The man who would become the most emphatic critic of Darwinian theory in America had been born in Switzerland, the son of a strict provincial pastor. By age twenty-five Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz had clinched his reputation in Europe as a foremost ichthyologist, learning more about fish than anyone else in the world. Next he developed the Ice Age theory, arguing that the Earth had undergone repeated periods of glaciation: long frozen eras in which much of the Earth was covered in ice. During these periods, he said, entire families of plants and animals had been wiped from the face of the Earth while sublime marvels such as the Swiss Alps had been created.
By 1846, when he visited America on a lecture tour, Agassiz was no longer a productive scientist so much as an iconic representation of what science looked like. Witty and spellbinding, he lectured to workingmen’s associations, lyceums, and women’s salons about the wonders of nature. To a nation hungry for self-improvement, he brought recent scientific discoveries thrillingly to life. On the basis of these qualities, Harvard hired him, and by 1860 he was in the process of consolidating his formidable scientific reputation with an ambitious museum of comparative zoology. From the Commonwealth of Massachusetts he had extracted an unprecedented gift of $100,000 (well over $2 million in today’s money), and the first floor of the new building on Oxford Street had just been completed. As he enjoyed explaining to potential donors, visitors would soon enter the museum through its impressive pillared portico and step into a spacious hall that revealed nothing less than the Great Plan of Nature herself. (Agassiz tended to speak in capital letters.) Eschewing traditional natural history cabinets, the museum would strive for unprecedented transparency in the arrangement of its collections. One wall would display the radiata—symmetrically identical animals such as starfish and sea urchins—while another would reveal the lower vertebrates, including birds and reptiles. The lower creatures would lead ineluctably to the Mammalia, the highest type of animal, Agassiz explained, “to which we ourselves belong.” Although not yet completed, the exhibition hall would eventually culminate in a display “of men, skulls, skeletons, &c., for the study of the human races.”
Agassiz’s museum was predicated on the idea that science was nothing less than the study of God’s creation. The universe was harmonious, unified, and governed by elegant laws. It was radiant with moral and aesthetic beauty. The Creator had stocked Earth with a delightful assortment of plant and animal species, each fashioned for its particular niche in the environment, each distinct and unlike any other. If the naturalist’s job was to collect and describe these species, to catalog their wondrous diversity, such a task was in the service of a much nobler object. Agassiz studied nature because it revealed “the free conception of the Almighty Intellect, matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible external forms.”
He did not originate the concept of special creation—the idea that God had made each plant and animal species separately and distributed them across the planet according to divine logic. Nor was he the first to proclaim that species were therefore incapable of change. But Agassiz was far and away the most influential scientist to advocate for these ideas, arguing that every plant and animal had been meticulously fashioned by a divine providence and placed in a special “zone” for which it was perfectly suited. This was why koala bears are not found in the woods of Vermont or whales in Lake Michigan. This was why tropical plants are so admirably matched to the humid environment in which they flourish.
Agassiz’s special creationism was encouraged by his mentor, the great classificatory naturalist Georges Cuvier, but it also owed a debt to his father’s religious teachings and, especially, to the German idealism that had inspired his youth. Early nineteenth-century thinkers such as Fichte and Schiller had asserted that God was the first and final reality. For them, the universe was a model of His mind. God had merely to conceive of stars or mammals or algae, and these things sprang into existence. Humans were unlike all other living things because they alone had been endowed with the capacity to appreciate the divine intelligence animating nature. Gray once tried to describe Agassiz’s thinking in the following way: “There is order in the universe; that order presupposes mind; design, will; and mind or will, personality.”
All this was enormously popular in Agassiz’s adopted country, where it neatly corresponded to the reigning American philosophy of the day, transcendentalism. Agassiz preferred to discuss scientific matters with Emerson rather than with anyone in his own profession, and he agreed wholeheartedly with Emerson’s idea that “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present.” As he never tired of repeating, in a phrase that might have appeared in some transcendentalist manifesto, the “study of nature is intercourse with the Highest Mind.”
