Acting Assistant Surgeon John H. Rapier, Jr.
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
John H. Rapier, Jr., was born in Florence, Alabama to free Black parents Susan and John Rapier, Sr. By 1860, his father was one of the wealthiest free Blacks in Alabama. The family made every effort to financially provide for their children’s education. Rapier, Jr.’s mother died in the late 1830s, so his father decided to send him and his brothers to stay with their grandmother, Sally Thomas, in Nashville, where the boys attended school.
Sally Thomas, born into slavery in 1790 in Virginia, grew up on a 1500-acre tobacco plantation owned by Charles S. Thomas. John Thomas, Charles’ son, is believed to be the father of Sally’s two sons, John, Sr. and Henry. (Sally herself was a child of miscegenation). Around 1818, John Thomas joined the westward movement of slaveholders across the Appalachians and settled in Nashville, bringing with him Sally and her two sons.
In Nashville, Sally managed to live a quasi-independent life there. John Thomas allowed her to hire out as a cleaning woman as long as she gave him part of her earnings. She rented a two-story frame house at the corner of Cherry (4th) and Deaderick Streets from which she ran a laundry business and a boarding house. Her businesses were 2 ½ blocks from Adelicia Acklen’s Cherry Street house. Sally also arranged for her sons to be hired out – John as a waiter and poleman on a river barge, Henry as an errand boy. With their earnings, she hoped to one day purchase “free papers” for her children.
In 1827, Sally gave birth to another son, James P. Thomas. His father was reportedly one of his mother’s boarders, John Catron, who would become a U.S. Supreme Court judge. Under state law children of enslaved women remained in bondage, regardless of the father’s status.
During this period, Nashville had a significant population of free Blacks. By 1833, this community had grown large enough to start the first school for Blacks in the city. That school educated 200 students before it closed in 1836 due to white suspicions that the school’s leader, a Black barber named Alphonso M. Sumner, was assisting runaway slaves. Undeterred by the situation, a group of free Blacks petitioned the state of Tennessee for permission to open a private school, which was granted with the stipulation that the school be run by a white person. The community then hired John Yandle to lead the school. Sarah Porter Player and Daniel Wadkins, a Black minister who had taught at Sumner’s school, assisted him. Eventually Yandle quit, leading Wadkins and Player to each open their own schools, which operated out of private homes and rented buildings. Both schools closed in 1856 when Nashville banned all Black educational institutions.
John Rapier., Jr. attended one of these schools with his uncle James Thomas. The rudimentary education John received here paved the way for his higher education and future career. In the end, it was not Nashville laws that ended Rapier Jr.’s education in the city, but his grandmother’s death due to cholera in 1850. He travelled back to Alabama to live with his father, but he would not remain there long.
Throughout his young adult years, Rapier, Jr. traveled extensively, believing that he could not find true liberty in the US. He followed William Walker to Nicaragua with the hope that Walker would liberate the country. He soon discovered Walker’s true intension was an expansion of slavery into Central America. He abandoned Walker’s project and went to Kingston, Jamaica, where he studied dentistry with a Canadian dentist, Dr. William Beckett. With this experience in hand, Rapier returned to the United States to continue his education. He started at Oberlin College in Ohio, but the school did not offer a medical program so he set his sights on the University of Michigan. However in 1860, Michigan did not admit Black students. Always careful in crafting his social interactions to his advantage, Rapier Jr. used his observations on racism to present himself as a mixed-race man from Kingston, Jamaica. He arrived in Ann Arbor on October 1, 1863 and enrolled in that academic year. That likely would not have happened if he presented himself as a Black U.S. citizen. Due to stress-related illnesses and community hostility, he departed Ann Arbor for Keokuk Medical College, also known as Iowa College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he completed his medical degree in 1864.
After some difficulty, he managed to get an Army Commission as a contract surgeon. Rapier then began work at the US Army Contraband Hospital (later the Freedman’s Hospital) in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1864. He joined the staff of Dr. Alexander T. Augusta, who was the Black surgeon in charge of the hospital and held the rank of major in the U.S. Army. Rapier remained in Washington D.C. until his death in 1865 at the age of 30. He was one of only 14 Black men known to serve as a surgeon in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.
Bibliography
DeGregory, Crystal A. “Nashville’s Clandestine Black Schools”. The New York Times. 2015.
Hoobler, James. “Sally Thomas, 1787-1580”. Monuments & Milestones. Nashville City Cemetery Association. Vol. 5 No. 1, Spring/Summer, 2009.
Lovett, Bobby L. The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930. University of Arkansas Press, 1999.
"Rapier, John H., Jr." Notable Black American Men, Book II. Encyclopedia.com. (February 2, 2026). https://www.encyclopedia.com/african-american-focus/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/rapier-john-h-jr
Schopieray, Cheney J. “Col[ore]d Men are not Admitted Here”. African American Student Project University of Michigan. March 9, 2022.
Schweninger, Loren. “A Slave Family in the Ante-Bellum South”. Journal of Negro History. Vol. 60. January, 1975.