Mixed Race Studies

When two proximate species of mankind, two races bearing a general resemblance to each other in type, are bred together—e.g.. Teutons, Celts, Pelasgians, Iberians, or Jews—they produce offspring perfectly prolific: although, even here, their, peculiarities cannot become so entirely fused into a homogeneous mass as to obliterate the original types of either. One or the other of these types will “crop-out,” from time to time, more or less apparently in their progeny.  When, on the other hand, species the most widely separated, such as the Anglo-Saxon with the Negro, are crossed, a different result has course. Their mulatto offspring, if still prolific, are but partially so; and acquire an inherent tendency to run out, and become eventually extinct when kept apart from the parent stocks.  This opinion is now becoming general among observers in our slave States; and it is very strongly insisted upon by M. Jacquinot.  This skillful naturalist (unread in cis-Atlantic literature) claims the discovery as original with himself; although erroneously, because it had long previously been advocated by Estwick and Long, the historians of Jamaica; by Dr. Caldwell; by Professors Dickson and Holbrook, of Charleston, S. C.; and by numerous other leading medical men of our Southern States.  There are some 4,000,000 of Negroes in the United States; about whom circumstances, personal and professional, have afforded me ample opportunities for observation. I have found it impossible, nevertheless, to collect such statistics as would be satisfactory to others on this point; and the difficulty arises solely from the want of chastity among mulatto women, which is so notorious as to be proverbial. Although often married to hybrid males of their own color, their children are begotten as frequently by white or other men, as by their husbands. For many years, in my daily professional visits, I have been in the habit of meeting with mulatto women, either free or slaves; and, never omitting an opportunity of inquiry with regard to their prolificacy, longevity of offspring, color of parents, age, &c., the conviction has become indelibly fixed in my mind that the positions laid down in the beginning of this chapter are true.

J. C. Nott, “Hybridity of Animals, Viewed in Connection with Mankind,” in Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania or Races and Upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History [Second Edition], J. C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon, (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), 397-398.

Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania or Races and Upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History [Second Edition]

Lippincott, Grambo & Co.
1854
738 pages

J. C. Nott, M.D.
Mobile, Alabama

Geo. R. Gliddon, Egyptologist
Former U.S. Consul to Egypt

CONTENTS

• FRONTISPIECE — Portrait or Samuel George Morton. [Steel Engraving.]
• DEDICATION–“To the Memory of Morton”
• PREFACE — by Geo. B. Gliddon
  • Postscriptum — by J. C. Nott
• MEMOIR—” Notice of the Life and Scientific Labors of the late Samuel Geo. Morton, M. D.”—contributed by Prof. Henry S. Patterson, M.D.
• SKETCH —” of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the different Types of Man” — contributed by Prof. L. Agassie, LL.D. [With colored lithographic Tableau and Map.]
• INTRODUCTION to ” Types of Mankind ” — by J. C. Nott
• PART I.
  • I. — Biographical Distribution or Animals and the Races of Men
  • II. — General Remarks on the Types of Mankind
  • III. Specific Types — Caucasian
  • IV. — Physical History of the Jews
  • V. — the Caucasian Types carried through Egyptian Monuments
  • VI. — African Types
  • VII. — Egypt and Egyptians. [Four Lithographic Plates]
  • VIII. — Negro Types
  • IX. — American and other Types — Aboriginal Races of America
  • X. — Excerpta from Morton’s Inedited Manuscripts
  • XI. — Geology and Palæontology, in Connection with Human Origins — contributed by William Usher, M.D.
  • XII. — Hybridity or Animals, viewed in Connection with the Natural History or Mankind — by J. C. Nott
  • XIII. — Comparative Anatomy or Races — by J. C. Nott
• PART II.
  • XIV.— The Xth Chapter of Genesis — Preliminary Remarks
    • Sect. A. — Analysis of the Hebrew Nomenclature
    • B. — Observations on, the annexed Genealogical Tableau of the “Sons of Noah”
      • Genealogical Tableau
    • C. — Observations on the accompanying “Map of the World”
      • Lithographic tinted Map, exhibiting the Countries more or less known to the ancient Writer of Xth Genesis
    • D. — the Xth Chapter of Genesis modernized, in its Nomenclature, to display popularly, and in Modern English, the Meaning of its ancient Writer
  • XV. — Biblical Ethnography:–
    • Sect. E. — Terms, universal and specific
    • F. — Structure of Genesis I., II., and III
    • G.—Cosmas-Indicopleustes
      • Cosmas’s Map [wood-cut]
    • H.—Antiquity of the Name “ADaM”
• PART III. — Supplement — by Geo. R. Gleddon
  • Essay I. — Archæological Introduction to the Xth Chapter of Genesis.
  • II — Palaeographic Excursus on thb Art op Writing.
    • Table — “Theory of the Order of Development in Human Writings”
  • III. — Mankind’s Chronology:—
    • Introductory
    • Chronology — Egyptian
    • Chinese
    • Assyrian
    • Hebrew
    • Hindoo
• APPENDIX I. — Notes and References to Parts I. and II.
• II. — Alphabetical List of Subscribers to “Types of Mankind”

…The least proximate types of the human species are the Anglo-Saxon and the negro. Their original homes are in widely separated regions of the earth, and neither race can establish itself in the home of the other. They differ in form and size of cranium, in the colour and texture of the skin, in the character and colour of the hair, and in intelligence.

