Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

pre-Civil War America, historians have substantially neglected the Indian. For black Americans there is a rich descriptive and interpretative literature, but for the Indians one of the key decades-the 1840s-has a paucity even of descriptive works. The basic historical account of science and race in the pre-Civil War decades, Stanton's The Leopard's Spots, concentrates on the new American of ethnology, mainly in the years from 1839 to 1859, and emphasizes that this group of men (most importantly Samuel G. Morton, George R. Gliddon, Josiah C. Nott, and Ephraim G. Squier) attacked the idea of monogenesisthe descent of all mankind from one pair-and reached the position of defending polygenesis-the separate creations of individual races.' Stanton concentrates on the position of the School in the history of science, and he minimizes its impact on the general community. He does devote attention to the arguments of the School for black and Indian inferiority, but his major interest is the attack on the unity of the human race rather than the implications and practical impact of the idea of the creation of a pattern of superior and inferior races.2 Frederickson inti-