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In 1846, when Agassiz first arrived in America to deliver the Lowell Lectures in Boston, Asa Gray had served as his cicerone to the American scientific community, escorting him to Princeton, Philadelphia, and Washington. “He is a fine, pleasant fellow,” Gray gushed to a friend, describing Agassiz’s course of lectures as rich in learning and “planned on a very high ground.” Back in Cambridge, where he was soon hired to direct Harvard’s new Lawrence Scientific School, Agassiz paid regular visits to Gray’s botanical gardens, perusing his colleague’s herbarium while he puffed on his ubiquitous cigar. He is “a good genial fellow,” Gray repeated a year or so later—but this time he hinted at troubles to come. The two had evidently disagreed over some matter of botanical evidence. Agassiz, Gray wrote, “bears contradicting as well as—could be expected.”
The tension between the two men was personal and professional. Agassiz was vivid and electrifying in the lecture hall, an extrovert who liked nothing so well as to speak to large, appreciative audiences. Gray was jealous of Agassiz’s charisma, but he also distrusted the man’s easy popularization of science. He complained that his colleague “is always writing and talking ad populum—fond of addressing himself to an incompetent tribunal.” In his opinion, Agassiz exaggerated, simplified, and otherwise cut corners in order to entertain a nonprofessional audience.
Gray thought Agassiz’s need for acclaim compromised his science. His early successes had been grounded in close observation—in the minute examination of fins and scales and prehistoric teeth, or of the jagged scoriae slicing through the alpine granite of his native country. Back then, hypothesis and observation had worked in delicate, contrapuntal relationship: ideas tested by experience and experience made comprehensible by ideas. But this supple habit of thought had apparently disappeared the moment Agassiz stepped onto the pier at Boston Harbor and began to cultivate his American reputation. He continued to catalog an ever-growing inventory of animal species—he even published a book or article now and then—but he no longer developed working hypotheses. His thinking had entered an ice age of its own: old ideas frozen in a kind of mental permafrost that hadn’t thawed in decades.
If Gray was jealous of Agassiz’s museum of comparative science, he also believed the institution had been conceived upon obsolete premises. Agassiz assumed his museum presented the architecture of creation. It was a museum of God’s thoughts. And because God did not make mistakes, each indigenous species displayed in the museum was understood to be immutable. Gray believed this was factually incorrect. He had catalogued too many plant varieties to think each was separate and fixed. Sedges, mosses, and wildflowers exhibited countless varieties, one grading into the next. Present several botanists with the same evidence, and you would find them incapable of agreeing where one species stopped and another began.
Gray was especially disturbed by Agassiz’s tendency to apply the logic of special creation to humans, which is another way of saying he was disturbed by the man’s politics. Agassiz claimed that each race had been created independently in the zone best suited for it. White people were formed in eastern Europe, Native Americans in the western hemisphere, blacks in Africa. Surely this separate creation implied a hierarchy. God had placed blacks and whites, brown-skinned and yellow-skinned peoples in various locations for a reason, Agassiz argued, and in the process He had ranked them by their development. This argument made Agassiz not only the premier American scientist of his time—it also made him the nation’s premier polygenist.
Ethnology—or the study of the origins, languages, and customs of various peoples—had arisen as a scholarly discipline in the late eighteenth century in response to the baffling diversity of peoples encountered by European explorers and merchants during the era of global expansion. American practitioners began to advance the discipline in the 1830s. A correspondent for the Methodist Review neatly summed up the science’s core issue in 1844: “In surveying the globe in reference to the different appearances of mankind, the most extraordinary diversities are apparent to the most superficial observer.” Two questions therefore presented themselves: “Have all these diverse races descended from a single stock? Or, on the other hand, Have the different races of mankind, from the beginning of their existence, differed from one another in their physical, moral, and intellectual nature?” These questions conflated the protocols of science with the received tradition of religion. For if every human descended from Adam and Eve, why were there now so many physical differences among them? What events and natural forces had caused them to diversify to such a striking degree? On the other hand, if human races had been created separately, as Agassiz and others claimed, did this nullify the Genesis account of human origins?
