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3 Friend of Human Liberty
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friend of human liberty 29 chapter three Friend of Human Liberty t At the beginning of 1790, Benjamin Harrison took his sixteen-year-old son out of Millfield and launched him into an inexpensive, second-class preparation for a career in medicine. The Reverend Burges’s school, like most one-man schools in Virginia, had no set list of requirements and awarded no degrees. Boys studied the ordinary texts in classics and mathematics until their fathers or guardians judged that they had made enough progress to go on to the next step. This Colonel Harrison did in 1790. Virginia planters who wanted their sons to practice medicine had a variety of options for preparing them for that career. Most prestigious was study in Europe, in either Edinburgh or Paris, but this was a choice available only to young men who had graduated from a college and were fluent in French or Latin. An attractive alternative was study at one of the medical institutions in Philadelphia; every year a handful of young Virginians commenced their training there. Lowest in prestige, though not necessarily in quality, was becoming an apprentice to a local practitioner.1 Colonel Harrison, conscious of his family’s standing, undoubtedly would have preferred one of the first two options; that he chose instead to apprentice Billy to a local doctor merely confirms what he had been saying for several years, that he was in desperate financial straits. Even before the war, Benjamin Harrison had been in debt from reckless spending. In Philadelphia at the Continental Congress, he had borrowed heavily from the merchant Thomas Willing, the brother of his Virginia neighbor 29 Booraem text.indb 29 5/22/12 1:53 PM 30 a child of the revolution Mary Willing Byrd, to cover his expenses. As governor of Virginia, he had been unable to devote enough attention to his property, ruined by British raids, to restore it to working order. By 1786, with his debt to Willing and associated lawsuits hanging over him, Harrison was facing, he told a friend, “the ruin of myself and family, let me do what I can.” As the situation dragged on, Colonel Harrison offered various pieces of his property, including part of Berkeley, for sale, but found no takers. By 1789, Willing was out of patience. “It now embarrasses me much,” he wrote to Alexander Donald of Richmond, “to be kept longer out of Money wh I have so long paid on this Gentlemans Account—he can’t make me amends for the trouble & anxiety he has given me.” During this same period, the colonel was writing to political friends begging for a job in the new federal government, which he had opposed; “the distresses brought upon me by the ravages of the British,” he wrote Charles Carroll of Maryland, “and the great fall of landed property here, have reduced me so low, that some prop is necessary for the support of a numerous family.” By “family,” he meant, as any James River planter would, his slaves and employees as well as his blood kin.2 Billy, acquainted with his family’s money problems, must have been aware that the training contemplated for him was second-rate by Virginia standards. Indeed, one could call it third-rate. The doctor who was to be his teacher was not even the leading physician in Richmond; that would have been William Foushee, a popular, elegant man who was active in the town government. Next in prominence were two Edinburgh graduates, James McClurg and James Currie, both in their early forties; then Andrew Leiper, an unmarried Scot around forty who had come to America as a young man and studied with Rush. It was Leiper who was to be Billy’s master.3 No evidence remains to indicate how Billy felt about this choice, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that he compared his opportunities with those given to his older brothers before the war and realized the comparative shabbiness of his treatment. Ben and Carter Harrison had both graduated from William and Mary College, and Ben had apprenticed in Philadelphia with Robert Morris before opening his own firm in Richmond, while Carter had studied law, it is not certain with whom.4 According to one Richmonder, Leiper was esteemed a good doctor, but his practice does not seem to have included many leading families. He was a public-spirited man and thoroughly professional, not afraid of dirt or danger. In1798 he would serve as...