A Southern Skeptic Engages American Free Thought

Richard Lynch Garner, like many other freethinkers, came from a pious family. He was born in 1848 to the solid middle-class family of Samuel and Mary Garner. Samuel Garner served on the vestry of the Abingdon Methodist church, a denomination known to attract middle-class townspeople in Appalachia before the Civil War. He owned a foundry and thus participated in the economic boom that the construction of a railroad from Knoxville to Roanoke provided over the course of the 1860s. Abingdon was hardly an isolated hamlet. As David Hsiung has noted for East Tennessee, townspeople living along the railroad often felt connected to national markets and culture, especially by comparison to farmers in the region who obtained few benefits from improved communication.Footnote ¹¹ Slaves, circuses, and itinerant Methodist preachers all passed through Garner's hometown.

Garner recalled in his unfinished memoirs how his rebellious streak began early. “Sunday was usually a day of inquisition and I dreaded its approach,” Garner wrote about his mandatory attendance to church services and Sunday school.Footnote ¹² Charles, a slave preacher, inspired Garner as a young boy to dream of preaching from the pulpit. So did the hearty meals that circuit riders received thanks to their fame. However, the middle-aged Garner saw the faith of his youth as a delusion: “[My belief] was simply that mental attitude in which millions of deluded people live and die thinking that they believe certain things concerning an impression which they have received without seeking or resisting.” It is uncertain if his combat service in Tennessee and Virginia during the Civil War challenged his Christian upbringing in the same way the bloody conflict destroyed the faith of more famous skeptics such as Bierce and Ingersoll. Frustratingly, Garner rarely discussed his life from the Civil War until the early 1890s, so details about this long period are scarce. After the war, Garner remained enough of a Christian to attend theology classes at an academy in East Tennessee in 1866 and 1867 but then embarked on several years of wanderings through the West. He married in 1872, taught for a number of years, and eventually became a real estate speculator in Roanoke, Virginia.

Scientific research and popular views on Darwinism allowed Garner to emerge from obscurity. He used these views to create a public persona of a heroic scientist willing to risk his life in Gabonese rainforests.Footnote ¹³ After visits to several zoos in the late 1880s, Garner argued that there was no clear intellectual divide between humans, apes, and monkeys. Chimpanzees communicated with each other through a language humans could master, and monkeys could feel emotions as deeply as any man or woman. Thanks to his own penchant for publicity and to literary agent Samuel McClure, founder of McClure's magazine, Garner raised enough money to travel to the French colony of Gabon in 1892 with great fanfare in the British and American press. Thomas Edison, William Dean Howells, and Grover Cleveland among other notables helped Garner along. In Africa, he studied primate behavior for over a year.

When upon his return in 1894, he was unable to convince scholars or popular audiences that he indeed could converse with apes, Garner struggled for the next two decades to overcome his reputation as an eccentric crank. Frustration with the Anglo-American scientific community's derision of his findings led Garner to criticize the conformity of academic scientists. He wrote in 1900 to a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, “The vast majority of men who follow science as an occupation are mere mechanics and they are the ones I offend, but they do take umbrage at my way of renouncing the orthodox ways. Heresy is the only true religion has been my creed these many years and I have lived up to it.”Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, journalists and university professors lampooned the self-proclaimed scientist throughout his career.Footnote ¹⁵ He had a knack for embarrassing moments, such as a 1910 tour with his chimpanzee Susie. Garner claimed he and the ape could hold conversations, but Susie rarely made a sound during public lectures. Garner's ability to find and care for apes eventually redeemed his career, as the Bronx Zoo and the Smithsonian hired Garner to acquire gorillas and other exotic animals in a series of expeditions from 1911 to 1919.

It was sometime after the Civil War that Garner turned against Christianity, although this change came before he began his public career. He joined a growing number of Americans in this period. As James Turner has noted, “Within twenty years after the Civil War, agnosticism emerged as a self-sustaining phenomenon.”Footnote ¹⁶ His surviving essays on religion, largely written between 1900 and 1910, closely resembled a range of critics of orthodoxy in the Gilded Age. However, his skepticism rarely emerged in his published articles and books, even if it was a major topic among his dozens of essays that did not reach the general public. The years in which he abandoned Christianity are left out of his surviving essays altogether. Garner's misanthropic character might explain why he chose never to discuss his path to irreligion in much detail or mention any southerners who might have shared his beliefs at all.

