The Civil War shattered and remade America, destroying the slave culture of the South and killing 720,000 men. It also temporarily obscured an event that was nearly as seminal: the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Like the first mortar shell to land on Fort Sumter, Darwin’s book would produce epochal change and unanticipated aftershocks. It would crash and rumble in expanding circles throughout the nation, disrupting old habits and beliefs, altering cherished ways of thinking, and remaking society. Ultimately the book would do to American intellectual life what the war did to its political, economic, and social spheres: blast it to pieces and then reconsolidate it in new ways.
One copy of the Origin made a disproportionately large impact on American culture. That copy—which today resides at Harvard University—was sent by its author to Asa Gray, a botanist who soon championed the new theory to general and scientific audiences throughout America. Gray passed his heavily annotated book to Charles Loring Brace, a social reformer who seized on the work as a powerful argument against slavery. Brace then introduced the same copy to three remarkable thinkers: Franklin Sanborn, a key supporter of the abolitionist John Brown; Bronson Alcott, the erstwhile philosopher and father of Louisa May; and Henry David Thoreau, who used Darwin’s theory to redirect his life’s work.
Today we think of Darwin’s theory of evolution as the spark that ignited the battle between science and religion. But that notion overlooks the way Darwin’s first American readers encountered it. Antislavery activists eagerly embraced the Origin of Species because they believed the book advanced the cause of abolition. By hinting that all humans were biologically related, Darwin’s work seemed to refute once and for all the idea that African American slaves were a separate, inferior species. In the immediate aftermath of the John Brown affair—which all five of these early American readers of Darwin supported—evolutionary ideas were seen as powerful ammunition in the debate over slavery. Only after they had employed Darwin’s theory of natural selection on behalf of abolitionism did these five thinkers come to discover that it also posed enormous threats to their other beliefs, including their faith in God and their trust that America was a country divinely chosen for the regeneration of the world.
This book is a biography of the single most important idea of the nineteenth century. It is also an account of issues and concerns that are still very much with us, including racism, one of the most intractable problems in American life, and the enduring conflict between science and religion. Ultimately, it is shaped by a notion of its own: that ideas are like the plants and animals in Darwin’s theory of natural selection, shaped by their particular context, thriving or dying as a result of their ability to adapt. This process can be wrenching; it leaves people trapped between two ways of thinking and believing, stranded between two existences. But it also remakes the world.