The Carolina Ideal World: Natural Science and Social Thought in Ante Bellum South Carolina

Abstract

THE CAROLINA IDEAL WORLD: Natural Science and Social Thought in Ante Bellum South Carolina William Henry Longton A few years ago, Marvin Harris remarked on what he called "the trend toward biologization" of the social sciences in the nineteenth century, and argued that it "had nothing to do with the greater prestige of the biological disciplines" over the social sciences. "It was not," he suggested, "a matter of one discipline aping another, but rather a parallel response by both disciplines to similar ideological needs."1 It was an astute observation and there is no reason to quarrel with it in order to insist that a major feature of the century was a dynamic process of mutual reinforcement between sociocultural concepts and interpretations of biological information. Social theorists and natural scientists who shared similar kinds of assumptions about the nature of the world were in large measure committed to demonstrations of the validity of those assumptions, and they were perforce bound to borrow from and support each other. This exchange and alliance, moreover, did not ordinarily reach its limits when it trespassed on theological premises , since the same kinds of ideological requirements operated on theologians as they did on everyone else. Theology, social thought, and scientific interpretation all drew upon each other for sustenance and direction, and they each modified the others in the process so that a general harmony among them was always possible. Indeed, the fact that nineteenth-century writers placed such great importance on the harmonization of theology, science, and social theories suggests that it was their harmonization rather than any one of them alone that was crucial to the satisfaction of ideological needs. Whatever may have generated and defined such needs for others in the nineteenth century, it is scarcely a matter of conjecture that for ante bellum Southerners it was slavery. Slavery dictated the requirements for Southern world views and even those who dissented from specific theoretical suggestions rarely questioned the essential ideological structure within which their dissent was contained, because slavery was its irreducible first principle. It needs to be stressed, furthermore , that it was clearly a racist concept of slavery to which the 1 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (New York, 1968), p. 129. 118 ideal referred. The racial inferiority and bondage of blacks to whites were the fundamental issues. Expressing an understanding of the way things really were, the ideological structure or "ideal world" involved two propositions. First, it was affirmed that events in the organic world described a course of teleological development, signifying that living beings developed under God's control and that some final end awaited all life. The second proposition was that living beings possessed certain essentially changeless characters which gave them their definitions. Developments of almost any kind notwithstanding, the "natures" of things could not change without redefining the things themselves. Together, these tenets formed the basis of the ideal world for at least thirty years before the Civil War. During that time the process of harmonization of diverse disciplines caused a major shift of emphasis in the ideal. The shift was away from what are ordinarily described as neo-classical views and toward a distinctly romantic mood, so that by 1860, while the ideal was still structurally the same as in 1830, its emphasis was quite different. In order to trace this shift in emphasis it is well to review the state of theoretical natural science at the beginning of this period. A convenient summary of the best informed opinion on the subject in South Carolina between 1828 and 1831 may be found in three articles in The Southern Review of Charleston.2 One of the writers remains unidentified , but of the other two, Stephen Elliott was the most reputable botanist in the state at the time, and Thomas Cooper was an able and knowledgeable teacher of geology at the South Carolina College. Each of these writers was a catastrophist, holding that the earth was immensely old, that its surface morphology had undergone repeated changes through the agency of paroxysms—"earthquakes, upheavings , disruptions, deluges and catastrophes"—and that these convulsions had eventually produced an environment capable of sustaining life.3...