One day in the summer of 1862 a tall, angular guest peering with blue myopic eyes through thick spectacles appeared at Darwin’s house in Kent, introducing himself with diffident self-confidence. He was happy to make the acquaintance of a man he believed he knew better than most people because he knew the way that man thought. Alfred Russel Wallace never considered Darwin anything but the true originator of the idea of natural selection, the leader in a race in which he had been fortunate to place second. As he told a friend, “Mr Darwin has given the world a new science, and his name should, in my opinion, stand above that of every philosopher of ancient or modern times.” Darwin remained eternally grateful for the Welshman’s generosity and returned the praise whenever he could. “What strikes me most about Mr. Wallace,” he confided, “is the absence of jealousy towards me: he must have a really good honest & noble disposition.”
Both men assiduously followed news from across the Atlantic, where a war of unprecedented scale and lethality raged with no sign of ending. Darwin was especially attuned to the political divisions that had intensified after John Brown’s efforts to inflame a slave rebellion. He agreed with Asa Gray’s enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln, elected president of the United States without a majority vote. Lincoln’s ascendance to the country’s highest office was a direct result of Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry, which had divided Democrats and left them without a viable candidate. During the summer of 1860, while debates over Darwin’s theory reached their apex, America’s pro-slavery press had vilified Lincoln, using his ungainly visage in countless cartoons. Lincoln was portrayed as a suitor of black women or as the missing link between blacks and whites. Sometimes he was even a gorilla (“Ape Lincoln”). In one portrait, Lincoln was described as “Our Next Republican Candidate” whose constituent was none other than P. T. Barnum’s What-Is-It? Leaning on a rail, Lincoln says, “How fortunate! that this intellectual and noble creature should have been discovered just at this time, to prove to the world the superiority of the Colored over the Anglo Saxon race; he will be a worthy successor to carry out the policy which I shall inaugurate.”
After the election the South immediately revolted. Former Democratic president James Buchanan addressed Congress to complain of the “long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States. . . . The different sections of the Union are now arrayed against each other, and the time has arrived, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, when hostile geographical parties have been formed.” Buchanan was referring specifically to a series of rallies held throughout the South in support of secession, but his language made use of the same powerful metaphors of struggle and extinction that had appeared a year earlier in the Origin of Species.
Darwin and Wallace paced up and down the Sand Walk, discussing science and politics. They examined Darwin’s garden and sat in the dim study he had fashioned for himself on one side of Down House. They dined together. It is likely that they discussed the topic Darwin had scrupulously left out of the Origin—the evolutionary relationship between people and animals. Two years later, in 1864, Wallace published “The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of ‘Natural Selection.’” The paper specifically addressed the evolution of humans from primates, and it showed how similarly Wallace’s thought was to Darwin’s. But it was also at this point that the two men’s thinking began to diverge and to assume new characteristics of their own.
For example, Wallace did not believe that primitive peoples represented a missing link between primates and humans, as Darwin claimed. He had spent too many years living among the native peoples of the Amazon and Malaysia to believe that the local people possessed lesser mental capacities. The Indian tribes of South America practiced social arrangements every bit as complex as those of England. They engaged in rituals and observed custom. They possessed a rich mythos. These people were not inferior, Wallace insisted, just different: the product of different environments, different historical trajectories, different values and beliefs.
In Wallace’s account of human evolution, people first walked on two legs. This freed up the hands, enabling hominids to carry out tasks and create tools imagined by the brain, which expanded in tandem with these developments. (This account remains more or less the one upheld by anthropologists today.) Wallace thought the most exciting aspect of increased brain size was that it rendered physical evolution obsolete. Human intelligence allowed people to manipulate their environments by building houses and planting crops, which in turn allowed them to devote time to higher activities, such as mathematics or the writing of sonnets. They could make jokes and weep at representations of themselves in tragic drama; they could ponder the mysteries of the Spirit.