This frustrating lack of source material makes it difficult to trace his intellectual development, yet one can uncover some of his influences. Naturally, Charles Darwin loomed large in the Virginian's thought on primates. “From the chaos and confusion of human ignorance and bigotry [Darwin] has erected the most sublime monuments of thought and truth,” Garner declared in 1892.Footnote ¹⁷ Interestingly, the English biologist did not ever enter Garner's discussions of organized religion. Garner sought to dethrone mankind from the lofty position above other animals through denoting how languages could exist outside the human species, but evolutionary theory did not hold an important position in his thought.

It is striking how closely the Virginian's arguments resembled those of Robert Ingersoll. Indeed, Garner himself listed Ingersoll as a personal hero.Footnote ¹⁸ An officer in the federal army during the Civil War and afterward a Republican politician, Ingersoll proclaimed the victory of science, reason, and individualism in hundreds of speeches made throughout the North.Footnote ¹⁹ Ingersoll's honorable manliness and views on spirituality resonated with Garner. True manhood required an abandonment of God. Both men imagined themselves to be part of a growing army of brave rationality too committed to honesty to accept religious tyranny, a common theme among freethinkers.Footnote ²⁰ “Truth compels one to say no other institution in human society has been guilty of more heinous crimes than the Christian church. . . .The fact that human intelligence and the growth of human understanding have become too robust to brook the lash of sacerdotal authority is no evidence that the spirit of oppression is dead,” Garner warned, though in private.Footnote ²¹ By contrast, Ingersoll's speeches and writings were full of such pronouncements. “Can you wonder,” the Great Agnostic asked after a typical review of the horrors of the Inquisition, “that we are proud to know that we have always been disciples of Reason, and soldiers of Freedom; that we have denounced tyranny and superstition, and kept our hands unstained of human blood?”Footnote ²² Ingersoll assured his audiences that freethinkers could pride themselves in not surrendering to conformity and that “nothing can be more detestable in character than servile imitation.”Footnote ²³ Garner likewise fulminated, “I quietly turned away from the gilded altar on which thousands offer up to Mammon their cringing, little souls in exchange for sacerdotal pie. . . . I have ever since felt a deeper sense of self respect in having the moral manhood to renounce the whole affair.”Footnote ²⁴

The laziness and cupidity of clergy compared to the selflessness and utility of scientists formed a theme repeatedly voiced by Ingersoll to the country and by Garner in his manuscripts. Individual effort and hard work achieved far more than any religion. “Man must learn to rely upon himself. Reading Bibles will not protect him from the blasts of winter, but houses, fires, and clothing will,” ran a typical Ingersoll quotation. “Even patent medicines will cure more diseases than all the prayers uttered since the beginning of the world.”Footnote ²⁵ Against the irrationality of the Bible and the machinations of ministers, Garner contended in his unfinished autobiography that he exemplified a manliness that celebrated honesty: “If all the clergy of the world were put to honest work, hoeing potatoes and sawing the wood stove to cook them, there would be no hunger [or] children going to school with flabby little bellies.”Footnote ²⁶

Garner also owed a debt to Thomas Paine, as did Ingersoll and so many other nineteenth-century skeptics. Paine argued that there indeed was a deity, but that Christianity and other religions only served to shackle men's minds and to ensure the rule of despots. An 1889 poem by Garner on the errors of original sin articulated views close to Paine's: “But friend, I trust there is a God, indeed/I feel the pressing instinct to believe/But not that He should ever wish or need/Oblations, blood, or victims to retrieve/The loss which guilt entailed.”Footnote ²⁷ However, Garner never again made any reference to a belief in any supernatural forces later in life. Whether or not this lone expression of belief was an example of his earlier ideas is impossible to ascertain, but the rest of his surviving work from the 1890s rejects the supernatural entirely. Though Garner spent much more time aiming his barbs at Christianity than declaring himself a non-believer in any deity whatsoever, it is reasonable to consider him an atheist.

