Audubon's description of the habits and horrific destruction of the Carolina Parakeet (aka Carolina Parrot)

Audubon's description of the habits and horrific destruction of the Carolina Parakeet -- aka Carolina Parrot -- (Conuropsis carolinensis).

https://twitter.com/LostSpeciesDay/status/966274836090834944

February 21st marked the 100th anniversary of the death of the last captive Carolina Parrot in the Cincinnati Zoo.  North America's only parrot, once numbering in the millions and inhabiting large portions of the eastern United States, the reasons for its decline are well summarized by @GrrlScientist in her Forbes article: “What Happened to America's only Parrot?”

“....North America lost its only endemic parrot species after the arrival of European settlers, and this loss was likely due to a combination of factors, particularly wholesale habitat destruction and unrelenting persecution.”

https://twitter.com/GrrlScientist/status/966397562080104449

 At the blog for the University of South Carolina's Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Michael Weisenburg in his “The Last Carolina Parakeet” notes that “....the Carolina Parakeet was only first scientifically described in English in 1731 in Mark Catesby’s two volume work Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands published in 1731 and 1743.” He also notes the writings of Ron Rash on species loss in the Carolinas:

“Southern author Ron Rash, whose archive was acquired by the Irvin Department in 2017, often writes about species that, though once plentiful in the Carolinas, have become extinct due to man’s destruction.  He is particularly interested in the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet.  He often laments its decimation in his works. In his 2002 Raising the Dead Rash summarizes his feelings of loss and well as the loss to us all in his poem "Carolina Parakeet":



Though once plentiful enough
to pulse an acre field, green
a blue sky, they were soon gone,
whole flocks slaughtered in a day,
though before forever lost
found last here, in these mountains
so sparsely settled a man
late as 1860 might
look up from new-broken land
and glimpse that bright vanishing.”

https://twitter.com/UntilDarwin/status/966408874000617474

By the time that Audubon described the Carolina Parrot, its numbers were already in decline from hunting and habitat destruction.  His account of the actions of humans and the reactions of the birds to the humans that were attempting to eradicate them is just a portion of his description of the species.  The full text of Audubon's description, and a high resolution version of Audubon's painting is available from the Audubon Society at http://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/carolina-parrot

“They visit the mulberries, pecan-nuts, grapes, and even the seeds of the dog-wood, before they are ripe, and on all commit similar depredations. The maize alone never attracts their notice. Do not imagine, reader, that all these outrages are borne without severe retaliation on the part of the planters.

So far from this, the Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds, as if conscious of the death of their companions, sweep over their bodies, screaming as loud as ever, but still return to the stack to be shot at, until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammunition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours, and have procured a basketfull of these birds at a few shots, in order to make choice of good specimens for drawing the figures by which this species is represented in the plate now under your consideration....

Our Parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen. At that period, they could be procured as far up the tributary waters of the Ohio as the Great Kenhawa, the Scioto, the heads of Miami, the mouth of the Manimee at its junction with Lake Erie, on the Illinois river, and sometimes as far north-east as Lake Ontario, and along the eastern districts as far as the boundary line between Virginia and Maryland. At the present day, very few are to be found higher than Cincinnati, nor is it until you reach the mouth of the Ohio that Parakeets are met with in considerable numbers. I should think that along the Mississippi there is not now half the number that existed fifteen years ago....”

--- Audubon, John James. 1840. The Birds of America: from drawings made in the United States and their territories. New York: J. J. Audubon; Philadelphia: J.B. Chevalier.

Of course, it is important to note that Audubon personally collected or was sent specimen depicted in The Birds of North America, and so the Carolina Parrots he depicts in his painting as vibrant and living, were in fact, dead when he sketched and painted them.

Credit: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History

Related Posts:

Maria Martin Bachman's sketches and paintings for Audubon: On-line Exhibition from the Charleston County Public Library
Audubon's Birds and some often Overlooked Contributions of Women to Natural History
A Short Biography of John Bachman (1790-1874)
Podcast - Charleston's Women Naturalists: Jennifer Scheetz, Archivist, Charleston Museum
The "American School": A brief timeline of the Monogenist/Polygenist Debate.
Notes on Royal Society’s “Types of Mankind” post
Review of America’s Other Audubon (Brain Pickings Blog)
Blue Jays in Audubon Magazine: Slings and Arrows: Why Birders Love to Hate Blue Jays

Darwin, Slavery, and Science (2009)

Darwin, Slavery, and Science (draft)
for The Civil War and Reconstruction Era: 1850s-1877 in the series Conflicts in American History, edited by Brian L. Johnson and Edward J. Blum. Manly, 2009.

In an era of revolutions, tucked away on the Down House estate, Darwin was the most reclusive of revolutionary figures. His theories were based upon direct observation, rather than philosophical speculation. Yet his views on the origin and variation of species transformed our understanding of natural and human history. While Darwin's work is often seen in terms of its conflict with Christian doctrines on creation and design, this was not the controversy that Darwin sought to engage. The Biblical chronology had been under siege for quite some time. The great naturalists that preceded him--- Linneaus, Cuvier, Blumenbach, and Lamarck--- all placed humans in the natural order, and the wide variety of new species of plants and animals, and new varieties of humans, confronting Europeans on their voyages of discovery and conquest, scientific research came to center on what was referred to as the species question. What could explain the rich variety of species found in the world? Why is there such variety to a divinely created and designed world? If the variety of nature was too great to allow one to answer these questions, then humans could serve as a model. If we could understand why humans vary, then we would have the key to the species question. A decade before the publication of the Origin of Species, the American craniologist Samuel G. Morton stated flatly that “the question of the origin of species is of the human species.” In the years between 1830 and 1859, a new scientific theory of human origins known as polygenesis ---which held that humans were divided into races,each with a separate origin and with fixed characteristics--- had come to dominate the understanding of human origins. Advocated most vigorously by a group of naturalists and doctors that came to be known as the American School, the polygenic theory of human origins was used by many as scientific justification for slavery and used against the abolitionists who often turned to the Biblical account of humans as having one single origin, or monogenesis, to support their cause. Although Darwin's work is often associated with the challenge it posed to Christian doctrine, this was not the opponent Darwin had in mind when he wrote the Origin of Species. His scientific intervention was against the polygenic theory and its implicit justification of slavery. To do this, Darwin proposed scientific, and not religious, monogenic theory of the origin and variation of species. Although humans are not mentioned at all in the work, its argument led to an unavoidable conclusion that humans are one species. The scientific foundation for slavery was ripped away, much to Darwin's satisfaction.

