Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (32 page)

Illinois Democrats won control of both houses and reelected Douglas in the 1858 midterm elections. Illinois Republicans learned that being branded pro-Black was more politically crippling than being branded proslavery. But in the rest of the North, Republicans did much better. Abraham Lincoln, in Springfield, Illinois; William Lloyd Garrison one thousand miles away in Boston; and other watchers of American politics saw the same obvious results of the elections. In addition to seizing power in the swing states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, Republicans had won big in abolitionist country: small-town New England, “the Yankee West,” and the northern counties along the Great Lakes. They had differing vantage points, differing ideologies, and differing personal and national ambitions, so it is not surprising that Lincoln and Garrison responded differently to the same results.
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Garrison tamed his criticism of a major political party for the first time in almost thirty years, recognizing that America’s antislavery voters had flocked to the Republican fold. He envisioned its coalition of “incongruous elements” breaking up after losing the 1860 election and the genuinely antislavery politicians taking over. In the meantime, it was his job—it was the job of the movement—to “distinguish the shortcomings of the Republican platform from the promise of the
Republican constituency,” that is, to persuade this constituency that there could be no compromise with slavery, and no union with slaveholders. Garrison’s biographer termed this new strategy “political suasion.” Old friends committed to keeping the movement out of politics admonished him, generating heated debates at abolitionist meetings in the late 1850s.
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In contrast, Lincoln turned away from the Republicans’ anti-slavery-expansion base and reached for the independents. Republicans in swing states like Illinois started focusing on the much more popular rights of “free labor,” a topic inspired by the 1857 best seller
The Impending Crisis of the South
by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper. Slavery needed to end because it was retarding southern economic progress and the opportunities of non-slaveholding Whites, who were oppressed by wealthy enslavers. Helper didn’t “believe in the unity of races.” But he refused to accept the doctrine of polygenesis as a justification to continue slavery. Emancipated Africans, he wrote, should be sent to Africa.
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Horace Greeley, the nation’s most famous editor, promoted Helper’s book in the nation’s leading newspaper, the
New York Tribune
. Helper and Greeley partnered in soliciting funds and Republican endorsements to produce a small, more inexpensive
Compendium
version of
The Impending Crisis of the South
to distribute during the upcoming election. Widely endorsed and published in July 1859, the
Compendium
became an instant best-seller in Republican circles, but an instant dartboard in enslaving circles. Helper’s free White labor, antislavery message was everything the Republicans—and Lincoln—were looking for: a way to oppose slavery without being cast as pro-Black.
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Enslavers were furious about the implications of Helper’s book, which practically called for a united front made up of Free Soilers, abolitionists, and former slaves. That unholy alliance became a reality in October 1859, when abolitionist John Brown and his nineteen-man interracial battalion captured the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, sixty miles northwest of Washington, DC. “General” Harriet Tubman was unable to come as planned, probably because she was suffering one of her recurring fevers. Brown could have used
her ingenuity. He selected an area of small-scale farms instead of massive gang-scale plantations, where he could have armed thousands and plotted the next stage of his revolt. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee crushed the rebellion instead and apprehended Brown. Seventeen people perished.

Although enslavers had fought off larger Black slave revolts throughout the tumultuous 1850s, Brown’s revolt affected them deeply. The growing breach in White unity unsettled them into delirium. William Lloyd Garrison initially described the revolt as an “insane,” though “well-intended,” attempt. But in the weeks after the conflict, he joined with abolitionists in transforming John Brown in the eyes of antislavery northerners from a madman to a “martyr.” Countless Americans came to admire his David-like courage to strike at the mighty and hated Goliath-like slave power. The disdain for violent Black revolutionaries lurked in the shadow of the praises for John Brown, however. Black slave rebels never became martyrs and remained madmen and madwomen. Never before had the leader of a major slave uprising been so praised. Not since Bacon’s Rebellion had the leader of a major antislavery uprising been White.

Millions read John Brown’s final court statement. Brown presented himself as a righteous Christian shepherd who was willing to follow the Golden Rule—willing to lead the dependent sheep out of slavery. On the day of his hanging, December 2, 1859, White and Black northerners mourned to the sounds of church bells for hours.
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ON FEBRUARY
2, 1860, Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, presented the southern platform of unlimited states’ rights and enslavers rights to the US Senate. The South needed these resolutions to be passed if they were going to remain in the Stephen Douglas–led Democratic Party and in the Union. Davis could have easily added that southerners believed the federal government should not use its resources to assist Black people in any way. On April 12, 1860, Davis objected to appropriating funds for educating Blacks in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,”
he said, but “by white men for white men.” The bill was based on the false assertion of racial equality, he stated. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”

Adam had driven away the first White criminal, his son Cain, who was “no longer the fit associate of those who were created to exercise dominion over the earth,” Davis lectured the senators. Cain had found in the “land of Nod those to whom his crime had degraded him to an equality.” Apparently, Blacks had lived in the Land of Nod among the “living creatures” God had created before humans. Blacks were later taken on Noah’s ark with other animals. Their overseer: Ham.
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On the lips of one of America’s most renowned politicians, it looked as if polygenesis had finally become mainstream. In actuality, the days of the notion of separately created human species were numbered. Another pernicious theory of the human species was about to take hold, one that would be used by racist apologists for the next one hundred years.

