From slave to surgeon: the heroic journey of Robert M Johnson
Robert Maxwell Johnson escaped enslavement and travelled to Scotland to become a doctor.
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The Victorian medical student might have had a reputation for drinking, playing gruesome hoaxes and seeking questionable forms of entertainment, but sometimes the stereotype did not apply. Robert Maxwell Johnson arrived in Edinburgh from Canada in 1857 with experiences very different from those of the comfortably-off young British man.
Johnson, who was in his early 30s, had escaped slavery in Kentucky and now aimed to become a doctor so that he could work among the black communities in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, where the Underground Railroad had brought them to freedom. Elements of his life story can be pieced together from newspaper reports of lectures he gave to abolitionist meetings in the UK.
Johnson was born in Lexington in around 1825-6. His mother – whose name he gives as Mellissa in one source1 – was an enslaved housekeeper to the Rev James and Mrs Dorothea Fishback. She had been stolen at a young age from what is now South Africa and grown up in Mrs Fishback’s birth family, accompanying her upon her marriage.
Robert Johnson did not realise he was enslaved until he was around eight years old, when he saw a group of black children being driven along and beaten by a slavedriver. He laughed at first, thinking they had been naughty, but his mother set him straight in no uncertain terms and told him the truth – that he was a slave too. From that time, he recognised the injustice of the system and longed for freedom.
‘From the day I knew I was a slave,’ he would later say, ‘until the day I felt I was a free man, life and labour seemed a burden.’2
Without her husband’s knowledge, Dorothea Fishback facilitated Johnson and his siblings learning to read, and Johnson secretly read all he could from Mr Fishback’s library. The reverend did not believe slaves should be educated, but because he assumed Johnson was illiterate, he did not see any threat in allowing him in there. When an abolitionist English gentleman came to live nearby, Mellissa Johnson arranged secret visits so the children could continue their education, and through him they got hold of anti-slavery literature. She felt that sticking with Mrs Fishback was the safest option but counselled her children that, should the lady die, they must be ready to make their escape.
In 1840, Dorothea Fishback did die, and her husband no longer attempted to treat the slaves well. Although Johnson later told British audiences that Fishback’s conduct was ‘perhaps fairer than the most of his slaveholding brethren’, this was all relative, and he describes an occasion when Fishback intended to whip him for some minor transgression. Johnson took the huge risk of physically tackling him, squeezing the reverend’s bulky frame until he ‘appeared as if he were about to have a fit of apoplexy.’ Fortunately, Fishback backed down rather than send Johnson to the chain-gang.3
After this, and the sale of most of his siblings, he resolved to run away, but did not want to leave his heartbroken mother. All the time, he was reading as much as he could and studying maps of the country in preparation for his escape. When Mrs Johnson died, he enlisted the help of an abolitionist friend to contact the Underground Railroad, who helped him get to the Ohio River and – after nerve-racking difficulties in getting a ticket – board a steamer to travel openly as a free ‘coloured gentleman.’4
On board, another passenger regarded him with suspicion, but his mother had taught him always to look people in the eye and not adopt the cowering demeanour expected of a slave. This led to a bystander telling the accuser that he 'never saw a slave look like that,' and Johnson survived the 26-hour journey to Cincinnati, where: ‘In three minutes more, I was on free soil, and was a free man. To describe to you how I felt would be impossible. I cannot do it.’5
He worked in a hotel for several years, studying in the evenings and saving up to continue his education. Although details are not clear, he seems to have had the opportunity to study medicine informally with a local doctor, and attracted the notice of a professor from Cleveland Medical College, who encouraged him to matriculate there.
On his first day, however, he met with violent racial discrimination from other students, who made animal noises and chanted slurs, displaying what Johnson later described as ‘inexcusable low breeding, ignorance and prejudice.’6 The encouraging professor changed his mind and told Johnson to leave, on the spurious grounds that he was suspected of supporting homeopathy.
From there, Johnson went to the Elgin Settlement, an organised black community in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, and became a Methodist minister. He still wanted to study medicine and, in 1857, crossed the Atlantic to Edinburgh, where he received support from Professor Miller of the medical school. In reporting that he had arrived, the Anti-Slavery Bugle stated:
‘The “natural repugnance of distinct races” seems far less active with the Scotch doctors than with their brethren in Ohio.’7
Johnson studied in both Edinburgh and Glasgow over the next few years and in 1863 went to London and passed the examination of the Royal College of Surgeons. He did not register with the GMC as he intended to return to Canada, but ended up staying in the UK until 1870, practising medicine in Sheffield. He married Mary Atkinson and their mixed-race relationship met with muted acceptance from her parents, although her brother objected and left home in protest. He regularly gave anti-slavery lectures at churches and groups around the country, detailing his own experiences and raising funds for his medical mission to the Chatham-Kent settlements.
After the American Civil War, Johnson considered returning to Kentucky to offer his medical services to the freed black people, but ultimately stuck with his original plan of going to Ontario. He, his wife and three children arrived there in 1870.
Johnson’s daughter, Mrs Olive Green, was featured in the Winnipeg Tribune in 1964 on the occasion of her 99th birthday. She remembered how hard things were for her parents in the town of Chatham, where the couple could not go out for a walk together without experiencing verbal abuse.
‘My mother found out what it was like for people of mixed marriage. Neither the blacks nor the whites wanted you.’8
Sadly, Johnson died of pneumonia after just a few months in Canada. His widow trained in tailoring to support the family and never returned to England.
Although Robert Maxwell Johnson is not well known in the history of the abolitionist movement or as a pioneering black doctor, the little we can piece together of his story demonstrates his strength and resilience, and the power of education as a tool for liberation. I hope more information will eventually come to light about the life of this remarkable man.