Fearn was born into a prosperous farming family near Danville, Virginia, on November 15, 1789. Custom dictated that his older brother would inherit the farm, so the second-born Thomas entered into formal schooling early on and pursued a professional career. His academic track included primary school in Danville and then further education at Washington Academy (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, where he graduated in 1806. After deciding on a career in medicine, Fearn left Virginia to study in Philadelphia, where he graduated from the Old Medical College in 1810. Degree in hand, he immediately headed to the Mississippi Territory—a region that would later form the states of Mississippi and Alabama. Recent federal land sales there drew thousands of new immigrant families who would need the services of qualified physicians.
Fearn stopped in the village of Huntsville, the seat of newly created Madison County. Whether he intended to stay permanently in this growing village is unknown. Many doctors of this era moved from town to town, relocating often as they tried to find communities that had the right combination of paying patients and treatable diseases, making their practices worthwhile. In any event, Fearn did settle in Huntsville.
Once Fearn became established in town, his practice and reputation grew rapidly. In July 1811, he formed a medical partnership with another doctor, John McGhee. Over the next eighteen months the partnership treated over one hundred families, a number that represented more than half the town’s population. Fearn’s rates were typical of the times: he charged $5.25 for a 24-hour visit, $8.25 for a 36-hour visit, and $4.25 to spend the night. He billed Josea Wheat twenty-five cents for a vial of elixir and charged fifty cents for pulling George Worley’s sore tooth. When future Alabama governor Clement C. Clay stopped in for a consultation about an unspecified complaint, Fearn gave him two opium pills and a bill for $5.25. During particularly trying times—such as July of 1811, when many residents suffered from illness—Fearn spent many nights away from home attending to the treatment of patients.
Fearn’s medical journal also reveals that over time he became interested in setting up longer-term arrangements with patients. In May 1812, he was put on a retainer by the Benjamin Cash family, who paid him a fee of twenty dollars so that he would be available to them at all times, day or night. The next month, Fearn arranged to care for two slaves owned by Thomas Brandon for a charge of twenty dollars, and the doctor noted that he “looked to be paid when they are cured.” After a year and half, Fearn and his partner had a respectable practice that treated many of Huntsville’s most prominent citizens, and during this time the partnership collected a total of $1,358.37 in fees.
Fearn’s medical practice was put on hold in 1813 when he and others from Huntsville joined Gen. Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee army in a series of campaigns against a warring faction of the Creek tribe. These battles were one part of the War of 1812, a war with Britain to secure American hegemony in North America and to tie up loose ends from the American Revolution. Fearn served as a chief surgeon for Jackson. When the doctor left the battlefield in March 1814, Jackson gave Fearn responsibility for managing the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers in Huntsville. He ordered Fearn to “take charge of the Hospital of Huntsville,” which was set up at the home of LeRoy Pope, and make certain that “all the sick and wounded of the army are…attended by you.”
Two weeks after this letter, Jackson and his army attacked the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend and effectively ended the Creek War. The same week, Fearn published an advertisement in Huntsville’s Madison Gazette letting his patients know that he was home and back in business: “Doctor T. Fearn returns his grateful acknowledgement to his friends for their patronage, and informs them and the public that he may be found at his former residence and at all times prepared to attend to the business of his profession.”
The Creek War established Fearn as the leading physician in Huntsville, but he was restless to improve his medical and surgical skills. A few years after his return from the war, the doctor decided to travel to Europe to further hone his talents. By the summer of 1818, he was studying in London, and weeks later, he moved on to Paris to study medicine once more. At this time Paris was in the process of becoming the preferred location of study for ambitious doctors who had the means to afford international travel, and three factors made the French city a coveted destination for surgeons in training. First, the city had over twelve hospitals and thousands of hospital beds, an environment that was unmatched in America or anywhere else. Paris also had the leading surgeon of the day, Guillaume Dupuytren, who performed over two thousand surgeries per year, almost always in front of a room of awe-struck colleagues. Additionally, Paris was a good choice for Fearn because, after twenty-five years of almost constant war, France was a nation filled with disabled citizens who supplied a constant source of experimental surgeries for Dupuytren and others.