Which is one reason that by the end of the 1860s, Wallace had become a spiritualist. Like Gray, he too found it impossible to accept Darwin’s purely materialist explanation of the universe. It failed, in his opinion, to account for at least three miraculous events in history: the creation of life from inorganic matter, the birth of consciousness in higher animals, and the appearance of moral faculties in humans. Something from “the unseen universe of Spirit,” as Wallace called it, had surely had a hand in each of these things, and he would spend the next decade or so gathering evidence to prove that this “unseen universe” existed, attending séances, consulting with spirit mediums, and investigating the paranormal. Increasingly he was convinced there was a higher order of existence and that it was only a matter of time before science discovered it. Within a decade after the publication of the Origin of Species, he had come to believe that the human form had long ago stabilized. It was the spirit that continued to evolve. One day the world would be peopled “by a single homogenous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity.” Humans would at last escape the iron dictates of natural selection, would free themselves from the imperative to survive at all costs.
Darwin reacted to Wallace’s public statements on spiritualism as though to an infanticide. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own & my child,” he wrote. When Wallace wrote an article expressing his latest beliefs in spiritualism, Darwin scribbled a single word in its margins: “No!!!”
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Wallace had arrived at a position not unlike the one Charles Loring Brace described at the conclusion of his book on ethnology, published in 1863. This was the same year Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, seemingly fulfilling John Brown’s vision of racial equality and consummating Brace’s once-radical abolitionist hopes. It was also the same year New York erupted in violent draft riots, confirming the fears of many that white resentment toward black citizens would inevitably result in bloodshed.
Despite the racial violence that tore apart his adopted city, Brace continued to believe that Darwin’s evolutionary theory foretold a better future. “The idea of the age is slow growth,” he wrote his cousin Henry Ward Beecher in 1869, at the height of Reconstruction, “especially of all moral things. We doubt sudden changes, or at all events, we consider them only feeble beginnings of long-working changes. We do not stand before the great masses of the educated classes and exhort them to a sudden conversion.” In 1870 he would continue to publish his ideas on evolutionary theory in the North American Review and the Christian Union. “In attempting to conceive the divine plans of the great architect, we are of course in a region where human faculties reach but little way; yet it seems a possible conception of an infinite Creator, that He should be able to arrange forces on a general plan, whose particular results He should clearly foresee.” For Brace, God realized that the physical laws He created inevitably entailed “future failures and half-effects.” Nevertheless the halting development of new species suggested “the great object of Progress and Completeness is being steadily worked out.”
This was similar to Gray’s effort to synthesize science and religion, to align the workings of natural selection with a sovereign God who determines all things. During one of his perennial visits to Cambridge, Brace admitted to a friend, “We (Dr. Gray and I) generally have incessant disputations and talks on Darwinism.” The two men did not shy away from the theory’s unsettling implications: “If the soul is a growth from animal faculties and instincts, the probability is less for immortality,” he summarized. “Or if the whole universe is an evolution under chance and natural selection from a few atoms in a cosmic vapor, the necessity of God is less.” But neither man felt the truth of these hypotheses. A deep and abiding faith led Brace to conclude, “Yet to me Darwinism is not inconsistent with Theism.”
As he discussed Darwin’s theory, his understanding of it changed. He claimed that “there is no drift toward the worse—no tendency to degeneracy and imperfection. The current of all created things, or of all phenomena, is towards higher forms of life. Natural selection is a means of arriving at the best.” This statement contradicted the evidence of human degeneracy he had chronicled in The Races of the Old World, but it more conveniently squared with the nation’s belief in itself as a progressive force in world history—a belief that took on renewed life after the Civil War. Brace now argued that “if the Darwinian theory be true, the law of natural selection applies to all the moral history of mankind, as well as the physical.” Races might become extinct, Brace conceded, but evolutionary theory meant that such losses were part of a larger beneficent framework. Beauty and perfection were the flowers produced by the soil of destruction. It moved him to consider that “each little violet . . . which gladdens our eye on a country walk has depended for its existence on a balancing and interworking of innumerable forms of life during ‘ages of ages,’ and is the result of laws old as creation.” Such insights corresponded “to our highest moral intuition of HIM the ‘All-controlling.’”