The American School, associated with such naturalists and doctors such as Morton, Josiah Nott,George Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz were perhaps the first American scientist to be fully recognized by their European peers. By 1850, the American School's polygenic theory had succeeded in challenging the Biblical chronology of the history of the earth and its inhabitants. Freed from doctrine, the American School hailed a new era of “free scientific inquiry” into human origins was upon us. The proponents of the American School elaborated the polygenic theory with such rigor that it was taken as the accepted scientific truth in the two decades before the publication of the Origin.  

The debate between the monogenists and polygenists was between two powerful explanations human variety. It would be simplistic to think that the polygenic/monogenic debate was between pro and anti-slavery advocates who wanted to wrap themselves in the veneer of scientific respectability. This debate went to the very core of the ethics of scientific inquiry. Supporters of slavery could be found on each side, as could abolitionists. The monogenist and co-author with James Audubon, the Rev. John Bachman of Charleston supported slavery, while those opposed to slavery included George Squire, polygenists and founder of the New York Anthropological Society.  

It is often uncritically accepted that the ideas and concepts Darwin brought together so masterfully in the Origin of Species had been “in the air” as part of the “spirit of the age.” But was everything already neatly in place and pointing to the same inevitable conclusion? Was Darwin's work the mere assembling and making intelligible insights already available? What is certain is that Natural History had reached a crisis amidst the disputes over fixity, variation, and classification. If a puzzle was before Darwin, it had been laid before him by the polygenists.

Darwin purposely avoided the use of the term evolve or evolution until the very last sentence in order to avoid any confusion of his work with the already well know use of the term. Evolution at the time of Origin of Species was most often used in the sense of an inevitable and determined unfolding over time of characteristics already present from the beginning. The homunculus, or the little man  in the head of each sperm, best represented this type of evolutionary view: “all future generations had been created in the ovaries of Eve or testes of Adam, enclosed like Russian dolls, one within the next---a homunculus in each of Eve’s ova, a tinier homunculus in each ovum of the homunculus, and so on.” Darwin redefined evolution to mean indeterminate change over time, i.e., change directed only by the needs of the individual to survive its struggle for existence and its ability of the species to adapt and vary in the course of the struggle for life. Instead of a movement towards an end or a higher stage, the history of nature became the struggle of life to perpetuate itself, in part through “natural selection” ---defined by Darwin as “the preservation of slight changes.”

Darwin put to rest the scientific discourse on the species question, which dominated the study on human origins. Darwin's work was grounded not only in the elements that he carried forward --- the importance of the fossil record, embryology, and rudimentary organs --- but also in the debates and discourses which he would either transform or destroy. The Origin of Species asks the central question of Darwin's time: What explains the origins and variety of species? That variation exists is obvious to any observer, Darwin notes at the beginning of his work. In 1842, a reviewer of recent polygenic works was led to begin by asking “[i]n surveying the globe in reference to the different appearances of mankind, the most extraordinary diversities are apparent to the most superficial observer.... Hence arises the question ---  Have all these diverse races descended from a single stock?” Human variety held the key to the species question precisely because the question always referred to human variety,and because Linneaus, Cuvier, and Lamarck had the wisdom to place humans in the animal kingdom.  Variation in one could explain variation in all because the process was at work on all. The struggle for life points to a commonality that is fundamentally genealogical. Darwin's theory, though, was neither eugenic nor teleological; and for him genealogy rather than Spirit connected all life.  

The Origin is structured as an argument for the theory. It begins with an exposition on variation as it exists under domestication, and without the intervention of humans. Instead of fixity, Darwin's takes variation to be the norm: individuals, even those classified as belonging to the same species vary across time and space. Variation is the central theme and the essential product of the struggle for life,and variation is generated by the struggle. Natural selection, amongst other forces is the basis of this law of variability. At the heart of nature rests variation. Life, embroiled in the struggle for existence, maintains itself through variation.

The remaining portion of the Origin is given over to anticipating objections to the theory.  Instinct, especially discussed in terms of slave-making ants and mutualistic aphid/ant relationships, hybridity approached as the permanent production of variety, and not as a violation of fixity. Other  problems of the geological record (fossils and catastrophe and extinction); the succession of organic beings (preformism, teleology) and geographic distribution (design and special creation) are addressed as possible areas from which objections will be heard. In spite of these difficulties, or perhaps because of them, Darwin proposes a new science arising from genealogy, morphology (the comparative study of function, behavior, and environment), embryology, and the study of rudimentary organs. This is the structure of the Origin which reveals the transvaluation of Natural History into the science of life. "All true classification is genealogical, that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike." Darwin’s  genealogical tree of evolution represents the history of Nature, and that species are an expression of continuity, but also of this discontinuity of past extinctions and adaptations. 