Garner and Ingersoll also listed the great names of free thought in history, a group that featured biologist Ernst Haeckel, Galileo, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Paine, Charles Darwin, and Christopher Columbus.Footnote ²⁸ Naturally, Garner included Ingersoll in his own list of heroes. Garner's enlistment into a crusade of manly freethinkers against corrupt and deceitful religious traditions offered a series of benefits. He could demonstrate, at least to himself, his intellectual and moral superiority over other men and join a fraternity of intellectual luminaries. Considering his position as an obscure teacher and businessman, his skeptical credentials allowed him to claim a much more famous pedigree than his daily life. Still, Garner never discussed national free thought associations or newspapers in his surviving writings. Perhaps Garner was too committed to his individual career as a scientist to seek ties with likeminded opponents of religion.

He also remained distant from other strands of skepticism. A fair number of freethinkers lived in Great Plains states and the Midwest.Footnote ²⁹ For example, the notable freethinking editor D.M. Bennett originally published in 1873 his popular magazine The Truth Seeker from Paris, Illinois.Footnote ³⁰ Like other native-born Americans, Garner almost certainly knew little or nothing about the lively circles of Czech, German, Norwegian, and other European immigrant opponents of organized religion who published in their own languages.Footnote ³¹ The genteel anguish of William James toward his loss of certainty regarding his faith never made a mark on Garner, although Garner made quite an impression on the Harvard professor. Claims of primate languages corresponded well with James's interest in idiosyncratic research, and he referenced Garner briefly in the margins of his Principles of Psychology.Footnote ³²

Garner was also a maverick in his political positions. The Democratic Party, whose base of southerners and Catholic immigrants appalled northern skeptics, had little appeal for him. States' rights, that foundation of southern Democratic politics, failed according to Garner because only a strong federal government could handle national problems.Footnote ³³ Pleas to Anglo-Saxon unity left Garner cold: “Every four years [the Democrats] blare about Jefferson and Anglo-Saxon civilization, and 75% of its supporters have no idea who T. Jefferson was. . . .We are not an Anglo-Saxon people—we are an American people.”Footnote ³⁴ Garner believed the Democrats left southern white voters at the mercy of ignorant newcomers from the old country. Garner wrote his son, “The Murphys and the Mahoneys, and the Hooligans and the Higgens's must be taught to follow and not to lead. But as long as [the Democratic Party] remains the tool of Irish fugitives and spoil hunters, its defeat is the only salvation of Amer. institutions.”Footnote ³⁵ Although Garner resented Republican policies “for its 10 thousand insults and its injustices heaped upon the south,” Democratic efforts to call upon aggressive white southern masculinity failed to convince Garner.Footnote ³⁶ Naturally, the Virginian despised perennial Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan's appeals to Christian virtue and populist frustrations. Garner noted: “Principles are poor stock unless they are backed up by men of ability and integrity—I know of no greater calamity that threatens the American republic than the election of Bryan.”Footnote ³⁷ True to his ideal of rugged independence, Garner lauded Grover Cleveland as a practical politician who could not be swayed by fickle public opinion—as did Ingersoll.Footnote ³⁸

Though Garner shared a wide range of views with northern freethinkers who did not support radical politics, his writings on Africa and race showed his fidelity to dominant southern attitudes. Unlike nearly any other American freethinker between 1865 and 1920, Garner had lived in Africa. His long residency in Gabon shaped his attitudes toward animals, race, and religious orthodoxy. Other freethinkers rarely discussed racial differences in their writings on free thought and religion. Garner racialized differences between African religion and white rationalism.

Garner, Race, and Religion

Garner never succeeded in fulfilling his ambition to become an important expert on racial questions. This failure was not from a lack of trying. Garner penned numerous essays on the subject during his stay in Gabon from 1904 to 1908. These writings never reached the general public, most likely thanks to Garner's notoriety for his eccentric theories. Even though they never reached a significant audience, his writings on race allow an unusual glimpse at how a southerner could combine atheism with support for segregation and African American disenfranchisement. While his religious opinions placed him at the margins of southern thought, he added an irreligious note to the chorus of southern self-styled race experts who wanted to defend Jim Crow to northern audiences.Footnote ³⁹ Garner also showed a genuine respect for Gabonese spiritual practices at times, in contrast to the virulent hatred some other southern skeptics expressed towards blacks.