In July 1872 Brace took a well-deserved vacation from the Children’s Aid Society and traveled abroad. He stopped in England to visit the man who had transformed his intellectual life a dozen years earlier. “I am at Darwin’s with Mrs. Brace for the night,” he wrote a friend back home, extolling the English countryside, which seemed to him calm and therapeutic. The well-tended Kentish countryside stood in stark contrast to the American landscape that, seven years after Appomattox, was still creased and furrowed with mass graves and the sunken ravines where lay the Union and Confederate dead. Here in England was no evidence of the struggle for existence that had nearly dissolved the United States.
Darwin was worn with illness. According to Brace, he worked an hour or so each day, excusing himself after dinner for rest. Then he launched into conversation: about the instincts of dogs and the recent discovery of primitive skulls in California. “He gave one of his lighting-up smiles,” Brace recalled, “which seemed to come way out from under his shaggy eyebrows. ‘Yes,’ he said; ‘it is very unpleasant of these facts; they won’t fit in as they ought to!’”
Inviting Brace into the study where he had written the Origin of Species, Darwin delightedly told him of his hate mail, including “a letter from a clergyman, saying that ‘he was delighted to see, from a recent photograph, that no man in England was more like the monkey he came from!’ and another from an American clergyman . . . beginning with, ‘You d—d scoundrel!’ and sprinkled with oaths and texts.” These letters amused him, Brace reported, “but not a word did he say of his own success and fame.” Instead he exuded good humor and childlike curiosity. “I never met a more simple, happy man,” continued Brace, “—as merry and keen as Dr. Gray, whom he loves much. Both he and Lyell think Dr. G. the soundest scientific brain in America.”
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Gray had last been in England four years earlier, in 1868. He and his wife, Jane, stayed in a cottage near Kew, where he could breakfast with his old friend, Joseph Dalton Hooker, now the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, and study sedges from around the world. On weekends the couple visited Down House. Gray found Darwin’s household bustling with extended family and a stream of scientists and writers—even the occasional politician—all of whom wished to speak with the great man. According to Jane Gray, Darwin was “entirely fascinating” but also visibly suffering from the illness that plagued him for much of his adult life. “He never stayed long with us at a time, but as soon as he had talked much, said he must go & rest.” During the afternoons he showed Gray his property. The two men visited Darwin’s kitchen garden, together spading the cold earth in preparation for next spring’s crop. Darwin also took his American friend inside his heated greenhouse, built in 1863, during the high point of his interest in orchids, which had supplanted his enthusiasm for sundews. Gray was astonished at his friend’s simple workbench; a local cooper or wheelwright could have built the primitive piece of furniture. He watched Darwin sit contentedly, attending to trays of seedlings, repotting plants.
He had been at Harvard nearly thirty years. In all that time he had worked tirelessly to elevate American science, to expand the college’s herbarium and develop its science curriculum. He had written dozens and dozens of articles and numerous monographs. He continued this work throughout the Civil War and the unimaginable carnage that resulted, as though incessant work were the only way to cope with the terrible destruction. Gray was childless, but many of his closest friends had sons who fought in the Union Army. When he reported these events to Darwin, he used the language of the Origin of Species to describe the conflict: the war was “a struggle for existence on our part,” he said, hoping it would prove in the long term that “natural selection quickly crushes out weak nations.” Gray generally kept his antislavery sentiments to himself, but as the conflict unfolded, he increasingly felt emboldened to argue that “if the rebels & scoundrels persevere, I go for carrying the war so far as to liberate every negro, tho’ what we are to do with this population I see not.” To Darwin he also communicated his admiration of Lincoln—“Homely, honest, ungainly Lincoln is the representative man of the country”—and expressed his disgust at the Confederacy, asserting, “The weak must go to the wall, because it can’t help it. ‘Blessed are the strong, for they shall inherit the earth.’” Darwin, who worried that “the South, with its accursed Slavery, shd triumph, & spread the evil,” followed this news with great interest, repeating Gray’s reports to friends in Europe.