History is not the striving of different species for supremacy, but the conflict within one species in particular as it confronts its own conditions of life. To Darwin, the torments of the rest of nature are rare and brief, only humans have learned to make suffering itself into a way of living. To see this, one needed only to observe, he often remarked, the torment of animals under the whip of the driver, or the knife of the vivisectionist,or the wars and enslavement of humans themselves.

Darwin did not engage in the active defense of his theory, leaving it to his friends Thomas Huxley and Asa Gray to respond to the more heated attacks. There were many reasons for this,including his health, which had been severely compromised during the five year circumnavigation of the H.M.S. Beagle.  It was not known at the time what caused his chronic illness and bouts of intense pain, but it is now speculated that he contracted a disease akin to sleeping sickness while on his excursions inland. Much of Darwin's work was shaped by his voyage. He had begun the voyage a believer in fixity and creation, and by the end had already begun to sketch the outlines of the theory. He had also begun the voyage as an ardent opponent of slavery, and related how he was often told that experiences in the slave countries would prove to him the inferiority of the Negro. He wrote to his sister that his experiences in Brazil in particular only hardened his opposition to slavery.  
 
Darwin was not the Beagle's naturalist, but more the social companion for Captain Fitz-Roy. British naval commanders were drawn from the upper class and it was forbidden for them to socialize even with their own junior officers. It was a lonely life for a ships captain, made all the more apparent by the suicide of the Beagle's first Captain while sheltering in a harbor in the Straits of Magellan. Fitz-Roy took Darwin even though he was concern, given his interest in craniology, that the shape of Darwin's nose suggested that he was not up to the hardships of the voyage. Reluctantly, Fitz-Roy took Darwin aboard and they shared the cramped quarters of the ship for five years. The smallness of the cabin became even more pronounced when the two discovered their opposing views of slavery. Fitz-Roy shared the common view that slavery was a necessary evil because of the inherent inferiority of the enslaved races. Slavery would ultimately raise the Negro to civilization, he thought. Fitz-Roy was himself returning three captives taken from Tierra del Fuego during the previous voyage to be trained as missionaries and potential colonial agents. The attempt ended in failure and tragedy.

 
But it was in Brazil that Darwin observed slavery for himself, and his experiences never left him. His son Francis remembered that his father was often awaken by nightmares of his Brazilian experiences, and he would become enraged at the mere suggestion that slavery might have any redeeming value. Those who thought so, he wrote, had never put themselves in the position of the slave. When his friend and mentor Charles Lyell wrote to Darwin about the forced separation of a slave family, Darwin's response was brutal, though once he realized that Lyell was only relating the views of another, he excused himself by saying that only the subject of slavery made his emotions get the better of him.  During the period between Darwin's return from the Beagle and the publication of his major works, it could not have been lost on anyone at the time ---especially one who like Darwin maintained a voluminous international correspondence--- that they were seeing the transformation of scientific knowledge --- and the “Spirit of the Age” is really only the structure of knowledge and its disciplines.Physics and chemistry were already becoming the province of specialists. The laboratory was becoming the locale for organizing the production of scientific knowledge. The rapid foundation of new learned associations and societies reflected both the move towards specialization and the speedier dissemination of results and theories. Science had finally turned to the study life. Just one governing principle remained to be overthrown:  the view of Man as the apex of creation. In this regard, the Origin of Species is a profound argument for human humility. The history of the Earth could no longer be thought of as identical with the history of Man, but it was now possible to assert that it was key to understanding the history of life. 

“As all the organic beings, extinct and recent, which have ever lived on this earth have to be classed together, and as all have been connected by the finest gradations,the best, or indeed, if our collections were nearly perfect, the only possible arrangement, would be genealogical. Descent being on my view the hidden bond of connection which naturalists have been seeking under the term of the natural system.”

 The Tree of Life was transformed into the tree of genealogical affinities: “I believe this simile largely speaks the truth” Darwin modestly stated. The Tree of Life, as well as his evocation of the “tangled bank,” represented a dynamic and indeterminate Nature.

Darwin executed more than just a rhetorical maneuver with the naming of The Origin of Species. Darwin choose to avoid the question of human origins, because to do so would have been to play on his opponents board and make his work a part of the monogenic-polygenic debate. To make a break with that controversy, Darwin answered the species question by demanding that we consider humans to be just one of an infinite variety of living organisms, all of which were created by the same processes that could even now be seen at work. Darwin shifts man from a central place in understanding variety in nature, and so produces a break with the polygenic/monogenic debate. If humans can tell us so much about the origins of the vast cacophony of nature, then there was no reason to privilege humans as the special key to knowledge. Any species could answer some or all of the question of origins. Darwin combined the genealogical classification of species with the gradual accumulation of small variations --- “a grain of sand is enough to tip the balance”--- and a theory of  population. With these he destroyed the theory of the fixity of species and the multiple origins of humans. Even Cuvier's theory of a series of creations could no longer be accepted.

Darwin was profoundly materialistic. With his intervention into the monogenic/polygenic controversy, the fixed, closed systems of classification of Natural History could no longer adequately describe the world. Now the Earth could only be seen as a planet where life “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” This,the last sentence of the book, is the only instance in the Origin of Species where evolution is used. It is significant that it is used in this passage to juxtapose the fixity of the law of gravity with the plasticity of descent with modification, a plasticity that is due in large part to the workings of chance.  

