as well as Abel P. Upshur’s reply, Letter 2689, Microfilm 135, Series 17, Benjamin Tappan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

41 C. Pickering to B. Tappan, July 23, 1843, Letter 2797, Microfilm 312, Series 17, Benjamin Tappan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

42 C. Wilkes to B. Tappan, 1843, Box 18, Reel 7, Benjamin Tappan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

43 A. Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 9–10. See, for example, S. Kohlstedt, ‘A Step Toward Scientific Self-Identity in the United States: The Failure of the National Institute, 1844,’ Isis, 3 (1971), 339–362.

44 J. S. Wilkins, Species: A History of the Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 99–100.

45 [Martin], pp. 543–544.

46 Joyce, pp. 152–155, and W. Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 92–98.

47 Pickering, Races, pp. 9–10.

48 Pickering, Races, p. 51.

49 C. Pickering to S. Morton, August 7 and 8, 1840, Samuel George Morton papers B M843, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. By contrast, see popular history of Vendovi, A. Adler, ‘The Capture and Curation of the Cannibal ‘Vendovi’: Reality and Representation of a Pacific Frontier,’ The Journal of Pacific History, 3 (2014), 255–282.

50 Pickering, Races, p. 286.

51 C. Pickering to S. Morton.

52 My reconstruction of the gallery displays correlates a number of published guides and institutional inventories including [Wilkes], ‘United States Exploring Expedition;’ “Plan of the National Gallery containing the Collection of the Exploring Expedition” [Figure 5]; R. Mills, Guide to the Capital and National Executive Offices of the United States (Washington, DC: W. M. Greer, 1847–8), pp. 65–68; A. Hunter, A Popular Catalogue of the Extraordinary Curiosities in the National Institute, Arranged in the Building Belonging to the Patent Office (Washington, DC: Alfred Hunter, 1855); Synopsis of the Collection in the National Gallery, Patent Office Building; as Originally Arranged by Dr. Chas. Pickering, T. R. Peale, James D. Dana, and Others of the United States Exploring Expedition, ordered by Charles Mason (Washington, D.C.: Polkinhorn, 1856/7); and Goode, ‘Synopsis.’

53 S. V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 7.

54 A. Hunter, p. 44.

55 F. Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J. H. Furst, 1931), pp. 45–66.

56 J. C. Brent, Letters on the National Institute, Smithsonian Legacy, the Fine Arts, and Other Matters Connected with the Interests of the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Gideon, 1844), p. 8.

57 Brent, p. 6.

58 A. Hunter, p.43. For more on the significance of mandingo amulets in the African diaspora, see M. F. Rarey, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).

59 D. L. Child, ‘Washington Correspondence’, The Liberator, 6 January 1843, p. 3. Fr. Curley was involved in the slave trade through his work at Georgetown College, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, ‘After the sale of the slaves … .’ Fr. Vespre to Fr. Roothaan, July 5 and July 13, 1840’, Georgetown Slavery Archive, <https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/465> [accessed 12 January 2024].

60 A. Hunter, A Popular Catalogue of the Extraordinary Curiosities in the National Institute, Arranged in the Building Belonging to the Patent Office (Washington, DC: Alfred Hunter, 1859), pp. 18. An African American man, Solomon Brown, was likely involved in moving the National Institute collections to the Smithsonian, see ‘Solomon Brown: First African American Employee at the Smithsonian Institution’, in Stories from the Smithsonian, <https://siarchives.si.edu/history/featured-topics/stories/solomon-brown-first-african-american-employee-smithsonian-institution> [accessed 4 January 2023].

61 J. Varden Diary, John Varden Papers RU 7063, Box 1, Folder 5, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.

62 F. Douglass, The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered, an Address, Before the Literary Societies, Western Reserve College, At Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester: Lee, Mann, & Co., 1854), p. 10. Later, M. R. Delaney would also address ethnology from an African American perspective in Principa of Ethnology (Philadelphia: Harper & Brother, 1880).

63 NMAAHC Four Pillars, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, <https://nmaahc.si.edu/about/about-museum> [accessed 10 January 2024].

64 M. C. Jalonick, ‘We Were Trapped’ Trauma of Jan. 6 Lingers for Lawmakers’, Associated Press News, 5 January 2022, <https://apnews.com/article/jan-6-capitol-siege-lawmakers-trauma-04e29724aa6017180259385642c1b990> [accessed 4 January 2023].

65 C. Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 22.

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Rachel Hooper

Rachel Hooper is a professor of art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art. She researches abolitionism, modernity, and the formation of art museums in the mid-nineteenth century.