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”

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

Harvard University Press
February 2003
334 pages
6 x 9-15/16 inches
Hardcove ISBN: 9780674009462

Bruce Dain, Associate Professor of History
University of Utah

The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.

From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously “black” African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist “natural history” into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences.

In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion “race” caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. The Face of Nature
• 2. Culture and the Persistence of Race
• 3. The Horrors of St. Domingue
• 4. The Mutability of Human Affairs
• 5. Conceiving Universal Equality
• 6. Black Immediatism
• 7. The New Ethnology

…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.

Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial Anxiety in Antebellum Writing

Northeast Modern Language Association
NeMLA 2012 Convention
Rochester, New York
2012-03-15 through 2012-03-18

This panel seeks to investigate how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response.

In antebellum America, the notion of ‘blood’ as ‘race’ maintained a strong hold over the 19th century literary imagination. This panel will examine how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Mid-century works by authors as varied as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and Frances E. W. Harper illustrated very clearly the instability of racial classification and its resultant sexual anxieties. Rather than phenotype, references to ‘white’ blood and ‘black’ blood came to be regarded as the primary signifiers of racial traits. The enduring fascination of white Americans with the mathematical fractionalization of blood was evident in the creation and use of words such as octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto in the titles of magazine articles, books, and pamphlets while, at the same time, actual skin color would become an increasingly invisible signifier of race. Among the anthropologists, anatomists, ethnologists, and naturalists who led the drive for racial classification in the mid-19th century were polygenists such as Josiah C. Nott, Samuel Cartwright, George Glidden, and others. Alabama physician Nott’s 1844 Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races and 1854 Types of Mankind cut to the heart of race-based ‘scientific’ writing during the19th century. Nott’s hypothesis that mulattoes, as the offspring of interracial sexual couplings—termed ‘faulty stock’—could not be self-sustaining was never scientifically tested. In addition, the continued emphasis on the supposed degeneracy and diseased blood caused by race-mixing betrayed a degree of hysteria disproportionate to the actual numbers of the unions. This panel is significant in that it seeks a fresh investigation of paradigms through which antebellum literary texts can be read as directly responding to the new science and ideology of ethnology. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response. Send 1-page abstract and brief bio as Word attachment to Rebecca Williams, rebelwill7@gmail.com, with ‘NEMLA’ in subject line.

For more information, click here.