The negro seems seldom to develop in intelligence beyond childhood. Havelock Ellis says* :—” The child of many African races is scarcely if at all less intelligent than the European child ; but while the African as he grows up becomes stupid and obtuse, and his whole social life falls into a state of hide-bound routine, the European retains much of his childlike vivacity.” they are mated. The offspring of the Anglo-Saxon and the negro are fertile when bred inter se, but in a less degree than when coupled with the parent races. The fertility of mulattoes decreases with each succeeding generation, and it is said they frequently die out in the fourth. The same thing is said to occur when the mulattoes are bred to the white race, but when they are bred to the negro they are more fertile, and the perfect negro type is reached in a few generations.

Dr. J. C. Nott, who resided for many years in the southern portion of the United States, and consequently had many opportunities of studying the negroes and their mulatto offspring, puts forward the following propositions respecting the mulattoes, the offspring of the strictly white race—i.e., the Anglo-Saxon or Teuton—and the true negro* :—

1. “That mulattoes are the shortest-lived of any class of the human race.
2. That mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between the blacks and whites.
3. That they are less capable of undergoing fatigue and hardship than either blacks or whites.
4. That the mulatto women are peculiarly delicate, and subject to a variety of chronic diseases. That they are bad breeders, bad nurses, liable to abortion, and that their children generally die young.
5. That when mulattoes intermarry they are less prolific than when crossed on the parent stocks.
6. That when a negro man married a white woman the offspring partook more largely of the negro type than when the reverse connection had effect.
7. That mulattoes, like negroes, although unacclimatized, enjoy extraordinary exemption from yellow fever when brought to Charles town, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans.”

Dr. Nott noticed that mulattoes the offspring of the races of Southern Europe and the negro were often long-lived and prolific.

Dr. Morton, President of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, classed species according to their disparity or affinity, in the following manner :— “Remote species of the same genus are those among which hybrids are never produced. Allied species produce inter se an infertile offspring. Proximate species produce with each other a fertile offspring.”

George A. Brown, Studies in stock breeding: An inquiry into the various phenomena connected with the breeding of the domestic animals, Walker, May and Co., Printers, 1902: 383-385.

The “ethnology” of Josiah Clark Nott

Journal of Urban Health
Volume 50, Number 4 (April 1974)
pages 509–528.

C. Loring Brace, Ph.D.
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan

It is only rarely that a person so completely transcends the ethos of his age that the recorded results of his scientific endeavors can be read a century or more later with any real profit, and apart from the desire to gain some historical perspective on the time in question. Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, among others, can still be read with instruction, not so much for their conclusions, but for the methods by which these were reached. This is because the conclusions, while now taken for granted, are no more intuitively obvious today than when they were first advanced.

Except for the rare transcending genius, the best minds of an age tend to typify the thinking of the time rather than to advance it. It is no surprise, then, to discover that the ablest figures in the American South prior to the Civil War, including Josiah Clark Nott, were unanimous in the defense of their “peculiar institution,” slavery. Although educated Southerners were unanimous in their defense of slavery, they diverged widely in their justification for doing so. As the 19th century progressed, two camps emerged which were engaged in vigorous, prolonged, and often acerbic debate at the time the Civil War broke out. Both sides took it as self-evident that Negroes were inferior and slavery justified, but they differed in their attempts to explain how racial differences arose in the first place.

The issue, at bottom, involved the relation between scientific and historical reality, and the written accounts in the Protestant Bible. On the one side it was argued that the words in the Bible were inspired by God and must therefore be literally true-all men, black and white, slave and free, were the descendants of Adam and Eve. On the other, the argument suggested that the inspiration in Holy Writ was largely moral and that the geographic and scientific information reflected the human fallibility and ignorance of the human authors. Neither side questioned the rectitude of a world view dominated by Protestant Christianity; both declared that, by definition, the basic teachings of science and religion must be in agreement. However, since there were apparent discrepancies between the views of the two realms, disputes arose over which should bend to accommodate the other…

…On August 12, 1845, Nott wrote to his friend John Henry Hammond, governor of South Carolina, that “the negro question was the one that I wished to bring out and embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography, etc., to excite a little more interest.”‘ He was referring specifically to his second published foray into the realm of “anthropology,” which had appeared just the year before and which set the tone and the dimensions of everything he was to write in an anthropological vein for the next 20 years. Once started, his involvement snowballed. As he wrote Hammond in a subsequent letter, September 4, 1845, “the nigger business has brought me into a large and heterogeneous correspondence,” and he declared his intention “to follow out the Negro, moral and physical in all his ramifications.”