None of these speculations were wholly dispassionate. In America, ethnology would always be bound up with the question of slavery. As the New York Times put it, the new science could “hardly be dated beyond the present century” in America, but it had quickly become a flashpoint in the slavery debate, feeding the “volcanic fires smouldering below unconscious feet.” Most American ethnologists believed that blacks had been separately created in Africa and endowed with lesser intellectual capacities than whites. (Caucasian was the preferred term for the latter, coined by a German ethnologist named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the mistaken belief that whites had originated near the Caucasus Mountains.) The differences presumed to exist between the races were copiously catalogued and illustrated in books that claimed the new authority of science.
Not everyone agreed with the separate creation model. Some scholars argued that humans were pliable, changeable, capable of extraordinary adaptations. They had sprung from a common ancestor and diversified over time. Advocates of this idea came to be known as monogenists, a term coined in 1857 to mean “advocates of a single origin.” For the monogenists, the differences among races—in hair texture and skin color, for instance—were merely superficial variations. They did nothing to undermine the deep connection linking all people, a view that had the benefit of squaring with the traditional Christian belief that humanity had sprung from a single pair in the Garden of Eden. Monogenism received its first significant articulation by the British physician and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard, whose Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1813) went through numerous editions over the first half of the nineteenth century and was eventually expanded into a five-volume treatise. According to Prichard, blacks and whites, Malays and Eskimos had all emerged from the same primal stock and were made in “the likeness of the Creator.” In his opinion, “mankind constitute but one race or proceed from a single family.” Physical differences were merely the products of “natural causes” such as climate, environment, and the availability of food “on a race originally uniform.” Prichard believed the oldest human civilization was that of Egypt and therefore concluded that the human race had originated in Africa. In his most controversial statement, he argued that the original, “primitive stock of men were Negroes.”
These ideas were eclipsed by the middle of the nineteenth century, however, by a handful of American ethnologists who came to be known as polygenists. Their version of human origins crystallized in the 1840s, when the Nashville physician Charles Caldwell composed his Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race. Caldwell was the founder of the University of Louisville and an expert on fever and pestilential diseases. He also owned slaves. “We have no great objection to the theory which maintains, that each species, or distinctive and incommutable race of men, is the progeny of a single pair,” he wrote. But he believed that whites and blacks were two separate and distinct species. Caldwell was equating race with species—a common error of the period—but it was a strategic mistake, allowing him to speculate that God had created exactly four categories of people: Caucasian, Mongolian, African, and American Indian. Each group was indelibly marked by distinct traits and attributes that implied an equally indelible and distinct hierarchy. One had only to examine an African male to see that his stomach was rounder, his blood darker, his penis larger—circumstances, Caldwell insisted, that placed him lower on the scale of human development and tended to “assimilate him . . . to the male ape.”
At its most pernicious, polygenetic theory was an argument that removed people of African descent from the category of the human. Which isn’t to say that monogenists were free from racism. Many who believed in a common origin for all people nevertheless assumed that blacks were a degenerate offshoot of the human family begun with Adam and Eve. But polygenists abandoned scriptural accounts entirely and depicted their conclusions as empirical fact. Samuel G. Morton, the Philadelphia physician who amassed a collection of some one thousand skulls from around the world and carefully measured and categorized them by race, claimed to prove the superiority of whites through the statistical analysis of cranial capacity. (His entire project was based on a false assumption. Variant brain size in humans actually has no correlation with intelligence.) The Mobile, Alabama, physician Josiah Nott and the English-born Egyptologist George Gliddon carried Morton’s findings even further in their monumental Types of Mankind, a richly illustrated eight-hundred-page work published in 1854.