By 1868 the two men were veterans of a somewhat more civil war—the battle over the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin had indeed published Gray’s three essays from the Atlantic in a pamphlet entitled “A Free Examination of Darwin’s Treatise on the Origin of Species, and of its American Reviewers.” For the pamphlet’s subtitle he chose: “Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology.” Appearing in 1861, the work invoked a fresh wave of commentary on Darwin’s controversial book. The prominent English theologian Frederic D. Maurice soon observed that “by far the best step forward in Natural Theology has been made by an American Dr. Asa Gray, who has said better than I can all that I want to say.” The Scottish botanist J. H. Balfour, a vigorous anti-Darwinian, was gratified that Gray expressed only “a qualified adhesion to Darwin’s views.”
Through voluminous correspondence the two men continued their private discussion about chance and design. Toward the end of 1860, Darwin wrote, “I had no intention to write atheistically,” but he admitted that he could not accept Gray’s arguments on behalf of intelligent creation. “I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about design. . . . I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; & yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design.” He realized this position placed him at odds with Gray’s religious convictions: “I own I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd. wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [a parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.” On the other hand, Darwin confessed that he could not “be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”
A similar ambivalence coursed through most discussions of Darwinian theory during the second half of the nineteenth century, in America especially. Religious thinkers like Henry Ward Beecher sought to accommodate natural selection to their progressive theology. Beecher believed that human history was as susceptible to evolutionary forces as nature was. Darwin’s theory not only magnified the wonder of Creation, it also seemed to confirm the heavenward ascent of humanity. Social scientists and industrialists, on the other hand, pointed to Darwinian struggle to justify an increasingly stratified American society. Few Americans subscribed to the brutal social Darwinism of Yale professor William Graham Sumner, who observed that “a drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.” But many people translated Darwin’s theory to social issues, some arguing that privileged classes had no obligation to help those who had failed to adapt to an increasingly industrialized modern world. Such arguments not only justified the business interests of the Gilded Age, they exercised especially pernicious effects on race relations during the Reconstruction period and beyond.
Frederick Douglass, white-haired and a little stooped, continued to speak out against America’s systemic racism for the remainder of the nineteenth century. He was particularly incensed by the rising incidence of lynching and other violence that began in the 1870s and became a feature of postwar America. Adopting Darwinian language, Douglass described African American existence as a “race of life,” a brutal conflict between blacks and whites that had not ended with the freeing of millions of slaves. In his 1894 address entitled “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” he suggested that the outmoded theories of ethnologists had not so much disappeared as returned in new guises. Emancipation had not been enough to guarantee equality for all, because “the spirit of slavery [continued] to perpetuate itself, if not in one form, then in another.” Douglass believed that social Darwinism was another pseudoscience designed to oppress free blacks, especially in the South. Partly for this reason, he refrained from endorsing the Darwinian hypothesis that humans and animals were biologically linked. To do so was to invite the same racial stereotypes that had been a feature of American life since its founding.
Through it all, Asa Gray viewed his role in the receding debate over natural selection with mixed feelings. To Darwin he confided that his landmark reviews for the Atlantic did “not exhibit anything like the full force of the impression the book . . . made on me”; he had deliberately sought to “stand uncommitted,” thinking this a better strategy than “announc[ing] myself a convert.” His strategy all along, as he told Joseph Dalton Hooker, was “that Darwin . . . should have a fair hearing here.”
But this approach had collided with his growing unease about the theological implications of the Origin. After the war, as American natural historians and intellectuals increasingly accepted portions of Darwin’s book, blending it with elements of Lamarckism, Gray labored to bridge for himself the widening gap he felt between science and religion.
