Darwin's Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond; James Moore

Author:Adrian Desmond; James Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Life Sciences, Social Science, Slavery, Biology, Science, Science & Technology, Evolution, Fiction, Biography & Autobiography, General
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

10

The Contamination of Negro Blood

America began haemorrhaging in spring 1856. As Darwin started writing up his evolutionary theory, Kansas lay torn between rival free-soil and pro-slavery legislatures, with Southern congressmen and the President himself conspiring to keep the latter in power. The bloodletting started on successive days in May. An old acquaintance was the first to suffer.

Charles Sumner had lived in London at the end of the 1830s, staying at Darwin's club, the Athenaeum, and making many friends in Darwin's circle. After hosting the Lyells in Boston, Sumner became a Massachusetts senator, and now on 19 May 1856 he delivered a ferocious attack in the US Senate on his Southern colleagues for abetting an electoral ‘crime against Kansas’. He taunted one refined gentleman with taking ‘a mistress… who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight; – I mean the harlot Slavery’. Such verbal violence, worthy of an ultra-abolitionist, was not unprecedented in the chamber. Sumner's violent punishment was. Sitting quietly afterwards, huge at six feet four inches, he was accosted by a senator wielding a hard rubber cane. The South Carolina planter thrashed him about the shoulders like a slave, the heavy gold handgrip twice splitting his head open. Blinded by his own blood, Sumner flailed and roared until he fell unconscious on the Senate floor, the cane shattering in its final blows. His degradation was deliberate. It showed insolent abolitionists that they deserved no better than uppity blacks, and the South roared its approval. Darwin's paper, The Times, gasped.1

Shortly after, a federal marshal leading a 700-strong pro-slavery posse thundered into the free-soil haven of Lawrence, Kansas, sacking the town, breaking presses and killing an anti-slavery supporter. Days later, a revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown, and his guerrilla ‘jayhawkers’ took revenge: five pro-slavery settlers were shot, stabbed and hacked to death. The Times now talked of a ‘civil war’. In June, the battle-cry became political – 1856 was an election year – when the anti-slavery Republican Party, with Sumner as its martyr, put up the heroic explorer John C. Frémont for president at its first national nominating convention. Frémont's report of his famous Western expeditions sat on Darwin's shelves, and he drew on its account of migrating buffalo when exploring ‘instincts’ in his ‘Natural Selection’ manuscript.2 The Times was happy with Frémont's candidacy and at first condoned the use of force to stem the pro-slavery attacks. Its correspondent reported ‘thousands of men marching in solid column through’ New York, ‘singing a rallying song to the Marsellaise, and raising… the midnight chorus, “Free soil, free speech, free press, free men, Fremont, and victory” ’. In July, federal troops broke up the free Kansas legislature; in August, a frontier war erupted, leaving hundreds dead and property worth millions of dollars wrecked; in September the troops were in again. The Northern states looked weak, hostages to Southern demands. When the Democrats – a ‘slavery extension party’ in The Times's

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