Fearn, arriving in Paris in 1818 as one of the hundreds of American physicians training there during the antebellum period, found that working under Dupuytren was an invigorating, informative, but at times horrifying experience. The Alabama doctor’s most frequent complaint dealt with the manner in which his mentor casually experimented on patients without regard to their pain or suffering. On December 31, 1818, Fearn noted in his journal that “the practice of Mr. Dupuytren in this as in most other cases appears unsettled; he is experimenting either to satisfy himself or for the instruction of his pupils. One day in similar cases he adopts one plan and the next another.” Sometimes Dupuytren’s experimentation had lethal consequences. Fearn witnessed a woman admitted with “a severe, extensive, and possibly gangrenous wound to one of her limbs.” The wound was so severe Fearn believed there was no “hope of recovery without amputation.” But instead of removing the leg, Dupuytren insisted on attempting an innovative procedure, which had a disastrous consequence. “My ideas have proven correct for the attempt to save the limb has cost her life,” Fearn wrote later.
As his public career blossomed, so too did his family. In 1822 Fearn married Sallie Shelby, the daughter of a Tennessee planter. The union was a smart match: Sallie brought assets into the relationship and boosted Fearn’s overall economic standing. It proved fruitful in other ways as the pair produced seven girls (plus four other children who did not survive infancy). Also during this period Fearn’s family in Virginia moved to Huntsville. First his brother Robert moved to Alabama, and he was soon followed by brothers George and Richard, along with their mother. Robert and George were frequent partners with Dr. Fearn in real estate and business deals, while Richard became a leading physician in Mobile. Thomas Fearn, whose one older brother passed away years before, was now patriarch of one of Alabama’s most prominent clans.
Locally, Fearn maintained a thriving medical practice. The town benefitted from Fearn’s good name and his willingness to teach and train new physicians. A contemporary to Fearn, Dr. John Young Bassett, commented that “the influence of this gentleman’s reputation upon the profession was favorable to…physicians in the neighborhood, many of whom he had been directly instrumental in educating.” In 1835 Fearn expanded his home on Franklin Street by adding a wing with a separate entrance that he used for his practice, and his records from that year show that he was a cautious and deliberate surgeon. On March 25 he operated on a young boy named John, “the son of Joseph Clarke of this place,” in order to remove a stone that was causing the boy considerable pain. He detailed the procedure in his medical journal: “Incision into the neck of the bladder admitted the forefinger and the stone was felt. The smallest forceps, however, could not be introduced without more force than I thought prudent to use.” While fundamentally conservative as a surgeon, Fearn tended to be more aggressive when dealing with diseases. Fearn was one of the first practitioners to notice the remedial powers of quinine in dealing with malaria, although Dr. Bassett claimed that in at least five or six cases Fearn’s quinine treatments led to cases of night blindness caused by overly large doses.
For reasons that are a bit mysterious, Fearn had stopped practicing medicine by 1840. He left no record of the reasons for this decision, but his well-documented life offers several clues. Even though Fearn was an exceptional physician, he was also in some ways typical of other antebellum professionals. Most professional men learned early that you could not get rich practicing medicine or law, and so they actively pursued careers outside their profession. Marion Sims, a Montgomery physician who is controversially referred to as the “Father of American Gynecology” due to his experimental surgeries on female slaves, wrote that, even after he had become “tolerably successful” in medicine, he “was really ready, at any time and at any moment, to take up anything that offered, or that held out an inducement of fortune,” because he knew that he “could never make a fortune out of the practice of medicine.” In fact Sims did quit medicine to take on a partnership role in a new clothing house in Mississippi, only to return to practice when the deal fell through. Likewise, Fearn’s son-in-law Matthew Steele trained to be a lawyer, but he soon quit. He thought law to be “a laborious and beggaring profession,” and he began to work as a commission agent, stating, “The great object of my wishes is now to be at work, and working in such a manner as will render me comfortable and independent.”
Like many professionals, Fearn had always taken interest in commercial ventures. In 1816 he was appointed a trustee for Huntsville’s Planters and Merchants Bank, a position he had to resign when he left for Europe. Soon after returning from Paris, Fearn took part in his first public works project, which involved digging a canal from Huntsville’s Big Spring to the Tennessee River. Fearn’s financial contributions and his persistence in seeing the work through to its completion, despite years of setbacks, led many to refer to the project as Fearn’s Canal. Fearn and his brother George also took over the town’s dilapidated water works system and had it completely rebuilt. The Huntsville Water Works was one of the first public water systems west of the Appalachian Mountains and the first one in Alabama. In 1858 Fearn sold the system to the city for $10,000 cash and the promise of a lifetime of free water for his home on Franklin Street. Both the canal and water works projects were major capital investments for Fearn, and he happily dedicated much time to the endeavors.
