Josiah
Nott (March 31, 1804 - March 31, 1873) was
a leading exponent of polygenism and figure in the American School of
Ethnology, which dominated the scientific understanding of race in
the decades before Charles Darwin. Josiah Nott investigated yellow
fever, edited the first translated Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on
the Inequality of Races, and with George Gliddon published Types
of Mankind, a tribute to their mentor Samuel G. Morton and
summation of their evidence that the races were separate species of
Homo sapiens.
Nott
was born in Columbia, South Carolina. His father served in the U.S.
Congress and on the South Carolina Court of Appeals. He received his
medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and traveled
widely in Europe studying Natural History and furthering his medical
knowledge. Returning to the United States, he settled in Mobile and
into a flourishing practice and a social life noted for its
indulgences in horses and dalliances.
Nott
argued against the theory that yellow fever, the most serious health
threat of his day, was caused by a miasma, suggesting instead that an
insect such as the mosquito was the cause.
Nott did not, however, venture into the question of human variety
until the deeply flawed Census of 1840 suggested that slavery was a
protective and civilizing institution.
George
Cuvier, who dominated Natural History
during Nott's time, argued that inter-fertility, or the ability to
produce viable offspring, marked the boundary between a variety and a
species. The existence of the mulatto
seemed to undermined the notion of separate species. In Nott's
first venture into the species question he argued that mulatto were
the product of the crossing of “two distinct species --- as a mule
from the horse and ass.” Later, Nott
added that mulattos proved the polygenist
theory by demonstrating the permanence of racial characteristics and
were a subject to a morbid “Law of Hybridity” leaving them weak
and degenerate.
Nott
had good company in pursuing the polygenist
theory: Samuel G. Morton, George Squire,
John De Bow, and later Louis Agassiz also
championed the fixity of species and the
multiple origins of human races. They argued for fixity from the
evidence derived from the study of hybrids, crania, Egyptology, and
philology; they differed only over the
origins of the races. Some like Agassiz argued that the fixity of
racial types was evidence of Design, while others like Nott were
stanch atheists, but all agreed with Nott that scientific inquiry
should be freed from the constraints of religious dogma and based
solely upon evidence, direct experience,
and experiment.
Nott
and George R. Gliddon published their
summation of polygenist theory in Types
of Mankind in 1850. Intended as a memorial to Morton, and with
an introductory essay by Agassiz, Types of Mankind was
recognized as a definitive statement of current scientific knowledge
of human variety, and established race as the explanation for human
variety. Nott and Gliddon, whom he had always considered more of a
showman than a serious scholar and scientist, then parted ways. Nott
later made a limited contribution to a second volume Indigenous
Races, but without his full participation, it did not carry the
weight of the first. Nott had, however, established polygenism as
the generally agreed scientific understanding of human variety.
Nott
now turned to scientific debates, lectures, and articles. The only
scientific opponent of polygenism ---the abolitionist
churches were certainly united against the theory --- was Rev. John
Bachman of Charleston, friend and co-author
of James Audubon. Nott dismissed Bachman's
scientific objections as disguised religious positions
from a hypocritical “parson.” After all, Bachman supported
slavery as well as he, and did not question the moral superiority of
the European type. The proponents of monogenism and polygenism did
not question the scientific validity of race, and following from
that, the scientific validity of racial hierarchies. Tellingly, Nott
published the first translation of Gorbineau's Essay on the
Inequality of the Races.
The
scientific ideology of race was established in the years before
Darwin intervened to finally put an end to the dominance of
polygenism (Canguilhem, 1988). Nott immediately recognized Darwin's
Origins as finally giving monogenesis an unshakable scientific
basis, and he gracefully admitted that Darwin's answer to the species
question had settled the matter. He took what solace
he could in Darwin's Origins being “a capital dig at the
parsons.” Nott did not abandon his views on race even as he
acknowledged that, had he had the evidence available to him that
Darwin had amassed, he would not have published Types of Mankind.
