Abstract
In 1810 Samuel Stanhope Smith, Presbyterian reverend, professor of Moral Philosophy, and president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), gave to print the second American edition of An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. Originally published in Philadelphia in 1787, the year of the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, the Essay was reprinted in London two years later, while a new edition appeared in Edinburgh in 1788, introduced and annotated by the American medical student Benjamin Smith Barton. This was, according to John C. Greene, “the most ambitious and the best known American treatise on physical anthropology” in the eighteenth century.1
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Notes
John C. Greene, “The American Debate on the Negro’s Place in Nature, 1780–1815,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15/3 (1954): 384–396;
John C. Greene, “Some Early Speculations on the Origin of Human Races,” American Anthropologist 56/1 (1954): 31–41.
Alexandre-César Chavannes, Anthropologie ou science générale de l’homme (Lausanne, 1788). See Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (1971), with a Postface by Claude Blanckaert (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 12;
Claude Blanckaert, “L’anthropologie en France, le mot et l’histoire (XVIe–XIXe),” Bulletins et mémoires de la société d’anthropologie de Paris, n.s., 3–4 (1989): 13–43;
Larry Wolff, “Discovering Cultural Perspective: The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment,” in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment, ed. Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2007), 3–32.
Early members of the American Philosophical Society included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, David Rittenhouse, and non-Americans such as Alexander von Humboldt and the Marquis de Lafayette, while both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush served as presidents. See John C. Greene, “Science, Learning, and Utility: Patterns of Organization in the Early American Republic,” in The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War, ed. Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1976), 1–20;
John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: U. of Iowa P., 1984), 37.
As was asserted in the “Preface” to the first issue of the Society’s Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1771): xvii. On the utilitarian context of the Philosophical Society, see Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 1956), chaps. 6–7; more generally, see
Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 2009).
After a student riot in 1807, Smith’s position became highly precarious, and he was forced to resign in 1812. For his efforts to reconcile reason and revelation, Smith was charged with rationalism and Arminianism within the church. See Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1989);
Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia U., 1971), 164–184.
However, Barton never finished his MD degree, either in Edinburgh or in Göttingen, as he implied. See Theodore W. Jeffries, “A Biographical Note on Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815),” Isis 60/2 (1969): 231–232. On the debate about race within the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh between the 1780s and 1820s, see
Colin Kidd, “Medicine, Race, and Radicalism in the Later Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Practice of Reform in Health, Medicine, and Science, 1500–2000: Essays for Charles Webster, ed. Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005), 207–222.
On the Wise Club, see H. Lewis Ulman, The Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 1758–1773 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen U. P., 1990);
Stephen A. Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense: The Problem of Authority in the Social Background and Social Philosophy of the Wise Club of Aberdeen (New York: Garland, 1987).
Deborah C. Brunton, “The Transfer of Medical Education: Teaching at the Edinburgh and Philadelphia Medical Schools,” in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1990), 242–258;
Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2008), chap. 8.
Benjamin Rush to William Cullen, September 16, 1783, in The Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1951), vol. 1: 310.
Karrian Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2011), chap. 5.
Smith, Essay, 1788 ed., 165; in similar terms, 1810 ed., 244. Smith’s mono-genetic and biblical outlook plays an important role in Colin Kidd’s view of the Protestant Enlightenment: The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005), esp. chap. 2.
The term “polygenesis” (as well as “monogenesis”) was coined in the writings of the Philadelphia anthropological school in the 1850s. However, the debate about the plural origins of humankind dated back to the sixteenth century, with the discovery of peoples unrecorded in the Mosaic account, and of chronologies much older than the biblical one. From among a wide literature on the topic, see David N. Livingstone’s recent work: Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2008).
Titled Six Sketches of the History of Man, the Philadelphia edition omitted the other two books composing the work, on the progress of political nations and of sciences. In all probability, the project of publishing the entire work failed because of the escalation of hostilities between Britain and the American colonies, which reduced commerce with the mother country for the following ten years. See Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2006), 530.
From a now extensive literature, see the pioneering study by Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1976).
John Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State U. P., 1959). One cannot fail to notice the parallel with Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs—introduced, from 1769, by the Philosophie de l’histoire, which developed the “philosophical” argument of the different origins of human races/species.
See George W. Stocking, “Scotland as the Model of Mankind: Lord Kames’ Philosophical View of Civilization,” in Towards a Science of Man: Essays in the History of Anthropology, ed. Timothy H. H. Thoresen (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 75–89;
Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), chap. 3.
Witherspoon presided over the College until his death in 1794, and was succeeded by S. S. Smith himself. The Presbyterian community in America played a leading role in the trans-Atlantic connection with the Scottish Enlightenment. See Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford U. P., 1976).
Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 2002), chap. 2.
Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1985); Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book, 214.
Stewart J. Brown, ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997);
Stewart J. Brown, “An Eighteenth-Century Historian on the Amerindians: Culture, Colonialism and Christianity in William Robertson’s History of America,” Studies in World Christianity 2 (1996): 204–222;
John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1999), 316–328; vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005), 181–204.
Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (1955), ed. and trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh, 1973).
