Race and Evolution in Antebellum Alabama: The Polygenist Prehistory We’d Rather Ignore

Peterson, Erik L.

doi:10.1057/978-1-349-95139-0_2

Race and Evolution in Antebellum Alabama: The Polygenist Prehistory We’d Rather Ignore

Erik L. Peterson⁵

Chapter
First Online: 10 March 2017

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Abstract

The name of Alabama physician Josiah Clark Nott (1804–1873) adorns a building on the campus of the University of Alabama perhaps in part because he made it possible for scientists to speak of the origins of humanity and an antiquated Earth without first nodding to Genesis. Nott popularized a fully secular science that investigated the development of humanity two decades before Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871). But Nott also provided solid scientific support for some of the most repugnant racial theories of the Victorian era. Using previously unexplored archival resources, this essay attempts to clear up the mythology surrounding Nott, the history of evolutionary theory, and the role of American science during the foundation of anthropology.

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Notes

1.
Numbers and Stephens, “Darwinism,” 58–9.
2.
Nott also felt pulled toward the libertine lifestyle that such a boomtown permitted. Among other things, acquaintances noted his penchant for horse racing (Horsman, Josiah Nott, 66–7). His brother, Gustavus Adolphus Nott, taught at the nearby University of Louisiana medical school for many years, even after Josiah departed from the South.
3.
Amos, “Social Life,” 361.
4.
Amos, “Social Life,” 340–41.
5.
Tuke, “Prichard, James Cowles,” 344–46.
6.
Michael C. Campbell and Sarah A. Tishkoff, “The Evolution of Human Genetic and Phenotypic Variation in Africa,” Current Biology 20, no. 4 (2010), R166–R173.
7.
Joseph L. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Rutgers University Press, 2003).
8.
Prichard, Researches, vol. 1, 3rd ed., xx.
9.
Jardine, Secord, and Spary, Cultures of Natural History, 339.
10.
Rainger, “Philanthropy and Science,” 702–17.
11.
Prichard, “On the Relations of Ethnology,” 321.
12.
See, for instance, Charles Caldwell, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race (New York: Kessinger Publishing Co., 1830).
13.
Nott, “Mulatto a Hybrid,” 29.
14.
Hrdlička, Physical Anthropology, frontispiece. Morton, like Nott, was a product of Philadelphia’s medical education system and, like Nott, was strident in his anti-clericalism and distrust of Scripture. Unlike Nott, he remained in Philadelphia and retained connections with the rest of the American and European medical and antiquarian communities. Both Morton and Nott were also connected to Ephraim George Squier (1821–1888) and Edwin Hamilton Davis (1811–1888), two New York-born archaeologists who excavated over 100 of the ancient aboriginal mounds around the state of Ohio and along the Ohio and Mississippi watersheds.
15.
Stephen Jay Gould took Morton’s skull measurements to task in Mismeasure of Man, citing Morton’s racial bias, conscious or not. Since then, two other anthropological studies have seemed to show Gould’s measurements were biased and that Morton could not be faulted—the racial differences Morton showed were real, apparently. Still more recently, philosopher Michael Weisberg has reexamined Morton, Gould, and these other studies and demonstrated that Gould’s arguments and evidence, while not without error, proved more defensible. Weisberg, “Remeasuring Man.”
16.
This piece may have influenced John C. Calhoun’s famous 1850 address repeating the mutual benefit argument. Nott was friends with Calhoun’s eldest son, Andrew Pickens Calhoun, and hosted the Calhouns on multiple occasions. See Nott to A.P. Calhoun, June 14, 1846, Manuscript collection 51, Folder 081-V, Lister Hill Library, Medical Archives, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
17.
Nott had already cited Lyell’s work in support of his own in “Unity of the Human Race.”
18.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Murray, 1871).
19.
Alan R. Templeton, “Biological Races in Humans,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44, no. 3 (2013), 262–271.; Koffi N. Maglo, Tesfaye B. Mersha and Lisa J. Martin, “Population Genomics and the Statistical Values of Race: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Biological Classification of Human Populations and Implications for Clinical Genetic Epidemiological Research,” Frontiers in Genetics 7 (2016).
20.
Guido Barbujani, Silvia Ghirotto and Francesca Tassi, “Nine Things to Remember about Human Genome Diversity,” Tissue Antigens 82, no. 3 (2013), 155–164.
21.
Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2013).
22.
Sean F. Reardon, Lindsay Fox and Joseph Townsend, “Neighborhood Income Composition by Household Race and Income, 1990–2009,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 660, no. 1 (2015), 78–97.
23.
Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century.
24.
Lyell, Second Visit, vol. 2, p. 96.
25.
Nott, “Statistics,” 277.
26.
Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 195.
27.
When Lyell later published Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Nott claimed he had been vindicated. Nott, “Negro Race,” 108.
28.
Nott to E. G. Squier, 7 Sept. 1848, quoted in Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 118.
29.
Nott, Two Lectures, 16–17.
30.
Nott, Two Lectures, 19.
31.
Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 122.
32.
Nott, “Examination of the Physical History of Jews,” 98 [emphasis added].
33.
“Remarks of Prof. Agassiz,” 107.
34.
Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, 232–33.
35.
Stanton (Leopard’s Spots, 155) makes Nott the “Voltaire” to Morton’s “Newton.”
36.