Nott’s first anthropological contribution, entitled “The Mulatto a Hybrid-Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” was published in i843 in the highly respectable American Journal of the Medical Sciences.’ In this article, Nott became the first American public figure to declare that whites and blacks belonged to separate species of the genus Homo. As he stated, “this I do believe, that at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are, according to common acceptation of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid” (italics Nott’s) . To support this conclusion he reprinted figures from a paper that had appeared the year before in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, written by an anonymous author who signed himself Philanthropist.

The figures purported to show that the life spans of mulattoes are the shortest of any kind of human population, indicating that in the long run they were destined for eventual extinction. While it was not so acknowledged, the data on which these conclusions were based originally came from the census of  1840, which was filled with unverifiable claims and gross errors and slanted in a blatantly proslavery manner. Nott could hardly have been ignorant of the problems associated with the data of the census since these had been exposed in the very same Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, but he used them anyway without apology or qualification. In this instance, as in many others in his “anthropological” career, it is clear that the lip-service he gave to science was mainly camouflage to cover the racist advocacy that lay beneath.

Despite the weakness in his case, Nott’s hybridity argument drew favorable notice from Morton and helped enlist the latter in the ensuing debate. The ostensible issue was the criterion for the establishment of valid species. If members of different populations either could not crossbreed or, having done so, could only produce offspring that were sterile or of reduced viability and fertility, then the populations could be considered as different biological species. All agreed that the failure to crossbreed or the production of sterile offspring-the mule, for example-indicated a valid specific difference. The argument concerned the evidence for cases of reduced viability and fertility. In Mobile, Ala., Nott lacked the library resources as well as the time and inclination to pursue the matter beyond its initial stages. Morton, however, had the inclination; he also had the collections of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He had just completed the second of his two principal contributions to anthropological research, his Crania Aegyptiaca, in which he had demonstrated that the physical characteristics of Caucasian and Negro populations were just as distinct in ancient Egypt as they are today. With the dates of Egyptian antiquity established by the follow-up of Champollion’s translation of the Rosetta stone, and with a concept of the antiquity of human existence assumed to be on the order of those appended to the English Bible by Archbishop Ussher, Morton felt that human racial distinctions must have existed “in the beginning. Realizing that such an opinion was likely to stir up controversy, Morton was diffident about advancing it, but he finally did so with qualified caution in his defence and expansion of Nott’s hybridity position…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto a Hybrid-probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry

The American Journal of the Medical Sciences
Volume 6, Issue 11 (July 1843)
pages 252-256

Josiah C. Nott, M.D.
Mobile, Alabama

The reader will probably be astonished at this late clay to sec so novel an assertion us that the mulatto is a hybrid; but I hope ho will read and ponder upon the diets given below before be concludes that it has no foundation in reason.

A writer in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, under the signature of ” Philanthropist,” has made the following important and interesting statements:—

• “From authentic statistics and extensive corroborating information, obtained from sources, to me of unquestionable authority, together with my own observation, I am led to believe that the following statements are substantially correct.
• 1st, ” That the longevity of the pure Africans is greater than that of the inhabitants of any other part of the globe.”
• 2d, “That the mulattoes, i. e. those born of parents one being African and the other Caucasian or white, are decidedly the shortest lived of any class of the human race.”
• 3d, “That the mulattoes are no more liable to die under the age of 25* than the whites or blacks; but from 85 to 40, their deaths are as 10 to 1 of either the whites or blacks between those ages—from 40 to 55, 50 to 1–and from 55 to 70, 100 to 1.”
• 4th, “That the mortality of the free people of colour in the United States, is more than 100 per cent, greater than that of the slaves.”
• 5th, “That those of unmixed African extraction in the “free states” are not more liable to sickness or premature death than the whiles of their rank and condition in society; but that the striking mortality, so manifest amongst the free people of colour, is in every community and section of the country, invariably confined to the mulattoes.”

The following extracts are from the same writer:—

“It was remarked by a gentleman eminent for his intellectual attainments and distinguished for his correct observation, and who had lived many years in the Southern States, that he did not believe be had ever seen a mulatto 70 years of age.”…

Read or purchase the article here.