Most simply put, Darwin made the question of human origins a matter of the origin of any species.  Humans were no longer at the center. Linneaus may have placed Man in the chart of classification and as the measure and explanation for its origins, but Darwin placed humans in the genealogical tree of life, that is, directly in nature itself, and allowed that other species shall now explain the origin of man.  Darwin's work opens us to the infinity of nature, and makes humans just one of many species joined in life's great struggle for existence “whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity.” 
 
We should not think of Darwin's intervention as the triumph of reason over false-science, for with the new theory came also new forms of knowledge such as degeneracy and eugenics, and new forms of control that relied on new systems of classification which never quite left behind those of the late period of Natural History. These were not new forms of unreason, and neither was polygenesis merely a false and wretched knowledge that was a perversion of reason. It constituted scientific reason in relation to Man. Our present everyday knowledge of race owes much to it, but so too the the same degree do the sciences of life such as biology and sociology insofar as they came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to buttress the eugenic movement.  
 
Life and its struggle now occupied the center, and the displacement of Man could not be sustained under the guise of Natural History. New fields such as biology, sociology, and ecology would now supplant Natural History with the new study of life. The end of Natural History came along with the end of the dispute between the monogenists and polygenists. The polygenic theory was turned on its head by Darwin's account of a single common line of descent shaped by natural selection, among other conditions of life.

Darwin does not directly refer to polygenism until ten years later in the Descent of Man, and by then the polygenists had already been eclipsed by the combined forces of Darwin's critique and the American Civil War. That we do not remember the monogenic/polygenic debate is what Darwin hoped would be one of his most notable achievements.

Notes on Royal Society’s “Types of Mankind” post

Marginal Notes on Royal Society’s “Types of Mankind”: science and race in the 18th and 19th centuries 
http://royalsociety.org/exhibitions/2012/black-history-month/types-of-mankind/

Of course it is always important to remember that the errors of the past as well as the triumphs (or heroes, which has been the subject of a series of recent blog posts elsewhere: see, e.g., posts by  Thony Christie ‏ @rmathematicus and  Rebekah Higgitt @beckyfh  "Why whiggish won't do" ) often do not in hindsight seem so triumphal or heroic.  The Royal Society’s post coincided with the death of J. P. Rushton and so serves to remind us that the errors of the past do not simply “go way”.  So it is good that the Royal Society blog chose to bring attention to Josiah Nott and George R. Gliddon’s 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 and the polygenist scientific ideology which like that of the eugenicists still haunt us.

And this is a good reason to spend a few moments adding some marginal notes to the Royal Society’s post because it is difficult to address such issues, especially when the prompt is Black History Month(*) with its competing audiences and demands.

Perhaps it is a result of competing demands and audiences – as  is so often the case! – that some aspects of polygenism are not always so obvious in the post.  It is easy to overemphasize either the discontinuities and continuities of the polygenic theory when we try to make sense of its place in classical Natural History and later Biology (and Sociology, too).  There are aspects of Natural History that are very familiar to us and yet are also indicative of fundamentally different ways of understanding the world.  Though it is tempting to simply project categories such as biology and figures such as the scientist into the past, classical Natural History was not the study of life and the figure of the scientist as we know it did not exist.  The scientist as a term appears at the highpoint of classical Natural History, but it is not until we have the study of life that we can finally recognize the scientist as we know it.(**)  Instead of the conflation of time and perspectives found in the initial paragraph, it would be better to go further and understand the “study of race” and the catalogs of differences generated by such studies as having more than simply fascinated the 18th and 19th centuries: it was a central object of Natural History.  The “study of race” consolidated race as a object of rational scientific analysis within the confines of classical Natural History just as it does today in the case of race and biology.  The authority of Natural History as a science derived in part from its offer of satisfactory “systematic rules to describe and explain the differences” European nation-states found during their global expansion.  “Race and racial differences” became the means to systematically understand human variety, and provide an answer the Species Question. 

Forgetting this is one reason why it appears to us that “discussions of race have always been tied up with perceptions of morality, intelligence, and civilization” because race has been used since the 17th-18th centuries as the means to make sense of differences and to legitimize moralities and scientific ideologies.  So it is only correct to say that race has “always been tied up with perceptions of morality, intelligence, and civilization” precisely because it appears alongside and within those “perceptions” (i. e., social relations).  After all, race is itself a scientific ideology in Canguilhem’s sense of the term: 

“For many scholars the notion of scientific ideology is still controversial.  By it I mean a discourse that parallels the development of a science and that, under the pressure of pragmatic needs, makes statements that go beyond what has actually been proved by research.  In relation to science itself it is both presumptuous and misplaced.  Presumptuous because it believes that the end has been reached when research in fact stands at the beginning.  Misplaced because when the achievements of science actually do come, they are not in the areas where the ideology thought they would be, nor are they achieved in the manner predicted by the ideology” (Canguilhem Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, pp. 57-58).

So it is more correct to say that race has “always” played its present role only if one takes as one’s historical era the  c.17th - 20th centuries.

Often the discussion of human variety is taken out of this historical and social context so as to be seen as a choice between a “purely biological concept’ and “at least in part – a social and cultural construction”.  Rather than this simple binary relation, Nature and Society are dialectically related, i. e., they are mutually constitutive.  The one would be impossible without the other, and in our time the fields of biology, anthropology, psychology, and sociology mark this relation through their incessant search for human nature.  Understanding this is key to understanding how race so fascinating to Naturalists and why it seemed to hold the answer to the Species Question.