All these thinkers claimed to be advancing objectively verifiable knowledge, but they were not at times above appealing to the emotions; Nott asked readers to “Look first upon the Caucasian female, with her rose and lily skin, silky hair, Venus form, and well chiseled features—and then upon the African wench, with her black and odorous skin, woolly head and animal features.” Typically, however, the racist conclusions espoused by polygenism were cloaked in the rhetoric of a neutral and disinterested science. As one ethnologist wrote, “It has been charged upon the views here advanced that they tend to the support of slavery. . . . Is that a fair objection to a philosophical investigation?” The author was Louis Agassiz.
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No one understood the ramifications of Agassiz’s polygenism better than Frederick Douglass. On a sweltering day in July 1854, Douglass gave a commencement address at Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio. This in itself was remarkable: black people in antebellum America were not invited to speak to graduating white students. Perhaps for this reason Douglass chose not to give one of his famous barn-burning abolitionist speeches (which was why the student body had invited him in the first place). He delivered instead a scholarly treatise entitled “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered.”
One of the era’s greatest orators and a spellbinding storyteller, Douglass was easily the most famous black man in America. In a series of vivid and riveting autobiographies, he had described his hard-fought rise from slavery to freedom, suggesting that his story might one day be taken as a blueprint for black emancipation. Central to that narrative was his encounter, at age sixteen, with a “negro-breaker” named Edward Covey, who repeatedly beat and humiliated the young man until finally he “resolved to fight.” For Douglass, this battle “was the turning point in my career as a slave.” It structured his understanding of race relations in the United States, shaped his belief that slavery was a form of warfare enacted by one race upon another. Convinced that abolition could not be accomplished through moral suasion or legislative maneuvering alone, Douglass argued that life was struggle, that freedom had to be secured through resistance, conflict, and a fierce effort in which one’s very being was risked but in which the slave might achieve “manhood,” self-respect, and survival.
Accordingly, he began his commencement address in Ohio by describing the ideological struggle dividing the nation. “The relation subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the vital question of the age,” he declared. “To the lawyer, the preacher, the politician, and to the man of letters, there is no neutral ground.” Waving a copy of the Richmond Examiner before his audience, he read an excerpt from the Southern paper that exposed the moral depravity of those who supported slavery. According to the article, no slave could claim legal or moral rights—“BECAUSE HE IS NOT A MAN!”
There was nothing particularly new in this assertion. The supposed bestial and subhuman qualities of Africans had been used to justify slavery since its very beginnings. In 1787 the German historian Christoph Meiners was merely repeating an accepted commonplace when he declared that blacks had “no human, barely any animal feeling.” What troubled Douglass, however, was the way pro-slavery activists now were using science to advance this claim. “It is remarkable—nay, it is strange,” he said, “that there should arise a phalanx of learned men—speaking in the name of science—to forbid the magnificent reunion of mankind in one brotherhood.”
Douglass had in mind people like Samuel G. Morton, Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon. But he was most concerned by Louis Agassiz, who seemed to believe God had fashioned whites for “higher things”: for culture and Beethoven and classificatory schemata of the natural world. In his commencement address Douglass disputed “the Notts, the Gliddens [sic], the Agassiz, and Mortons,” asserting that “what are technically called the negro race, are a part of the human family, and are descended from a common ancestry, with the rest of mankind.” Humanity’s shared inheritance not only reflected “most glory upon the wisdom, power, and goodness of the Author of all existence.” It also fulfilled scripture. “The unity of the human race—the brotherhood of man—the reciprocal duties of all to each, and of each to all, are too plainly taught in the Bible to admit of cavil.”
The problem, Douglass saw, was that the new “science” resisted moral arguments. It claimed to concern itself solely with facts and experience. Douglass argued that science was never pure, never entirely innocent of self-interested manipulation. Slavery was in truth “at the bottom of the whole controversy” over ethnology, and the debate between polygenists and monogenists was really a proxy battle “between the slaveholders on the one hand, and the abolitionists on the other.” Indeed, the polygenists repeatedly disclosed their ideological commitments by distorting the very evidence they declared was neutral. Agassiz and the other scientists consistently “separate the negro race from every intelligent nation and tribe in Africa.” (Douglass was thinking principally of Egypt.) And their ethnological manuals typically presented European faces “in harmony with the highest ideas of beauty,” while the “negro, on the other hand, appears with features distorted, lips exaggerated, forehead depressed.” It was clear that these so-called scientists had “staked out the ground beforehand, and that they have aimed to construct a theory in support of a foregone conclusion.”