Garner firmly placed his views on spirituality and racial hierarchies in a southern context. His childhood in late antebellum southwestern Virginia left him with a strong sense of paternalism toward African Americans. Unlike impoverished regions of southern Appalachia isolated from the larger southern economy, Abingdon's position on the Knoxville-Richmond railroad ensured that Garner grew up around slaves.Footnote ⁴⁰ A slave preacher's kindness so impressed Garner that one of the future skeptic's youthful ambitions was to become a pastor.Footnote ⁴¹ Though Garner witnessed one public execution of a slave, he never viewed black men as naturally violent. An African-born slave healer even prepared a cure for Garner.Footnote ⁴² Such an upbringing perhaps explains how Garner might view Gabonese spiritual practices in a positive light.

Garner thus could bring Africans, African Americans, and race generally into discussions of skepticism. No scholar has tried to survey at length understandings of race among freethinkers, but it is clear that little consensus existed on racial difference amongst northern skeptics.Footnote ⁴³ Some major journals, such as The Freethinker, featured comments that mocked Christians over the failure of African Americans to receive equal rights. A short piece on the notorious Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision reported, “Those who fancy there is perfect equality between negroes and white people in Christian America will be surprised to learn that the Supreme Court, the highest legal authority in the States, has affirmed the law of Louisiana compelling every railroad in the state to provide separate cars for white and colored passengers.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Still, other freethinking publications disseminated racist stereotypes. Free Thought published an article on African American secret societies in which the author, Charles Alexander, himself apparently black, declared, “The negro's taste for the mysterious, the mystical, the unexplainable, the inexplicable . . . is a taste and an aspiration which do not appear to enter into the composition of other natures. . . . Being intensely religious and marvelously superstitious, he finds it necessary to mix a large portion of his religion with the ritualistic doctrine of his secret order.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Although Alexander might have been trying to condemn religion and ritual in his own community, freethinkers who despised irrationality could have easily concluded that black people were mesmerized by religious humbug.

Garner, a proponent of scientific progress, did not belong to either the conservative anti-modernist or the revolutionary strands within the free thought movement. Henry Adams, Madison Grant, and H.P. Lovecraft had little hope that the decline of organized religious belief offered new vistas of freedom.Footnote ⁴⁶ Jews, foreign immigrants, and African Americans constituted a serious threat to racial purity, rationality, and the American republic. Some anarchists and Marxists celebrated a heroic revolutionary future that would lead to the collapse of organized religion and, to a lesser extent, to racial equality. The most familiar freethinker stance, however, rejected revolution while embracing the ideal of progress. Such freethinkers proclaimed that scientific achievements and individualism would eventually liberate all mankind. How could one believe in universal progress through the defeat of organized religion if one also accepted the existence of a biological hierarchy of races?

Some major figures sidestepped the question of race. Garner's hero, Ingersoll, rarely touched on racial themes, even as he expounded on practically every other intellectual topic. Still, his racial attitudes did not always support his rhetoric of a universal crusade for science against faith. When Ingersoll entered politics in Illinois in 1863, he called for the expulsion of African Americans from his state and the country.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although Ingersoll attacked slavery and supported Republican civil rights legislation after the late 1860s, he did nothing to decry the rise of Jim Crow in the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ⁴⁸To explain how whites had supposedly reached the summit of intellectual achievement, Ingersoll resorted to the popular nineteenth-century view that climate dictated intelligence.Footnote ⁴⁹

Much more clearly than Ingersoll, Garner asserted the existence of a racial separation of spiritual traditions that corresponded to his classification of humanity into multiple species. The materialist nature of African thought and the supposed inability of Africans to develop abstractions separated them from whites. “The negro is essentially a materialist and his mind only deals with material things. He lives in a totally different sphere from the white man. . . . Countless generations of education in literature cannot develop in him a mind that deals with the abstract things. . . . Not one of them that ever lived grasps the idea of a truly spiritual religion. They learn to repeat the dogmas and recite the language of religion but no negro has ever grasped the true philosophy of it,” Garner observed in one essay.Footnote ⁵⁰ His opinions did not waver until his death in 1920.Footnote ⁵¹