It was consistent with the work the tendencies of the preceding work in natural History and medicine that Nott and Gliddon asserted that “the difficulties respecting the races of men are not peculiar to the question of man, but involve the investigation of the whole animal kingdom”.  If we could understand the mechanism and meaning of human variety, it was believed, then we could understand variety in nature as a whole.  The polygenic theory – that the races represented five different species with separate origins and with fixed characteristics – was already the accepted view when Nott and Gliddon wrote Indigenous Races. They had in fact contributed greatly to the success of the polygenic theory with their Types of Mankind as had Samuel Morton with his Crania Americana and Crania Aegyptica. 

This was the accepted approach to the Species Question in the years before the Origin of Species that species are fixed and that races constitute separate species with separate origins in either nature or creation. 
It may be of interest that Indigenous Races was the follow up to Types of Mankind,  which was a monumental work in terms of its contributors, scope, and dedication to Samuel G. Morton.  It ws the pinnacle of the work of the American School and the summation of the polygenic theory of human origins and the fixity of species.  It would only be pushed aside by Darwin’s Origin of Species,  a “capital dig at the parsons” Nott wrote in 1861.  As Darwin would later admit in the Descent of Man,  the polygenic theory had been the target of his on monogenic argument for descent with modification:  ‘... when the principle of evolution is generally accepted, as it surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death.’ (Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 235)  Indigenous Races came at the end of the polygenic era rather than at the beginning, which is an impression that the section might leave with a casual reader.  In fact, the following reference to Long’s 1774 History of Jamaica itself indicates that Nott and Gliddon came at the end of a long period of rational and scientific investigations.  It is between the publication of Types of Mankind and Indigenous Races that we discover Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines. 
   
Indigenous Races was for the most part the work of George Gliddon.  Nott was not interested in revisiting what he considered to be the established scientific fact of the multiple origins of the races, while  Gliddon was less a naturalist than a showman, popularizer, and former diplomat who idolized Samuel G. Morton to the point of robbing Egyptian tombs and graves for crania to send to Morton.  He died not long after the publication of Indigenous Races from fever having sought his fortune in Central America where he had gone frustrated that he had not been selected to implement one of his projects: a camel corp for the US army to deploy in the deserts of the Southwest.

From William Stanton’s The Leopard’s Spots, still one of the best works on the American School, on Indigenous Races ***

Nott blamed unfavorable reviews of Types of Mankind on Gliddon’s ‘very impolitic & undignified tone [in attacking religion],’ and expressed the wish that [George] Squire instead of Gliddon had been his collaborator.... Nott and Gliddon’s new book, Indigenous Races of the Earth, appeared in early 1857.  Nott was disgusted that ‘in spite of all sorts of pledges,’ Gliddon had ‘pitched into the Bible and [the] Parsons again,’ and hoped ‘most devoutly’ that he would ‘never hear the words Mono- & Polygenist again.  ‘I have no longer any doubt about his insanity on this subject,’ he wrote Squire.  Although hardly more sane on the subject himself, Nott was justified in his criticism of Indigenous Races – nearly all of which was written by Gliddon – as all ‘folly & confusion.”  The book is a great conglomeration of discourses and diatribes strung out with long and irrelevant digression and written in Gliddon’s style of ponderous ostentation.  Agassiz contributed a brief letter on geographical distribution; Joseph Leidy, who had no desire to become embroiled in the controversy, sent a short letter on paleontology; Alfred Maury, librarian of the French Institute, wrote a chapter on the philological evidence for diversity [of species]; Francis Pulszky, fellow of the Hungarian Academy and personal secretary to Loius Kossuth, contributed a letter on archeology; Dr. James Aitken Meigs, now curator of Morton’s collection, wrote a chapter on craniology; and Nott,complaining that he had exhausted his fund of information in Types of Mankind, contributed only one chapter, despite the fact that he was listed as co-author.  Gliddon wrote the rest.” (Stanton, pp.175-76.)

Nott’s attention had been drawn to the publication of Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inegalite just 2 years after Types of Mankind.  Nott sensed that the polygenic theory had so won the day that the dispute with religion would soon end in favor of the polygenists.  There was no reason to continue arguing with John Bachman (see related posts below) and others. 

...Nott was busy with another enterprise.  In 1856 he had a new acquaintance, a young Swiss immigrant named Henry Hotz, sometime Mobile [Alabama] newspaperman, secretary to the United States legation in Belgium, and later to be Confederate propogandist extraordinary in England and France.  Together they brought out a one-volume American edition of Arthur de Gobineau’s four-volume  Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines, the bible of nineteenth-century racists.  While Hotz translated, Nott evidently selected those passages which gave most support to his own position.  The book was dedicated ‘to the Statesmen of America,’ for Hotz thought instruction in ethnology especially important in America, which had long been the abode of three races and was rapidly becoming that of a fourth – the Chinese, who were streaming into California. (Stanton, pp.174-75.)

Like Types of Mankind, Gorbineau’s  Essai sur l’inegalite drew on Morton’s cranial studies and the appearance of these works and many others like them is an indication of the importance of the problem of human variety.  However, Gobineau and Nott disagreed about Morton’s work.  Gobineau may have  hierarchically arranged the races, but he, according to Nott, seriously misread Morton.  Gobineau relied on second hand accounts of Morton’s work and would not abandon his religious convictions, Nott pointed out, and did not have sufficient knowledge of Natural History.  Nott and Hotz together published their one volume abridgment of Gobineau’s  Essai sur l’inegalite with Nott adding an appendix correcting what he saw as Gobineau’s misunderstanding of Morton, Natural History, and polygenism.