In August 1860, polygenesist Josiah C. Nott took some time away from raising Alabama’s first medical school (now in Birmingham). He skimmed through a five-hundred-page tome published the previous November in England. It had a long title,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
. Nott probably knew the author: the eminent, antislavery British marine biologist Charles Darwin.

“The view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous,” Darwin famously declared. “I am fully convinced that species are not immutable.” Recent discoveries were showing, he explained, that humans had originated much earlier than a few thousand years ago. Darwin effectively declared war on biblical chronology
and
the ruling conception of polygenesis, offering a new ruling idea: natural selection. In the “recurring struggle for existence,” he wrote, “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.”

Darwin did not explicitly claim that the White race had been naturally selected to evolve toward perfection. He hardly spent any writing
time on humans in
The Origin of Species
. He had a grander purpose: proving that all living things the world over were struggling, evolving, spreading, and facing extinction or perfection. Darwin did, however, open the door for bigots to use his theory by referring to “civilized” states, the “savage races of man,” and “half-civilized man,” and calling the natives of southern Africa and their descendants “the lowest savages.”
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Over the course of the 1860s, the Western reception of Darwin transformed from opposition to skepticism to approval to hailing praise. The sensitive, private, and sickly Darwin let his many friends develop his ideas and engage his critics. The mind of English polymath Herbert Spencer became the ultimate womb for Darwin’s ideas, his writings the amplifier of what came to be known as Social Darwinism. In
Principles of Biology
in 1864, Spencer coined the iconic phrase “survival of the fittest.” He religiously believed that human behavior was inherited. Superior hereditary traits made the “dominant races” better fit to survive than the “inferior races.” Spencer spent the rest of his life calling for governments to get out of the way of the struggle for existence. In his quest to limit government, Spencer ignored the discriminators, probably knowing they were rigging the struggle for existence. Longing for ideas to justify the nation’s growing inequities, American elites firmly embraced Charles Darwin and fell head over heels for Herbert Spencer.
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Charles Darwin’s scholarly circle grew immeasurably over the 1860s, encircling the entire Western world.
The Origin of Species
even changed the life of Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton. The father of modern statistics, Galton created the concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean and blazed the trail for the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data. In
Hereditary Genius
(1869), he used his data to popularize the myth that parents passed on hereditary traits like intelligence that environment could not alter. “The average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own,” Galton wrote. He coined the phrase “nature versus nurture,” claiming that nature was undefeated. Galton urged governments to rid the world of all naturally unselected peoples, or at least stop them from reproducing, a social policy he called “eugenics” in 1883.
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Darwin did not stop his adherents from applying the principles of natural selection to humans. However, the largely unknown co-discoverer of natural selection did. By 1869, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace professed that human spirituality and the equal capacity of healthy brains took humans outside of natural selection. Then again, as Wallace made a name for himself as the most egalitarian English scientist of his generation, he still professed European culture to be superior to any other.
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Darwin attempted to prove once and for all that natural selection applied to humans in
Descent of Man
, released in 1871. In the book, he was all over the place as he related race and intelligence. He spoke about the “mental similarity between the most distinct races of man,” and then claimed that “the American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named.” He noted that he was “incessantly struck” by some South Americans and “a full-blood negro” acquaintance who impressed him with “how similar their minds were to ours.” On racial evolution, he said that the “civilized races” had “extended, and are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take the place of the lower races.” A future evolutionary break would occur between “civilized” Whites and “some ape”—unlike like the present break “between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” Both assimilationists and segregationists hailed
Descent of Man
. Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction.
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IN APRIL
1860,
De Bow’s Review
printed the results of a “search [for] a moral, happy, and voluntarily industrious community of free negroes.” The reporter apparently surveyed Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad, British Guiana, Antilles, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Thomas, St. John, Antigua, Peru, Mexico, Panama, Mauritius, England, Canada, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, but found that “no such community exists upon the face of the earth.”
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The proslavery magazine’s lead story that April 1860 spoke of “the Secession of the south and a new confederation necessary to the
preservation of constitutional liberty and social morality.” Not yet ready to secede from the Union, southern Democrats seceded from the Democratic Party and fielded Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential nominee for the 1860 election.
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Northern and southern Democrats came to their nominating conventions unwilling to moderate their views for the sake of victory, but moderation for victory headlined the Republican convention. Delegates came ready to erase the “Black Republican” label once and for all. Abraham Lincoln helped them do just that. His humble life appealed to working-class voters, his principled stance against slavery appealed to radicals, and his principled stance against Black voting and racial equality appealed to anti-Black Free Soilers. With their man in place, Republicans passed a platform that pledged
not
to challenge southern slavery. The pavement of the platform, what the Republicans intended to run on, was the declaration of freedom as “the normal condition of all the territories.”

Praising Lincoln as “a man of will and nerve,” Frederick Douglass refused to vote for him, knowing his horrible Illinois record on Black rights. William Lloyd Garrison ignored the promoters playing up Lincoln’s antislavery credentials. Lincoln would “do nothing to offend the South,” Garrison scoffed.
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