Garner's views on race coincided with common views among white proponents of Jim Crow. According to Garner, a true southerner respected the reality of racial difference, whereas Christian fanatics and misguided northerners did not. Like many southern intellectuals, Garner argued that blacks and whites belonged to two separate species of the same human genus. He denied that people of African descent were either “identical with the white race except in [their] condition . . . [or] a kind of brute—only a little higher than the animals.”Footnote ⁵² No amount of evangelization or education could overcome race differences, he warned.Footnote ⁵³ Even if slavery supposedly had provided the benefit of making black labor valuable, according to him it was improper and self-defeating to treat Africans as mere machines either in America or Africa.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, whites who supported political rights for people of color were “political tinkerers” who “converted [blacks] into a political toy” to be easily manipulated.Footnote ⁵⁵ Equality for blacks was a will-o'-the-wisp “that constantly lures [blacks] into the treacherous sands of social despair,” particularly because whites in the Americas would always view emancipated black labor as a threat.Footnote ⁵⁶ Blacks were “dead weight for the white man to carry” and were far more productive in the days of slavery than “whining about their rights and licking the boots of charity.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Garner's solution to solve racial problems would be threefold: blacks should be granted their own independent territory in Africa to develop economically, leave the United States and flee city life, and receive vocational training rather than a literary education.Footnote ⁵⁸

Such a collection of prescriptions was hardly original, even if Garner's skepticism stripped the edifice of racial orthodoxy of appeals to the curse of Ham and other Biblical references. Garner's self-representation as a paternal and compassionate protector of blacks fit within the southern conservative perspective, which disclaimed any belief in racial equality but was still uneasy over the demonization of blacks identified with race-baiting politicians like Ben Tillman of South Carolina or James Vardaman of Mississippi.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although Garner was familiar with Herbert Spencer's social Darwinist ideas, he did not embrace an unceasing battle of the races. This placed Garner at odds with the Texan journalist William Cowper Brann, perhaps the most well-known southern proponent of religious skepticism in the 1890s.

Brann's Iconoclast magazine's fiery essays drew a national audience, as he dared challenge Baptist orthodoxy in Waco, home of Baylor University.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whereas Garner considered the Catholic Church and Christians generally as enemies of scientific progress, Brann viewed all faiths as possible paths to God. Such tolerance fell by the wayside on matters of race. Brann's screeds on the monstrous lusts and brutal ways of African American men resonated little with Garner.Footnote ⁶¹ One of Brann's essays began: “I once severely shocked the pseudo-philanthropists by suggesting that if the South was ever to rid herself of the Negro rape-fiend she must take a day off and kill every member of the accused race that refuses to leave the country.”Footnote ⁶² Garner never allowed such demagoguery—even in private writings—to undermine the persona he cultivated as a kind patron of black people. However, the two men agreed on other issues. The reality of racial difference never could be overcome by education or laws, they both insisted. White supremacy was necessary, in their shared view, and white southerners far better understood Africans and African Americans than naïve northern social activists.

Garner's theories regarding race also separated him to some degree from Kentucky's famed infidel Charles Clifton Moore (1837–1906), a former Protestant minister who espoused agnostic ideas similar to Ingersoll in his newspaper, the Blue Grass Blade.Footnote ⁶³ Moore became the scourge of the Protestant establishment in Kentucky in the 1880s, just as Brann so riled Baptists in Waco that he was ultimately killed by an irate supporter of Baylor University. Moore and Garner upheld a common notion that they represented brave, honorable manhood fighting hypocrisy. Moore repudiated slavery shortly before the Civil War, though, and hardly brought up race in his writings despite the fact he had owned a plantation and served in a Confederate military unit. Biographer John Sparks has argued Moore was relatively respectful of African Americans.Footnote ⁶⁴ Perhaps, but some of his actions would have been approved by Garner. On Easter Sunday in 1901, Moore marched an African American who was an alleged thief at gunpoint through the streets of Lexington.Footnote ⁶⁵ John Breckinridge Castleman, a Confederate general who befriended Moore, pointed to Moore's kindness to his old former slaves as evidence for the true benevolence of the peculiar institution.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other issues separated Garner and Moore. Garner never would have approved of Moore's public support for Prohibition, contraception, or radical feminists like Annie Besant. By contrast to Garner's silence about possible ties to other freethinkers, Moore corresponded with freethinking publications and authors around the country.