Count Gobineau, therefore, accepts the existing diversity of races as at least an accomplished fact and draws lessons of wisdom from the plain teachings of history. Man with him ceases to be an abstraction; each race, each nation, is made a separate study, and a fertile but unexplored field is opened to our view.
Our author leans strongly towards a belief in the original diversity of races, but has evidently been much embarrassed in arriving at conclusions by religious scruples and by the want of accurate knowledge in that part of natural history which treats of the designation of species and the laws of hybridity; he has been taught to believe that two distinct species cannot produce perfectly prolific offspring, and therefore concludes that all races of men must be of one origin, because they are prolific inter se. My appendix will therefore be devoted mainly to this question of species....

Our author has taken the facts of Dr. Morton at second hand, and, moreover, had not before him Dr. Morton's later tables and more matured deductions....

Just as important to observe is Nott’s advocacy of free scientific inquiry:

Mr. Gobineau remarks (p. 361), that he has very serious doubts as to the unity of origin. “These doubts, however,” he continues, “I am compelled to repress, because they are in contradiction to a scientific fact, which I cannot refute—the prolificness of halfbreeds ; and secondly, what is of much greater weight with me, they impugn a religious interpretation sanctioned by the church.”

....I shall venture on a few remarks upon this last scruple of the author, which is shared by many investigators of this interesting subject.

‘The strict rule of scientific scrutiny,’ says the most learned and formidable opponent in the adversary's camp, ‘exacts, according to modern philosophers, in matters of inductive reasoning, an exclusive homage. It requires that we should close our eyes against all presumptive and exterior evidence, and abstract our minds from all considerations not derived from the matters of fact which bear immediately on the question. The maxim we have to follow in such controversies is  ‘fiat justitia, ruat coelum.’ [“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”] In fact, what is actually true, it is always desirous to know, whatever consequences may arise from its admission" (citing Prichard, Nat. Hist. of Man, p. 8. London, 1843)

To this sentiment I cheerfully subscribe: it has always been my maxim. Yet I find it necessary, in treating of this subject, to touch on its biblical connections, for although "we have great reason to rejoice at the improved tone of toleration, or even liberality which prevails in this country, the day has not come when science can be severed from theology, and the student of nature can calmly follow her truths, no matter whither they may lead. What a mortifying picture do we behold in the histories of astronomy, geology, chronology, cosmogony, geographical distribution of animals, &c.; they have been compelled to fight their way, step by step, through human passion and prejudice, from their supposed contradiction to Holy Writ. But science has been vindicated—their great truths hare been established, and the Bible stands as firmly as it did before. The last great struggle between science and theology is the one we are now engaged in—the natural history of man—it has now, for the first time, a fair hearing before Christendom, and all any question should ask is "daylight and fair play."

The Bible should not be regarded as a text-book of natural history. On the contrary, it must be admitted that none of the writers of the Old or New Testament give the slightest evidence of knowledge in any department of science beyond that of their profane contemporaries; and we hold that the natural history of man is a department of science which should be placed upon the same footing with others, and its facts dispassionately investigated. What we require for our guidance in this world is truth, and the history of science shows how long it has been stifled by bigotry and error. (Nott in Hotz/Gobineau, pp.505-6)

The study of race and the demand for “free scientific inquiry” are not easily disentangled and Nott’s call sounds at times suspiciously like the chants of scientists like Rushton, although Nott directed his demand towards tradition and religious authority while Rushton directed his towards rational inquiry itself.

Works such as Types of Mankind and Indigenous Races are just some of the many texts, institutions, and social relations that were important for defining race and its use as the basis for the classifications of human variety.  We find the Species Question permeating the great and minor works of Natural History, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries just as we find slavery and domination.

__________________
(*)  Black History Month – which for our purposes we should take to mean not only the history of Black people, but also the retrieval of the former truths that we would repress or forget.  Certainly this should be a consistent activity, just as Black history should not be ghettoized to one month a year.  At least, it is not, as in the United States, observed during the shortest month of the year.

(**) Some are attempting to reform Natural History and take it away from the Natural/travel log/memoirist writers, but this will be a fundamentally different Natural History, one whose practitioners will already be aware of the variability of species, natural & sexual selection, descent with modification, the expanded fossil record, genetics, the germ theory of disease, the unity of humans as one species, etc.  The list could be extended further, but that should suffice to note that these efforts will, if successful, be a very different Natural History.

(***) Stephen Jay Gould based the historical aspects of his Mismeasure of Man chapter on Morton on Stanton’s text.  Stanton provided a wealth of information and insights, but his purposes were not the same as Gould’s and Gould could have benefited from reading Morton, Nott, et al. in more detail. 

Canguilhem, Georges, 1988.  Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cussins, Jessica. "Race and Medicine guidelines Using Race in Medicine? Seven Guidelines for Doing so Responsibly"
http://www.biopoliticaltimes.org/article.php?id=6392

Gobineau, Arthur, comte de. 1853.  Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1884 ed.).  Paris : Firmin-Didot
http://archive.org/details/essaisurlingal01gobi

Gobineau, Arthur, comte de.  1856.  The moral and intellectual diversity of races, with particular reference to their respective influence in the civil and political history of mankind / from the French by Count A. De Gobineau; with an analytical introduction and copious historical notes by H. Hotz; to which is added an appendix containing a summary of the latest scientific facts bearing upon the question of unity or plurality of species by J. C. Nott (1856). J. B. Lippincott.
http://archive.org/details/moralintellectua00gobi

Long, Edward. 1774. The history of Jamaica or, General survey of the antient and modern state of the island: with reflections on its situation settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws, and government. London : T. Lownudes

http://archive.org/details/historyofjamaica02long

Morton, Samuel George and George Combe.  1839.  Crania americana; or, A comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North and South America. To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia, J. Dobson; London, Simpkin, Marshall & co.
http://archive.org/details/Craniaamericana00Mort