Silvia Sebastiani, “L’Amérique des Lumières et la hiérarchie des races: Disputes sur l’écriture de l’histoire dans l’Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1788),” Annales HSS 67 (2012): 327–361;
Silvia Sebastiani, “Las escrituras de la historia del Nuevo Mundo: Clavijero y Robertson en el contexto de la Ilustración europea,” Historia y Grafía 37 (2011): 203–236.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2001), 234–249.
Barton extensively quotes Clavijero. See, for instance, sect. IV of his Observations on Some Parts of Natural History, and his New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1797). In the American edition of John Pinkerton’s Modern Geography—first published in London in 1802 and republished in Philadelphia in 1804, with Barton’s annotations on the article “America”—Barton defends, against Pinkerton’s attacks, Clavijero and the reliability of Mexican codes and symbols as historical sources: Modern Geography: A Description of the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Colonies … The article America, corrected and considerably enlarged, by. Dr. Barton, of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: John Conrad & Co., 1804), vol. 2: 457. From his extensive correspondence, see especially Barton’s letter to Alexander Tilloch, March 1813, in Joseph Ewan, Nesta Dunn Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton: Naturalist and Physician in Jeffersonian America (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden, 2007), 253–257.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Written in the Year 1781, Somewhat Corrected and Enlarged in the Winter of 1782, for the Use of a Foreigner of Distinction, in Answer to Certain Queries Proposed by Him, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 1955), 59.
Ibid., 263, emphasis added. On the centrality of natural history in America, see Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois U. P., 1992), chap. 3.
The Systema Naturae was published for the first time in 1735, and revised and amplified through to the twelfth, three-volume edition of 1766–68; Linnaeus coined the concept of Homo Sapiens in 1758. See Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1999).
Jefferson, Notes of Virginia, 55. See Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 2006);
Andrew J. Lewis, A Democracy of Facts: Natural History in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2011).
In his New Views, dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, Barton takes issue with Jefferson’s claim that Amerindian languages were more ancient than the Asiatic languages and irreducible to a common stock; on which, see Edward G. Gray, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1999), 129–130.
John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” William and Mary Quarterly 11 (1954): 200–213;
Ned Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1985);
Ned Landsman, “The Legacy of British Union for the North American Colonies: Provincial Elites and the Problem of Imperial Union,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1995), 297–317.
For a broader discussion on this aspect, see Caroline Winterer, “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History, 9 (2012): 597–623.
Winthrop D. Jordan, Introduction to Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 1965), vii–lvii.
See, Phillip R. Sloan, “The Idea of Racial Degeneracy in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle,” in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve U. P., 1973), 293–321;
Claude Blanckaert, “Buffon and the Natural History of Man: Writing History and the ‘Foundational Myth’ of Anthropology,” History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993): 13–50.
See The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. L. W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1959), vol. 4: 234.
Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query XIV, “Laws,” 263. From an extensive literature, see the classical study by Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P., 1968), chap. 12.
Smith, 1787 ed., 90–92; 1810 ed., 169–172, with slight variations. Smith reiterated the same point in his “Remarks” against White. See Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968) (Walnut Creech: Altamira Press, 2001), 87. The positive review of Smith’s Essay in the Monthly Review also makes fun of this aspect: Monthly Review 80 (1789): 184–185.
Samuel Stanhope Smith, The Lectures, Corrected and Improved, Which Have Been Delivered for a Series of Years, in the College of New Jersey; On the Subjects of Moral and Political Philosophy, 2 vols. (Trenton, NJ: Daniel Fenton, 1812), Lecture XXI, vol. 2: 164–178, esp. 172. Larry Tise, in Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: U. of Georgia P., 2004), chap. 8, observes that Smith’s opinions, if not overtly proslavery, are however “defensive of slavery,” as attested by George Bourne’s criticism: The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable. With Animadversions upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy (Philadelphia: J. M. Sanderson, 1816).
Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1976), vol. 1: 402.
See Silvia Sebastiani, “National Character and Race: A Scottish Enlightenment Debate,” in Being Sociable: Character and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, ed. Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 187–206.
See, for instance, the example provided by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” The American Historical Review 104 (1999): 33–68.
Dena Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke U. P., 1998), 7.
Ibid., 1787 ed., 99–109; 1810 ed., 177–184. This part closely echoes Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1st ed., 1759; 6th ed., 1790), ed. David D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 199.
Ibid., 1810 ed., 15–16, emphasis added. Smith refers to David Doig’s Two Letters on the Savage State, Addressed to the Late Lord Kaims (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792; reprint, together with the Edinburgh edition of Smith’s Essay, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995). See Silvia Sebastiani, “Conjectural History vs. the Bible: Eighteenth-Century Scottish Historians and the Idea of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Storia della Storiografia 39 (2001): 39–50; Sebastiani, “L’Amérique des Lumières et la hiérarchie des races.”
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© 2014 László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
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Sebastiani, S. (2014). Anthropology beyond Empires: Samuel Stanhope Smith and the Reconfiguration of the Atlantic World. In: Kontler, L., Romano, A., Sebastiani, S., Török, B.Z. (eds) Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484017_9
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