Why Garner never used his fame to articulate his freethinking ideas on a larger stage like Brann and Moore is hard to determine. Perhaps it was not entirely Garner's own doing. It is possible that unfriendly editors rejected Garner's jeremiads against Christianity and missionaries—though this material would have been manna from heaven for any irreligious publication. Certainly, Garner's desperate search for press attention and his nomadic ways placed major obstacles in the way of efforts to make a name for himself as a skeptic. Brann and Moore stayed in one place, owned their newspapers, and had their own sources of support within their home cities to help weather inevitable attacks from opponents. Just as importantly, the Texan and Kentucky firebrands clearly placed themselves in national freethinking networks. Without contacts or a firm base of operations, Garner depended on the fickle judgments of newspaper and magazine editors who preferred articles on talking chimpanzees to his other themes. Unlike Brann or Moore, Garner had little interest in radical political causes save for his personal anxieties regarding colonialism. Even there he did not risk jeopardizing his research by publically condemning French rule in Gabon.

Unlike practically any other American freethinker or any proponent of white supremacy in the South, Garner spent years learning about African cultural practices. Progressive Era southern enemies of racial equality, such as sociologist Joseph Alexander Tillinghast, compiled books exposing the supposed barbarism of all black people based on secondary sources, but hardly any bothered to travel to any African locale.Footnote ⁶⁷ Freethinkers of various persuasions enjoyed infuriating Christians by making favorable references to other religions. Even a bigot as virulent as Brann once declared, “If in the wilds of Central Africa I should find a man bowing down to a dried toad [or] a stuffed snake . . . I'd remove my hat as a tribute of respect, not to his judgment, but to his honesty.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Garner went much further than these passing comments by arguing that African religions had no concept of deity and by asserting that indigenous beliefs were far better than the misguided and dangerous work of Christian missionaries. Colonial officials and foreign clergy both violated the natural order of separated races in Africa, just as abolitionists and supporters of African American rights did at home.

The Heathen and the Bible

Garner's complex engagement with Gabonese supernatural beliefs was marked by oscillations between respect and condescension.Footnote ⁶⁹ His accounts of Gabonese spirituality were not simply means to make rhetorical points against Christianity. Garner lived on the Fernan Vaz lagoon, a region with a limited French colonial military presence, and he did not have the manpower nor the weapons at his disposal to intimidate his Gabonese neighbors. Thus, Garner acquiesced to his neighbors, who treated him as a guest who was required to defer to Gabonese chiefs. On a practical level, Garner could not operate without the labor and knowledge of Gabonese people as he searched for primates. To negotiate more effectively with Gabonese communities, Garner endorsed aspects of local beliefs. Though Garner never referenced William James, the two men shared a common empiricist position toward religion, in which the results of religious practices on human behavior were the main subject of scrutiny rather than the plausibility of spiritual beliefs themselves.

One of his essays described how he underwent a healing ceremony to show his respect for Ogoula, a chief of a village where Garner spent several months.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fever had ravaged Garner, and Ogoula told Garner to participate in a ritual to appease an evil spirit and put an end to the sickness. To Garner, Ogoula was a worthy ally: “a tall, stately man” who “manifested a warm friendship and evinced deep solicitude for my welfare.”Footnote ⁷¹ The Gabonese leader offered to heal his American friend and asserted the value of indigenous spirituality and Garner's status as a valued client to the chief. “I know the white man is a wise man and knows things that the black man doesn't know. I also know that, in his own country, the white man has his own god and makes his own mbuiri (any mystery or mysterious ceremonies) and that he does not believe in those of the black man. But, when you remain in the black man's country, the black man's mbuiri must protect you,” Ogoula declared.Footnote ⁷² Though Garner discounted the effectiveness of the ritual, he also noted how he appreciated “the good intent and conscientious efforts” of his host.Footnote ⁷³ After a long description of the procedure, Garner concluded that the event was “not materially different from many ceremonies of the higher cults of civilization.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The narrative allowed Garner to present himself as a tolerant man who was willing to learn from Africans.