Morton, Samuel George. 1844. Crania Aegyptiaca: Or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography.  J. Penington
http://archive.org/details/craniaaegyptiac00mortgoog

Morton, Samuel George. 1840.  Catalogue of skulls of man and the inferior animals in the collection of Samuel George Morton.  Philadelphia : Printed by Turner & Fisher for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
http://archive.org/details/60411940R.nlm.nih.gov

Nott, Josiah Clark, 1804-1873; Gliddon, George R. (George Robins); Morton, Samuel George; Agassiz, Louis; Usher, William; Patterson, Henry S. (Henry Stuart). 1851.  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.
Philadelphia : J.B. Lippincott
http://archive.org/details/typesofmankindor01nott

Nott, Josiah Clark, 1804-1873; Gliddon, George R. 1857.  Indigenous races of the earth; or, New chapters of ethnological inquiry; including monographs on special departments. Philadelphia : J.B. Lippincott & Co.; [etc., etc.]
http://archive.org/details/cu31924029883752

Prichard, James Cowles and Edwin Norris. 1855.  The Natural History of Man: Comprising Inquiries Into the Modifying Influence of Physical and Moral Agencies of the Different Tribes of the Human Family.  Paris: H. Baillière.
http://archive.org/details/naturalhistorym00norrgoog

Stanton, William.  1960.  The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-1859.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


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

On Josiah Nott
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-josiah-nott.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

Maria Martin Bachman's sketches and paintings for Audubon: On-line Exhibition from the Charleston County Public Library

After I posted the other entries on Maria Martin, I realized that I neglected to refer to this outstanding series of pages from the Charleston County Public Library via the Charleston Museum. 

[May 2021 update:  The online exhibit has been taken down, but is still viable via the Internet Archive's Way back Machine: 

The surviving works by Maria Martin are to be found under arranged under the headings:

Fire Damaged Paintings: Gallery 1, Gallery 2, and Gallery 3.

Sketchbook Paintings: Gallery 1, Gallery 2.

Sketchbook Paintings: Unidentified Insects

Birds of America Paintings
These are well worth the time spent in viewing them. Below is one of the paintings from Audubon that that was in part painted by Maria Martin. Fittingly, it is of Bachman's Warbler, named by Audubon for her husband or perhaps for her as well.

Bachman's Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii)

The rare bush Maria Martin drew, Franklinia (Franklinia alatamaha) was named in honor of Benjamin Franklin.  Bachman's Warbler was one of several species of animals named by Audubon in honor of John Bachman.  Sadly, due to the advance of industrial forest management, Bachman's Warbler is thought to be extinct.  According to the National Audubon Society:

Since Western science discovered it in 1832, the Bachman's Warbler has been elusive for ornithologists and birdwatchers. Given that the last individual was confirmed alive in 1961, the Bachman's Warbler is probably extinct. A bright yellow-headed songbird with a black crown and throat patch, this insectivore preferred nesting in shrubs in bottomland hardwood forests and wintered in Cuba – a combination that rendered it extremely vulnerable to habitat destruction.

All of the Audubon painting that Maria Martin contributed to are here via the Charleston County Public Library and from it there is this the painting of the similarly named Bachman's Sparrow (Aimophila aestivalis) to which Maria Martin Bachman also contributed:

[Updated May 16, 2016; September 28, 2019]

Related posts:
Audubon's Birds and some often Overlooked Contributions of Women to Natural History

A Short Biography of John Bachman (1790-1874)

Podcast - Charleston's Women Naturalists: Jennifer Scheetz, Archivist, Charleston Museum  
The "American School": A brief timeline of the Monogenist/Polygenist Debate.

Notes on Royal Society’s “Types of Mankind” post
Review of America’s Other Audubon (Brain Pickings Blog)



 

Audubon's Birds and some often Overlooked Contributions of Women to Natural History

There was one of those interesting coincidences in the past weeks that reminded me of a neglected portion of the all too brief essay that is Until Darwin.  The first was the typically fine broadcast of  Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on Women and Enlightenment Science.  The second was the record breaking auction sale of Audubon's Birds of America (see Audubon's Birds of America: The world's most expensive book and Birds of America sets £7m sales record at Sotheby's). 

Maria Martin's life is one that is well described by Bragg and his guests.  As with most women of the era, advanced formal education was denied her.  On the other hand, science and research at the time was not something done in universities or laboratories, but in the home.  As the managers of the domestic space and through their relationships with their husbands or lovers, women had access to scientific research, often taking the lead but recieving little or no credit.

Charleston, with the steeple of St. John's Church, forms the backdrop
for Audubon's Long-Billed Curlew

 The same can be found in more recent academic works, particularly those of the mid-century before the days of PCs.  The preface for many books will end with a appreciation for the contribution of the spouse to the completion of the work, from the care of the household to "discussions" about the work to its actual editing and typing.

Here is an excerpt from Until Darwin on the connection of Maria Martin and Audubon.  At some point, it would be nice to write something more extensive on this topic.