See Noll, America’s God for clerical arguments that slavery at least did not receive condemnation from the Bible and possibly even supported it.
37.
Nott et al., Types of Mankind, 53.
38.
Agassiz, “Sketch,” in Nott et al., Types of Mankind, lxxv–lxxvi. Agassiz referred to the anonymously published 1844 blockbuster Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which speculated on common origins for not only all creatures—and in that sense went far beyond Lamarck—but incorporated the origins of Earth and the solar system from eddies in interstellar nebulae into the story.
39.
Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 163.
40.
Nott et al., Types of Mankind, 60.
41.
Nott et al., Types of Mankind, 605.
42.
Stanton, Leopard’s Spots, 163. Among the most critical reviews appeared in the official record of the ESL: Richard Cull, “On the Recent Progress of Ethnology,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1848–1856), 4 (1856): 297–316. Cull lambasted both Gliddon’s interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and his flippant tone throughout. He said little about Nott’s anthropology other than it being not specific enough.
43.
Thankfully, Desmond and Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause doesn’t quite make this argument.
44.
See Stocking, “Persistence of Polygenist Thought.”
45.
Dunn, “Physiological and Psychological Evidence,” 202.
46.
Crawfurd, “Classification of the Races,” 370.
47.
Crawfurd, “Classification of the Races,” 378.
48.
Knox, “Abstract of Observations.” For more on Knox’s role in the Burke and Hare case, see Rosner, Lisa, The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh’s Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
49.
Beddoe, “On the Physical Characteristics.”
50.
Colp, “Charles Darwin.”
51.
Darwin, Descent of Man, 208.
52.
Stocking, “What’s in a Name?”
53.
Wallace, “Origin of Human Races”; and see, Richards, “‘Moral Anatomy.’”
54.
When the ASL’s Anthropological Review accidentally published Nott’s obituary prematurely (G.A. Nott died in Louisiana in 1868 after Josiah’s departure for New York), it lauded Types of Mankind as anthropology’s foundational text. Mackenzie, “Life and Anthropological Labours,” lxxxi.
55.
Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 101–2.
56.
Nott, “Yellow Fever.”
57.
Walker, Jr., “Dr. Josiah Clark Nott.”
58.
See Emmett B. Carmichael, “Josiah Clark Nott” [bound copy of Carmichael’s research 1940s–1970s]. Lister Hill Library, UAB Archives, University of Alabama at Birmingham. Carmichael helped rededicate Nott Hall in the 1970s and minimized Nott’s scientific racism.
59.
Nott to unnamed “Doctor,” 14 Aug. 1870. Manuscript collection 51, Folder 08/U, Lister Hill Library, UAB Archives, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
60.
Stocking, “Persistence of Polygenist Thought.”
61.
Horsman, Josiah Nott, 297.
62.
Nott’s fears were largely unfounded: many of his European wax models survive to the present and are kept in the Alabama Medical Museum in Birmingham.
63.
Board of Trustees Minutes, May 21, 1923, University of Alabama, Hoole Library, RG 96, Box 11, Shelf 103-063. Foster’s initial mayoral victory in 1890 was assured when armed “escorts” rounded up around 200 black males and encouraged them to vote for Foster—after an all-night meeting behind locked doors and under threat of violence. Under the Foster administration, disenfranchisement of black voters escalated considerably. Ben Windham, “Black Vote Carries Heavy History in the Deep South,” TuscaloosaNews.com, 20 Jan. 2008, http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20080120/NEWS/428305184
64.
“Dr. George A. Ketchum Dead; Was 81 Years Old and a Noted Authority on Medicine,” The New York Times (May 31, 1906). Ketchum claimed to be among the first physicians to use large doses of quinine in treating tropical fevers, an important but suspect claim given the popularity of the treatment before Ketchum had completed medical school. See, Charles McCormick, “On the Use and Action of the Sulph. Quinine in Large Doses,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 2, no. 3 (1845): 290–300; and W.J. Tuck, “A Few Observations on the Use of Large Doses of Quinine in the Treatment of Bilious Remittent Fevers,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 2, no. 3 (1845): 301–306.

Acknowledgments

Research was supported by a Reynolds-Finney Research Fellowship. Many thanks to Michael Flannery, Peggy Balch, Timothy Pennycuff, and Stefanie Rookis at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Archives, Medical Museum, and Lister Hill Special Collections for their assistance, advice, and historical knowledge. Thank you also to Kathryn Metheny at Hoole Special Collections at the University of Alabama for unflagging encouragement and support. Trever J. Chidester and Jodi B. Wilson conducted the initial research into the 1923 naming of Nott Hall.

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Department of History, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
Erik L. Peterson

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The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
Christopher D. Lynn
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA
Amanda L. Glaze
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
William A. Evans
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
Laura K. Reed

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Peterson, E.L. (2017). Race and Evolution in Antebellum Alabama: The Polygenist Prehistory We’d Rather Ignore. In: Lynn, C., Glaze, A., Evans, W., Reed, L. (eds) Evolution Education in the American South. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95139-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95139-0_2
Published: 10 March 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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