Having
lost two sons in the war, one from wounds at Gettysburg, Nott could
not endure a South transformed, he said, into “Negroland.” He
settled in New York City, drawn he said to a place “without morals,
without scruples, without religion, & without niggers.” There
he rebuilt his practice, joined Squire's Anthropological Institute,
and flourished until age and health forced
his final return to Mobile.
Nott's
importance in developing and promoting the theory of polygenism left
an enduring legacy of race as a scientific ideology. Darwin believed
natural selection would cause polygenism “to die a silent and
unobserved death” (Darwin, 188), but its supporters continued to
justify using race as a explanation for human variety. Nott and the
American School's legacy is not entirely negative. They sought to
science to exist within a spirit of free inquiry. That this inquiry
would from 1830-1859 give slavery the stamp of scientific approval is
more than ironic. Nott's work demonstrates how scientific
disciplines constantly produce regimes of truth, and that these are
never separate from the social relations of the time and space. Nott
and his fellow polygenists constructed a regime of truth around
slavery which would reemerge most obviously in the middle of the 20th
Century, and endure to the present in our everyday administrative and
technical understanding of race. That it has continued down to today
as both a scientific ideology and a common sense notion owes much to
the work of Josiah Nott.
Bibliography
Canguilhem,
Georges. 1988. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the
Life Sciences. Cambridge: MIT
Press
Darwin,
Charles. 1998 [1874]. The Descent of Man. New York:
Prometheus Books.
Nott,
Josiah. 1846. “Unity of the Human Race,” Southern
Quarterly Review,
IX (17): 1-57.
Nott,
Josiah. 1848. “Yellow Fever Contrasted with
Billious Fever --- Reason for Believing it a Disease of Sui
Generis... Probably Insect or Animalcular
Origin,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, 4,
563-601.
Nott,
Josiah. 1850. “Ancient and Scripture Chronology”
Southern Quarterly Review II
( 4): 385-426.
Nott,
Josiah. 1851. An
Essay on the Natural History of Mankind, Viewed in Connection with
Negro Slavery delivered before the Southern Rights Association, 14th
December, 1850. Mobile:
Dade, Thompson, 1851.
Nott,
Josiah. 1852. “Geographical Distributions of
Animals and the Races of Man” New Orleans Medical and Surgical
Journal, IX.
Nott,
Josiah. 1853. “Aboriginal Races of America”
Southern Quarterly Review, VIII (3).
Nott,
Josiah and George R. Gliddon, 1855. Types
of Mankind: or Ethnological Researches, based upon the Ancient
Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their
Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical history: illustrated
by selections from the unedited papers of Samuel George Morton and by
additional contributions from Prof. L. Agassiz, LL.D., W. Usher,
M.D., and Prof. H. S. Patterson, M.D. Philadelphia, London:
Lippincott Gramoo & co., Trubner & co., 1855.
Stanton,
William. 1960. The Leopards Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward
Race in America, 1815-1859. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Gould,
Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man, revised
and expanded. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
B.
Ricardo Brown, Ph. D.
Associate
Professor of Cultural Studies
Pratt
Institute
New
York
A
version of this appeared in The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism.
Macmillan Press, 2007.
See also:
Related posts from this blog:
A Short Biography of John Bachman (1790-1874)
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2011/07/short-biography-of-john-bachman-1790.html
Diversity, Culture, Theory, and Data: Science on Human Variety.
B. Ricardo Brown and Christopher X J. Jensen
SLAS Faculty Research Seminar
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2011/11/diversity-culture-theory-and-data.html
Maria Martin Bachman's sketches and paintings for Audubon: On-line Exhibition from the Charleston County Public Library
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2011/02/maria-martin-bachmans-sketches-and.html
Audubon's Birds and some often Overlooked Contributions of Women to Natural History
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2010/12/audubons-birds-and-some-often.html
Podcast - Charleston's Women Naturalists: Jennifer Scheetz, Archivist, Charleston Museum
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2012/04/podcast-charlestons-women-naturalists.html
Comment II on “Gould versus Morton”: Morton’s Crania Collection in the Context of the Final Decades of Natural History, Part One.
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2011/07/comment-ii-on-gould-versus-morton.html