In 1868 Darwin published his Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication, an enormous, painstaking work that detailed the means by which breeders manipulated the characteristics of vegetables, flowers, and animals. The book’s conclusion addressed the very question that had plagued Gray for nearly a decade. As Darwin told Hooker, “It is foolish to touch such subjects, but there have been so many allusions to what I think about the part which God has played in the formation of organic beings, that I thought it shabby to evade the question.” Echoing the opening of the Origin of Species, Darwin stated that domestic animal breeders and natural selection worked in similar ways. Both favored useful varieties. Both relied on varieties that were accidentally produced. He asked his readers to imagine an architect who built a mansion out of rocks that had broken off and splintered at the foot of a cliff. “Can it be reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered . . . that certain fragments should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice?” Like the architect, natural selection constructed something new from fragmentary, accidental materials. Darwin concluded the passage with a reference to his old friend: “However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief that ‘variation has been along certain beneficial lines,’ like a ‘stream along definite and useful lines of irrigation.’”
Gray admitted that he “was put on the defence by your reference to an old hazardous remark of mine.” Darwin’s stone house argument could not be answered; “the notion of design must after all rest mostly on faith,” he maintained, and faith was something a person felt regardless of evidence or arguments to the contrary. If the two friends discussed the matter during Gray’s visit, there is no record of it. Jane Loring Gray, who kept a diary account of the trip, had been particularly impressed with Darwin’s face, which bore deeply graven “marks of suffering and disease.” He was “tall & thin, though broad framed,” and he seemed immensely older than her husband, who was not even two years younger than Darwin.
Eight years later, in 1876, Gray published a collection of everything he had ever written about Darwin’s theory. Natural selection was by this time almost universally accepted among American scientists. It was also accepted by a large swath of the liberal clergy, who embraced Gray’s arguments throughout Darwiniana that natural selection was a mechanism employed by God. Gray no longer insisted upon the separation between science and religion. The origins of the material universe might be beyond our ken, he wrote, but “there are also mysteries proper to be inquired into and reasoned about.” Among the mysteries: “Whence this rich endowment of matter? Whence comes that of which we all see and know is the outcome?” These were theological questions—metaphysical questions that resembled transcendentalist speculation more than contemporaneous science. They were wrapped in mystery. Still, Gray noted, most “scientific men have thought themselves intellectually authorized to have an opinion about [them].”
He must have realized that his opinions were beginning to sound old-fashioned and quaint. Darwiniana concludes with Aristotle’s observation that “the Divine it is which holds together all Nature.” This idea, he wrote, had “continued through succeeding ages, and illuminated by the Light which has come into the world—may still express the worthiest thoughts of the modern scientific investigator and reasoner.” Around this time, and not coincidentally, he was finally invited to join the Saturday Club.
Gray would live another decade, his final year including yet another trip across the Atlantic, where in addition to being conferred honorary degrees by Cambridge and Oxford, he returned once more to study at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In the spring of 1882, after visiting the botanist Alphonse de Candolle in Geneva, he learned of Darwin’s death. The news staggered him, arriving soon after he learned that both Emerson and Longfellow had also died. About Darwin he could only marvel at his relationship with the man. “We hardly should have thought,” he recalled, “twenty-five years ago, that he would have made such an impression upon the great world, as well as on the scientific world!”
Twenty-nine years and four days after the publication of the Origin of Species in England, Gray was coming down the stairs of his house on Garden Street when he suffered a stroke. He managed to eat breakfast and then to send off a copy of a review of The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, written and edited by the naturalist’s son. But paralysis soon struck, and nearly two months later, in January 1888, he died. At his funeral, Harvard’s preacher, Francis Greenwood Peabody, read a scriptural passage that provided a religious gloss to Darwin’s notion of the Tree of Life: Every tree is known by its own fruit: a good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good. To Gray’s widow, Charles Loring Brace wrote, “I feel I owe a great deal intellectually to the dear Doctor.” Three months later he was still grieving. He considered himself “so much indebted to him for innumerable acts of kindness and consideration, and above all, for the light he threw on so many scientific questions for me and others.” He closed with an image of Gray in heaven. “I imagine him living in the highest light of God, and ever learning of His universe.”