Science, Religion, and Race

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Science, Religion, and Race

A Well-Ordered World . Enlightenment thinking encouraged Americans to make sense of their country and society, to discover the ordering principle that might explain the diversity they saw around them. One obvious, and troubling, example of diversity was skin color. The system of biological classification developed by Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus, used to name and categorize all living things by genus and species, was generally accepted by American scientists, but it posed difficult questions. While some believed that all human beings were of the same species, as Linnaeus suggested, others maintained that blacks and whites were of two different species (with the obvious implication that whites were superior). It was well known that the mating of animals of different species produced sterile offspring. The fact that no such reproductive problem resulted from the mixture of Caucasian and Negro parentage led some scientists to the conclusion that blacks and whites belonged to the same species. However, there were enough exceptions in the animal world to make this line of argument inconclusive.

Great Chain of Being . Another unifying principle, popularized in poetical form in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732), was the Chain of Being, in which all matter, from minerals to God, was categorized in hierarchical order. No gaps were allowed in the chain, for that would suggest that God had not executed his creation perfectly. Why then was there a huge gap between man and the closest beast, the orangutan? Did the Negro, some wondered, fill that gap? The biblical story of Genesis raised related questions: if all humankind derived from one set of parents, why was the Negro so different? Since science and religion were not considered incompatible, scientists and philosophers tried, with varying degrees of inconsistency, to find positions that reconciled the differences among their religious, scientific, and social dispositions.

Jefferson’s Unchanging Universe . As a scientist, Thomas Jefferson placed his faith in a well-ordered universe operating according to fixed laws. So firm was his belief in the Chain of Being and the unchangeable nature of the world since God’s perfect creation that he denied the possibility of extinction. “Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote in an attempt to prove that mammoths still existed, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” Yet Jefferson knew that to engage in scientific inquiry could mean encountering facts that did not fit his system. When confronted with evidence of seashells high in the Andes Mountains, he admitted that he could not explain how they got there. “Ignorance is preferable to error,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), “and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.”

Jefferson on Race . In addition to being a scientist, Jefferson was a Virginia slaveholder and refused to be pinned down on the subject of race. He was caught between his belief in a single perfect creation and his ideal of a free society, and his personal experience of Negro inferiority. “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only,” he wrote, “that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Despite his vagueness on the scientific basis of his assertion, Jefferson’s real opinion was clear.

THE BANNEKER-JEFFERSON CORRESPONDENCE

On 19 August 1791 Benjamin Banneker sent a long letter to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, along with a copy of his almanac. It was a bold plea to the author of the Declaration of Independence to apply the same sentiments of liberty to the Negro:

Sir, I am fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom, which I take with you on the present occasion; a liberty which Seemed to me Scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished and dignified station in which you Stand, and the almost general prejudice and prepossession, which is so prevalent in the world against those of my complexion.… It [needs no] proof here, that we are a race of Beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and Scarcely capable of mental endowments.
Sir, I hope … you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us; and that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that one universal Father hath given being to us all … and that however variable we may be in Society or religion, however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family.…
Sir, I freely and Chearfully acknowledge, that I am of the African race, and in that colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye;… I am not under that State of tyrannical thraldom, and inhuman captivity, to which too many of my brethren are doomed, but that I have abundantly tasted of the fruition of those blessings, which proceed from that free and unequalled liberty with which you are favored.…
Sir, Suffer me to recall to your mind that time, in which the Arms and tyranny of the British Crown were exerted, with every powerful effort, in order to reduce you to a State of Servitude.… This, Sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a State of Slavery.… It was now that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all Succeeding ages: “We hold these truths to be Self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.… But, Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges … that you should at the Same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.…
And now, Sir, I Shall conclude, and Subscribe my Self, with the most profound respect,
Your most Obedient humble Servant, Benjamin Banneker

Jefferson promptly replied, in a letter dated 30 August 1791, expressing his vague hope that something might be done about slavery as soon as circumstances might permit:

Sir, I Thank you sincerely for your letter of the 19^th instant, and for the Almanac it contained. No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth, that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced, for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will admit.
I have taken the liberty of sending your Almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and Member of the Philanthropic Society, because I considered it as a document, to which your whole color had a right for their justification, against the doubts which have been entertained of them.
I am with great esteem, Sir, your most obedient humble servant. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson’s letter to Banneker was reprinted and widely distributed, undoubtedly helping to publicize the Almanac. His letter to Condorcet was warmer and more personal regarding Banneker’s accomplishments:

I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the son of a black man born in Africa, and a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable mathematician.… He made an Almanac for the next year, which he sent me in his own hand writing, & which I enclose to you. I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him. Add to this that he is a very worthy & respectable member of society. He is a free man. I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.

Sources: Silvio A. Bedim, The Life of Benjamin Banneker (New York: Scribners, 1972).

Environmental Argument . Jefferson’s friend Dr. Benjamin Rush—an antislavery Philadelphian—working from a similar set of religious and scientific (but not social) beliefs, held to the theory that all mankind derived from the same creation and were originally white. In 1792 Rush made a presentation to the American Philosophical Society titled “Observations Intended to Favour a Supposition That the Black Color (As It is Called) of the Negroes Is Derived from the Leprosy.” Despite the total absence of scientific proof, Rush found his theory appealing, for it fit the prejudices of white European cultural superiority, while demonstrating that Negroes were on the same level of humanity with whites, but simply in need of a medical cure for their “disease.” Most scientists rejected Rush’s theory, yet many did believe that environmental factors accounted for differences in skin color. As Charles Crawford wrote in 1790, “the Negro is in every respect similar to us, only that his skin, or rather the skin of his ancestors, had been darkened by the sun.” In the environmental argument white was the “normal” color, and all others were inferior variations, but all mankind was one and equal. There were both social and scientific problems with the environmental thesis. It could be used by defenders of slavery to justify the belief that nature had condemned the Negro to toil under conditions that whites could not tolerate. And it came under scientific attack because it could not explain why whites who lived in Africa for several generations became only somewhat darker, and still produced white children. In his satirical Modern Chivalry (1792) Hugh Henry Brackenridge neatly sidestepped the environmental question by proposing the idea that while Adam was a white man, Eve was black. “For what necessity to make them both of the same color, feature, and form,” he wrote, “when there is beauty in variety.” No one took Brackenridge seriously, yet here was a curiously logical explanation for the diversity of mankind.

Samuel Stanhope Smith . A Presbyterian minister, president of Yale, and “natural philosopher,” Samuel Stanhope Smith was a major figure in this social and intellectual controversy. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1785, he wrote An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787), in which he asserted that mankind originated in Asia as a single species. Over time, differences in climate and living conditions produced physical variations. If it were otherwise, Smith argued, no ordered scientific system would be possible: “the science of morals would be absurd; the law of nature and nations would be annihilated; and human nature … could not be comprehended in any system.” Smith had neatly combined Lin-naean order, environmental theory, and Genesis to support the antislavery cause; but even this skillful argument implied that Negroes would attain true equality only when they lost their blackness. To the majority of scientists and moral philosophers America was a country for white people. Yet despite the lack of consensus on the race question, Americans were beginning to apply disciplined scientific methods to grapple with complex intellectual problems with profound social implications.