Fearn’s new career path was more than simply a desire for personal financial enrichment, however. The death of his beloved wife Sallie in 1842 undoubtedly gave him a new focus. From that moment on, Fearn devoted himself obsessively to the advancement of his seven daughters by making sure they received the best education, had the fi nest clothes, and experienced all the good things that life had to offer the family of an upper-class southern gentleman. Raising seven southern belles in the late antebellum period cost money, so Fearn understandably focused on the more lucrative opportunities available through agriculture. Even so, the transition away from medicine did not change the way the community viewed him. Fearn was forever known in Huntsville as “Doctor Fearn,” and the 1850 U.S. Census still listed his occupation as physician (although by 1860 that had changed, and Fearn is listed as a planter).
Besides his commission work, Fearn continued to invest his own money in both land and slaves, which, combined, were the principle paths to wealth in antebellum Alabama. In addition to an exquisite home on Franklin Street, which he renovated for a second time in 1848, the doctor owned three other town lots. According to tax records in 1857, the value of this town property was $9,500. Also, Fearn acquired large tracts of land outside Huntsville. He spent considerable time at one of his plantations to the south of the town in an area that is now part of the Redstone Arsenal. Interestingly, he purchased these 160 acres in two installments in 1834 and 1835, at the same time he was adding a medical office onto his Franklin Street home and investing in the water works project. Clearly at that time Fearn felt capable of juggling medicine with public works and agriculture. By the time of the Civil War, his real estate holdings had increased significantly: he now owned 790 acres of plantation property valued at $12,500.
Still, antebellum men in Alabama did not get wealthy off land alone, which was relatively cheap, but they could off of slaves. Before the Thirteenth Amendment forever changed their legal status, slaves were treated as a form of personal property with individual values for adults ranging (generally) from $500 to $1500 depending on age, sex, health, and other factors. By 1860 Fearn had become one of the largest slaveholders in the county. That year’s census listed his wealth as $128,000 in personal property and $46,000 from real estate. Since the vast majority of all personal property was slave holdings, Fearn’s personal property figure indicates that he invested heavily in slave ownership. In the 1859 Madison County Personal Property record book, Fearn was taxed for owning forty-eight slaves. Of these, fourteen lived and worked at his home on Franklin Street. Fearn was also an active buyer and seller of slaves: each census between 1830 and 1860 reveals not just a difference in the total number of slaves, but also differences in distribution in terms of gender and age.
Fearn’s relationship with the institution of slavery was complicated. Although he was born into Virginia’s plantation culture and lived on a farm with nineteen slaves, at some point early in life he developed an aversion to the institution. When studying in Europe Fearn wrote home to Clement Clay that “the evil” of slavery “is admitted by all.” Fearn argued that emancipation could work in Alabama and he pointed to the examples of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New England, all of which were able to farm lands without slave labor. “Altho for a time we might feel some inconvenience, yet if our slaves were freed they would gladly hire themselves as labourers & our fields still continue to be cultivated.” In Fearn’s view all that was needed was the silent plurality of men to openly commit to such a plan. Fearn genuinely believed many would rally to an emancipation scheme modeled after the New England states. He suggested that every descendant of a slave born after a “fixed period” be freed at the age of twenty or even later if “this is thought too oppressive to the holders.”
When he returned from Europe, Fearn continued to work toward emancipation through the American Colonization Society where he served as one of the vice presidents of the Huntsville chapter. As a colonizationist, Fearn believed that the most humane way to end slavery was to export the enslaved back to Africa. This idea resonated with some southerners who believed that slavery was either intrinsically unjust or economically unviable, but who also did not believe that whites and blacks could live together peacefully in a free society. Fearn joined other prominent Huntsville professionals in this movement, including James G. Birney, a lawyer who later ran for president on the Liberty Party ticket in 1840 and 1844. At other times, too, Fearn’s actions suggested a belief in some different way of ordering the South’s laboring class to make the region more egalitarian—and perhaps more profitable. When it came time to dig Fearn’s canal, for example, he employed both slaves and free whites, paying each the same wage.
In retrospect, Fearn’s relationship with slavery remains enigmatic. Whatever his reasons, he became a large slaveholder, and during the Civil War his letters no longer harbored any traces of abolitionist sentiment. “The slavery question,” he wrote to a friend, “although is served to get up the fanaticism of the North and arouse the enmity & hatred of the South, has sunk into secondary consideration.” Rather, Fearn noted that “it is for our trade we are now at war.” That he was part of an eff ort to end slavery just a few decades before makes this statement somewhat ironic.