Monday, April 21, 2008

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: Racism as a justification for slavery

One doesn't need to be an economic determinist to recognize that economic changes had a great deal to do with generating shifts in the ideology used to justify human bondage. As Bruce Franklin writes in The Victim As Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (1978):

Slavery, as we now recognize, went through a fundamental change around 1830, completing its evolution from a predominantly small-scale, quasi-domestic institution appended to hand-tool farming and manufacture into the productive base of an expanding agricultural economy, utilizing machinery to process the harvested crops and pouring vast quantities of agricultural raw materials, principally cotton, into developing capitalist industry in the northern states and England. Prior to the 1830s, open assertions of the "permanent inferiority" of Blacks "were exceedingly rare." [quoting George Fredrickson] In fact, many eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century apologists for slavery defended it as a means of "raising" and "civilizing" the poor, benighted, childlike Negro. But in the 1830s there emerged in America a world-view based on the belief that Blacks were inherently a race inferior to whites, and as part of this world-view there developed a scientific theory of Blacks as beings halfway, or even less than halfway, between animals and white people. This was part of the shift of Blacks from their role as children, appropriate to a professedly patriarchal society which offered them the opportunity of eventual development into adulthood, into their role as subhuman beasts of burden, the permanent mainstay of the labor force of expanding agribusiness.
As Franklin explains, these pseudoscientific racist views were advocated in books like Richard Colfax's Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists, Consisting of Physical and Moral Proofs of the Natural Inferiority of the Negroes (1833) and Samuel George Morton's book Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844).

The late Stephen Jay Gould devotes a portion of his 1982 book The Mismeasure of Man to an discussion of Morton's work, which was based on craniometry, the study of skulls. Gould goes back to Morton's orginal physical data and re-examines it. What he found was that, even assuming that differences in cranial size in skulls was some kind of significant measure of intelligence (which we have long since known it is not), Morton had flat-out misinterpreted his own data. The skulls with which he worked showed "no significant differences among races" in terms of cranial size. Gould found that Morton had skewed his measurements and interpretations in line with his hypothesized ranking among the races.

But he also claimed that "I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation" in Morton's work. He believed from his examination of Morton's studies that the problems were due to Morton's "a priori conviction about racial ranking so poweful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines."

This line of thinking about racial differences was known as "polygeny". Gould writes about the public reception of such works:

The leading American polygenists differed in their attitude toward slavery. Most were Northerners, and most favored some version of Squier's quip: "[I have a] precious poor opinion of neggers...a still poorer one of slavery."
Yet another reminder that white supremacy, racism and hatred of the institution of slavery could go together, a reality which Lost Cause advocates find it convenient to obscure.

But the identification of blacks as a separate and unequal species had obvious appeal as an argument for slavery. Josiah Nott, a leading polygenist, encountered particularly receptive audiences in the South for his "lectures on niggerology" (as he called them). Morion's Crania Aegyptiaca received a warm welcome in the South ... One supporter of slavery wrote that the South need no longer be "so much frightened" by "voices of Europe or of Northern America" in defending its "peculiar institutions." When Morton died, the South's leading medical journal proclaimed (R. W. Gibbs, Charleston Medical Journal, 1851 ...): "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race."
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