Book Reviews

James D. Bratt
Calvin College
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Darwins Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwins Views on Human Evolution. By Adrian Desmond and James Moore.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009. xxii, 484
pp. $30.00, isbn 978-0-547-05526-8.)
The Young Charles Darwin. By Keith Thomson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

xii, 276 pp. $28.00, isbn 978-0-300-136081.)

The extensive literature on Charles Darwin
has valuable additions with these two volumes, one revealing the depth and complexity
of the intersection of science and morality, the
other providing social and historical context
for the incubation of the most important scientific theory of the last two centuries. Darwins Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and
James Moore, authors of the comprehensive
biography Darwin (1991), have fitted Darwins experience with and ideas about slavery
to the development of his ideas about evolution. Keith Thomson, in The Young Charles
Darwin, provides a worthy biographical supplement that shows an accomplished scientist
before publication of On the Origin of the Species (1859) and provides the cultural context
for Darwins intellectual development.
At the core of both the slavery debate and
the evolution debate were the ideas of pluralism and unitarism. The latter saw a common origin for the different races; in Darwins
words it was a common descent, a concept
congruent with his emerging ideas about the
common origin for different species and varieties within species. Pluralists, by contrast, believed in separate origins for the different races of humanity, making it easier to pronounce
one race superior or inferior. Thus, slavery was
rationalized and owning a slave was no different, philosophically, than owning livestock.
Desmond and Moore deftly dissect Darwins
dilemma over slavery, as exemplified by the
necessity of naturalizing the slave-making instinct in ants while condemning the same action among humans. And this is from a scientist who said that what applied to one part of
the animal kingdom applied to all.
Darwin and natural selection have been
exhaustively researched, but Desmond and
Moore have something new to say, which requires adjustment of the historical scales in
evaluating the significance of different experiences in Darwins life. For example, they agree
with previous assessmentsincluding their
ownthat Darwins time in Edinburgh, Scotland (between 1824 and 1826) was pivotal.
However, they bluntly state that historians have
often looked in the wrong place for the impor-

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Kane demonstrated a combination of genuine courage, periodic depression, and ceaseless hypochondria, all covered by the cloak
of textbook narcissism. This portrait emerges from Grows pioneering excavation of the
Kane papers, which became a public collection (at Brigham Young University) in 2000,
during Grows doctoral work at the University
of Notre Dame. The resulting dissertation, he
says, was nearly twice as long as this book (p.
ix); the editorial scissors could have trimmed
even more.
At the same time, the recovery of the culture of reform Kane inhabited creates a level
of detail that facilitates evaluation of Grows
thesis regarding Democratic-Romantic reform
(p. xx). That step requires moving past Kanes
personal idiosyncrasies to assess his ideology and his organizational acumen, where the
evangelical-Whig line excelled. Kanes ideology
encompassed free-soil antislavery of the segregationist sort, and was phobic of racial amalgamation (p. 107), unrepentant about colonization, and brimming with American imperialist
enthusiasm. It could also bemore than its
evangelical-Whig rivalsupportive of ethnic
and religious pluralism, sensitive to social class,
and selectively feminist in a way not usually associated with mid-century Democrats. Organizationally, Kane could never escape the long
arm of the Democratic party until it shattered
in 1860, but even if he had escaped, his gentlemanly code of independence and his profound
ambivalence toward the rising urban-industrial
complex make it unlikely that he could have
effected the sort of efficiency and persistence
realized by other reformers. Whether that was
true of just him or of his entire brand is the
next question to be pursued.

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The Journal of American History

Darwin focused on the science rather than the

social issues. Thomsons work is not as unique
as Desmond and Moores, but Thomsons book
is the first devoted entirely to a young Darwin
and the relationship of those years to the later,
world-changing ones. Thomson is concerned
largely with the years up to 1842, when Darwin began his first draft of what would become
On the Origin of the Species. Much already has
been devoted to his relationship with mentors,
to whom he owed a great deal. The relationships with others, Thomson shows, were quite
important because Darwin created a great
deal out of existing ideas. . . . [Darwins] greatness lay in analytical thinking, rather than intuition, scientific rather than artistic judgment, and painstaking observation rather than
fiery debate (p. 83). This assertion has been
demonstrated in numerous biographies, but
Thomson documents and untangles the web
of relationships that contributed to the young
mans intellectual development and, eventually, to the theory of natural selection.
Thomson traces several major breakthroughs
for the young man, including the branching
tree diagram of evolution that appears in one
of Darwins early notebooks. The first major
breakthrough, Thomson writes, was Darwins
associative reasoning, which set him apart
from peers. That reasoning was his discussion
(in an early notebook) of how species replaced
one another in geographical space (the northern and southern Rheas, for example) and replaced one another across time, as shown in
the fossil record (p. 189). By 1837, Darwin
had become preoccupied with his ideas about
the transmutation of species.
The debate about the intellectual and cultural impact of Charles Darwin is not fixed
across time. These two volumes bring new
material and new theses to the history of the
individual and the idea to show their significance to an even wider audienceincluding,
now, historians of race, slavery, science, and religion.
Edward Caudill
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee
A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry
and the Struggle for Democracy in America. By

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tance of the Edinburgh years, when Darwin

decided against a career in medicine because
he was too squeamish for the operating room.
Desmond and Moore find the origins of Darwins racial thinking at Edinburgh, where Darwin apprenticed himself to a black man during
the winter of 1826 to learn to stuff birds. Darwin called the man, with whom he spent forty
or more hour-long sessions, very pleasant and
intelligent, quite an act and admission for an
upper-class Englishman (p. 18). They put the
voyage of the hms Beagle on a slightly different
tack, too. The trip still culminates with the insights gained from the Galapagos finches but
it also is the turning point in Darwins passive
abolitionism. The ships course on the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to Brazil was infested with slavers, and it is during the voyage
that Darwin shows the first substantial interest
in racial origins. It brings into sharp focus his
abolitionism when he hears the screams of tortured slaves in Brazil and witnesses inhumanities that included genocide of Pampas Indians
and even the stuffing of Hottentot skins.
In the minds of the Cambridge dons, slavery was an intellectual spat with implications
for some faraway colonies, but for America it
was a bloody fight on the front porchsoon
to be inside the house. The friction between
Darwin and the Harvard botanist Louis Agassiz is well documented, but Desmond and
Moore bring a new dimension to the conflict, one with profoundly human and moral
dimensions. When slavery is thrown into the
disagreement, Agassizs opposition becomes
much more than an argument about the fixity of species. The Harvard professor of natural
history Asa Gray, upon publication of On the
Origin of the Species, immediately picked up on
the implication of Darwins theory for the race
issue in America.
Young Charles Darwin is something of a genealogy of the history of the idea of natural selection. Thomson also raises the issue of slavery
and human races but in the broader context
of Darwins general intellectual development.
Thomson raises one question that Desmond
and Moore answer: How did Darwins views
and the views of those authors he consulted reflect the debate over slavery? Where Desmond
and Moore find race issues affecting Darwins
thinking about transformism, Thomson finds

December 2009