What troubled Douglass most about the polygenist theory was the way it provided scientific legitimacy to the malicious practice of equating black people with animals. The black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet condemned the animalization of black people when he argued that slaveholders “endeavor to make you as much brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind—when they have embittered the sweet waters of the light which shines from the word of God—then, and not till then has American slavery done its perfect work.” The prominent American abolitionist Theodore Wright Weld similarly observed, “The same terms are applied to slaves that are given to cattle. They are called ‘stock’” and “female slaves that are mothers, are called ‘breeders’ till past child bearing.” On the auction block, slaves were treated like cattle, pigs, horses: their muscles prodded, their mouths pried open, their sexual organs inspected before crowds of spectators.
The psychological toll of such treatment is almost impossible to imagine. Sarah Grimké, a white abolitionist writer raised among slaves in South Carolina, believed anyone who had suffered physical pain could conceive “the nakedness of some [slaves], the hungry yearnings of others, the wailing and wo[e], the bloody cut of the keen lash, and the frightful scream that rends the very skies.” Much more difficult to comprehend was the effect of slavery upon one’s personhood—one’s soul. According to Grimké, the institution transformed a slave into “a thing, a chattel personal, a machine to be used to all intents and purposes for the benefit of another. . . . It would annihilate the individual worth and responsibility conferred upon many by his Creator.”
Treating slaves like animals enabled slave owners to justify depriving their human property of the basic rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. While generalizations can be misleading—in 1844 a Kentucky judge declared, “A slave is not in the condition of a horse. . . . He is made after the image of the Creator. He has mental capacities, and an immortal principle in his nature”—the tendency to depict slaves as subhumans or as animals nevertheless became pervasive in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was bolstered by ethnologists who claimed that black people were a separate race or species, closer to animals, especially primates, and therefore possessing little in common with their white masters. No less an authority than Louis Agassiz enjoyed musing over the relationship between blacks and animals. “[Is it] not a little remarkable,” he asked, “that the black orang occurs upon that continent which is inhabited by the black human race, whilst the brown orang inhabits those parts of Asia over which the chocolate-colored Malays have been developed[?]”
Douglass responded with thunderous anger. “Man is distinguished from all other animals,” he exhorted his Ohio audience, “by the possession of certain definite faculties and powers, as well as by physical organization and proportions. He is the only two-handed animal on the earth—the only one that laughs, and nearly the only one that weeps.” Human beings instinctively distinguished themselves from other animals, instinctively placed themselves above all other creatures. “Common sense itself is scarcely needed to detect the absence of manhood in a monkey, or to recognize its presence in a negro.”
It is not exactly clear when Douglass first encountered Darwin’s Origin of Species or whether he read it in any detail. He certainly became familiar with its arguments and would eventually adopt them in his attacks on scientific racism. In an 1864 lecture written at the height of the Civil War, he derided “a certain class of ethnologists and archeologists, more numerous in our country a few years ago than now and more numerous now than they ought to be and will be when slavery shall have no further need of them.” The reference suggests how quickly Darwin’s theory of common ancestry weakened the argument for the separate creation of human races. But if Douglass embraced Darwin’s vision of common inheritance, he consistently evaded that portion of evolutionary theory that linked human beings to nonhuman species.
In 1854, as he concluded his commencement address at Western Reserve College, he indicated why this aspect of Darwinian theory would seem so odious. “Away, therefore, with all the scientific moonshine that would connect men with monkeys,” he told the Ohio graduates, “that would have the world believe that humanity, instead of resting on its own characteristic pedestal—gloriously independent—is a sort of sliding scale, making one extreme brother to the ourang-ou-tang, and the other to angels, and all the rest intermediates!”