Dr. David Ramsay of Charleston was an active participant in and major early historian of the American Revolution. He also has the distinction of being the first of many American politicians to be assassinated.
Ramsay was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1749, the son of Scottish or Scotch-Irish emigrants. He graduated from The College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1765. In 1773, he became one of the first recipients of the MD degree from the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) in 1773. [Image: A young David Ramsay, by Charles Wilson Peale]
Ramsay moved to Charleston, South Carolina the following year, upon the recommendation of his mentor, Dr. Benjamin Rush. The city and its environs was then one of the unhealthiest and wealthiest regions of British North America, and a magnet for medical men. After a slow start, Ramsay built a lucrative medical practice.
He soon became involved in politics. When he arrived in Charleston, conflicts between the thirteen colonies and the British government were escalating towards war. Ramsay joined with the Whigs, or Patriots, as they later called themselves. He served in the state legislature during the War for Independence.
During the British siege of Charleston in the spring of 1780, he served as an army surgeon. After the British captured the city, they sent Ramsay and other Patriot leaders to St. Augustine, Florida. He remained there nearly a year, until he was released in a prisoner exchange.
He went to Philadelphia, where he became a member of the Continental Congress. He served in that body until 1786, after which he returned to South Carolina. During the 1790s he served several times in the state senate. His hope of becoming a United States senator was dashed when his opponent accused him of being insufficiently supportive of slavery.
Ramsay had opposed slavery when he first came to South Carolina, but he gradually modified his views on the issue. Without specifically endorsing slavery, he helped to justify it.
In 1780, he wrote his mentor Rush that he had concluded that God had designed blacks for labor in hot, humid, and sickly South Carolina: "Providence intended this for a Negro settlement. Their constitution is undoubtedly better suited to the climate, and all planters tell us that their lands cannot be cultivated by white men...."
In later years Ramsay blamed the enslaved themselves for their poor health rather than their living and working conditions. They carelessly exposed themselves to dangerous miasmas, knowing that an illness would gain them some time off from work and the attentions of a medical man. Why they would look forward to time off at the price of being ill, bled, and purged, he did not say.
Ramsay's change of views on slavery was no doubt influenced by his social, familial, and political environment. As a physician active in revolutionary politics, he became acquainted with many local planters.
In 1787 he married Martha Laurens, daughter of slave trader, planter, and politician Henry Laurens. She was Ramsay's third wife. The first two, Sabina Ellis (1775) and Frances Witherspoon (1783), had died within a year of their weddings. It may seem that Ramsay was a bit careless with his wives, but there is no clear evidence of that.
His marriage to Martha Laurens lasted until her death in 1811 and produced at least eleven children. Through his marriage to Martha he became related to some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in South Carolina, families with names like Rutledge, Pinckney, Middleton, and Izard. Each of them, like his father in law, owed their wealth to the labor of hundreds enslaved Africans. [Image: Henry Laurens, c.1782, painted when he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, by Lemuel Francis Abbott]
After the Declaration of Independence Laurens penned a letter to his son John then in London, later published, in which he declared his dislike of slavery and his intention to work for its abolition. But he did no such thing, and only freed one of his slaves in his will. John Laurens, however, took his fathers' words seriously and remained committed to abolition until his death in one of the last skirmishes of the War for Independence in 1782.
After the Revolution, Ramsay wrote several medical works. They remain useful to the historian of medicine and disease, but his medical ideas were highly derivative. He became an advocate of Benjamin Rush's heroic medicine, which recommended drastic bleeding and purging for most ailments. This medical regime sent many an unfortunate to an early grave.
On the positive side, Ramsay was an early advocate of Jenner's vaccination for smallpox, and began vaccinating early as 1802. He predicted that a general use of the technique could eliminate the dreaded scourge from the earth. He was right, although the goal was not achieved until the late 1970s.
It is for his historical works, not his political or medical contributions, that Ramsay is best known today. He wrote some of the earliest histories of the American Revolution. In 1785 he published a detailed History of the Revolution of South Carolina. It describes many events he was witness to or a participant in.
He followed with History of the American Revolution (1789) and History of South Carolina (1809). A History of the United States appeared in 1816-1817, shortly after his unexpected and unusual death. In these works he took an increasingly nationalist position. [Image: David Ramsay in mid-life, by Rembrandt Peale]
In 1815, Charleston's legal authorities asked Ramsay to examine William Linnen, a tailor who had tried to murder his lawyer. Ramsay reported that Linnen was deranged and dangerous, but not guilty of a crime due to his mental condition. In making this claim, Ramsay was aligning himself with medical and legal ideas that were as yet not widely accepted.
When Linnen appeared to have regained his sanity, the authorities released him. Linnen threatened Ramsay for calling him a madman, but Ramsay did not take the threat seriously. On May 6, 1815, Linnen approached Ramsay on Broad Street, pulled out a pistol and shot him twice.
Onlookers carried Ramsay to his home, where he died two days later, insisting to the last that Linnen was "a lunatic free from guilt." Ramsay was buried in the Charleston's Circular Congregational Church.
Ramsay was the first American politician to be assassinated, but many more would face the same fate, as America pursued its love affair with the gun.
Further Reading:
Arthur Shaffer, To Be an American: David Ramsay and the Making of the America Consciousness, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014.
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