Before Darwin, the great adversary of polygenism was John Bachman, although he is perhaps best remembered now for his collaboration and friendship with James Audubon. In the Jeffersonian tradition, he too devoted his effort to education, science, and service. Bachman worked tirelessly on a wide range of activities, all the while keeping up a busy ministry. He founded the small liberal arts Newberry College in Newberry, South Carolina. Clearly Natural History held a special importance for Bachman. Teaching at the College of Charleston, he joined the ‘Circle of Naturalists’. Charleston became one of the centers of Natural History, attracting such notables as Agassiz and Audubon. Bachman's association with Audubon began through an almost chance encounter and grew into a life-long friendship, including the marriage of two of Bachman's daughters to Audubon's sons. They spent a great deal of time together collecting along the coastal plain of South Carolina and disputing their divergent ways of life. Bachman often admonished Audubon for his love of ‘gog and wine and snuff’. Maria Martin Bachman, who had married Bachman after the death of her sister --- Bachman's first wife--- found in Audubon's friendship the opportunity to become a notable Natural History painter and illustrator. Many of the backgrounds and detailed vegetation illustrations which put Audubon's birds in context were painted by Maria Martin. Her contributions included the beautifully and accurately detailed entomological drawings that accompany Audubon's birds. This she learned on her on by studying the abundant specimen available to her as well as the drawings in Say's Entomology of North America. Her work with Audubon was common knowledge. One of her descendants noted in Charleston Receipts that ‘It was she who painted many of the backgrounds for Audubon's famous paintings’.97 All this while she gave birth to 14 children, suffered from tic douloureux, a nerve disease that produces a severe stabbing pain on one side of the face and is often triggered by the slightest touch or movement which causes the sufferer to wince involuntarily and can itself sometimes increase the severity of the attack. It is considered one of the most painful chronic conditions in found in humans. Audubon wrote of her that "Miss Martin with her superior talents, assists us greatly in the way of drawing; the insects she has drawn are, perhaps, the best I've seen."98
______
97.  Junior League of Charleston. Recipe for Soused Fish, in Charleston Receipts (Charleston, S.C.: Walker Evans & Cogswell Co., 1950), p. 72. . ‘Receipts’ rather than ‘recipes’, they say, ‘to designate time-honored dishes according to ancestral wishes’.
98.  Letter to Victor Audubon, December 24, 1833, in F. H. Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of his Life and Times, vol. 2 (New York: Appleton, 1917), p. 62. See also Bonta, M.M., Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1991).

And this excerpt as well from my entry on John Bachman in the Dictionary of Early American Philosophers (Thoemmes Continuum, 2010).

The war years were difficult for Bachman. The blockades prevented normal scientific communication and no one could avoid the constant fighting in and around Charleston. In the midst of the war, Bachman published his last major essay, “Characteristics of Genera and Species, as Applicable to the Doctrine of Unity in the Human Race” but Darwin had already brought an end to the polygenic/monogenic dispute. Maria Martin died in 1863, and one of Bachman's sons was mortally wounded fighting for the Confederacy. Now, with Maria dead and Sherman's forces advancing on Charleston, Bachman fully realized his own pre-war warning about “the duties and dangers of the moment.” The new bell of his church was melted down for Confederate ammunition as the city came under attack in the final siege and capture of Charleston that left Bachman's church, school, and library in ruins. With them, much of Bachman's papers and collections, as well as Maria's sketches and paintings, were lost. Bachman attempted to flee to Newberry College, but while journeying there his party was detained by Union troopers. During the encounter, he was badly beaten and left with a paralyzed arm.
With the end of the Civil War, Bachman concentrated his efforts on his role as pastor of St. John's, retiring in 1871. Bachman had signed his essay to war profiteers as “Marcus Curtius,” the Roman hero who rode his horse into the abyss to save Rome from the chasm that had opened in the Forum. An alter was raised over the spot and it is appropriate that John Bachman, who was often called the “Old Roman” by his friends, was himself buried under the alter of his church. In his life and work, he personified many of the contradictions of his educated and religious contemporaries who promoted both social reform and the preservation of archaic institutions.

Of course, we must end by noting that according to the 1860 Charleston Census of Slaves, John and Maria Martin Bachman owned five humans, with John possessing one and Maria Martin listed as owning four.  Because science was a domestic enterprise during the Enlightenment --- and therefore women were provided access to scientific studies despite being barred from formal education --- the administration of slaves in the household would coincide with the production and care of scientific instruments and specimens, the upkeep of gardens, the organization of observations, the parlor meetings of Natural History societies, and all other activities that took place within the domestic space.  Scarlett O'Hara was not only a fictional proto-mainstream feminist, but also the manager/overseer of the large number of slaves working in the productive domestic/industrial space of the plantation house and grounds.

The stain of slavery permeates the 19th Century - from the cotton supplying the Engels family' textile mill to the nightmares of Brazilian slavery that Darwin regularly suffered at Down House to the streets of Charleston, where freedmen and slaves wore badges identifying their occupation and the slaver.  It's effects are to be found wherever one looks, and can be found on the pages of Maria Bachman's drawings, which retain a certain aura of authenticity as having been held by her, but they were also no doubt held by the hands of slaves just as certainly as they bear the stains of the Civil War and the destruction of John and Maria Bachman's library, church, and schools.

Here are some of the few works by Maria Martin Bachman that survived the destruction of Charleston and its aftermath. 

The contribution of "Mrs. Gliddon" to Types of Mankind in a later post.

See also:
A Short Biography of John Bachman (1790-1874)
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2011/07/short-biography-of-john-bachman-1790.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
A brief additional note to Audubon's Birds and some often Overlooked Contributions of Women to Natural History
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2010/12/brief-additional-note-to-audubons-birds.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
Review of America’s Other Audubon (Brain Pickings Blog)
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-of-americas-other-audubon-brain.html
Podcast - Charleston's Women Naturalists: Jennifer Scheetz, Archivist, Charleston Museum
http://until-darwin.blogspot.com/2012/04/podcast-charlestons-women-naturalists.html

(Updated November 18, 2017; September 21, 2019; June 2021)