Garner enjoyed brandishing his respect for Gabonese beliefs to skewer the arrogance of Christians. In a description of a bwiti dance ceremony held by Nkomi people in Fernan Vaz to discover evil sorcerers, Garner remarked of an oganga (the oracle and leader of the ritual): “Oganga, as a functionary of African society, holds exactly the same relations to the masses as the preacher in civilization holds, except he includes the practice of medicine in his category of duties. . . . No impartial student of social economy who closely studies the two can doubt that the priesthood of civilized religions are purely and solely the survival of the ‘medicine man’ of savage society.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Garner repeatedly noted the similarities between Gabonese spirituality and Christianity in other essays. “So far as I can analyse prayer it is all equally heathen and it is mere egotism for any man to claim that his prayers are more efficacious than those of any other human being,” Garner argued in another essay in which he contended Gabonese and Christian prayers were equally powerless to stop calamity.Footnote ⁷⁶

Gabonese people had no concept of deities at all, declared Garner, an idea that hardly troubled an atheist. Sacrifices of goods and alcohol offered to ombwiri, powerful spirits associated with particular locations, did not demonstrate reverence for a god. “All alleged sacrifices . . . are simply the payment of tribute for a specific act . . . there is nothing sacred or reverential in the act or the thing appeased,” he wrote shortly before his death in 1920.Footnote ⁷⁷ Gabonese people only honored forces that they feared. Garner recalled one journey when his close ally Anjanga, a clan chief of the Nkomi people living on the Fernan Vaz lagoon, prayed to a storm to calm itself on behalf of Garner and all the Nkomi manning Garner's canoe. Anjanga and his crew commanded their American employer keep silent as they passed over waters known to inhabit Milamba, a mighty ombwiri that became angry at the slightest noise. Garner concluded, “There [sic] supplications are as really prayer as those of more intelligent races of mankind who address them to some deity supposed to be supernal if not supreme”Footnote ⁷⁸

Garner argued that Gabonese spiritual beliefs demonstrated the creativity of Africans, as well as their mistake of attributing their accurate observations of natural phenomena to imaginary causes. “The wise-men of Africa … are aware that the odours inhaled by certain plants produce sleep and that others produce insomnia. . . . They do not know how these things are accomplished, but they are conscious that such is the fact. The secret of the witch is knowing the plants that produce certain effects. . . . this is the sum and essence of witchcraft,” he noted in 1902.Footnote ⁷⁹ He espoused the same argument two decades later.Footnote ⁸⁰ One reason for Garner's unwillingness to condemn African intellects as unfailingly flawed came from his need for African knowledge. Garner depended extensively on Gabonese informants for detailed knowledge of animals and plants from the early 1890s until his last sojourn in Gabon from 1917 to 1919. Academic biologists such as Robert Yerkes mocked Garner for relying too much on the supposedly fantastic reports of Gabonese people. Footnote ⁸¹ Garner himself made a clear demarcation between what he considered to be valid African sources of knowledge from the imaginary world of Gabonese spirituality.

Moral relativism became one element of Garner's multifaceted understanding of white masculinity. Garner thought of himself as a rational defender of childish and entertaining Africans. Such self-representations allowed him to claim to be a benevolent master. The liberating possibilities of free thought simply did not apply to black people. Instead, Garner argued that Africans should maintain their own beliefs and their own culture unsullied by Western influences. He wrote in 1902, “We cling to that vain illusion that we alone are right. It is absolutely painful to any student of primitive customs to witness the contempt in which the majority of white men hold the native institutions of Africa and even more painful to witness the ruthless manner in which they try to subvert them.”Footnote ⁸² English experts on African affairs such as Mary Kingsley and E.D. Morel shared similar views in the early twentieth century and openly doubted the value of missionaries as well.Footnote ⁸³

For Garner, missionaries violated the basic truth of racial difference and created a dangerous group of Africans unable to truly convert to a faith best suited to whites. Jeremiads against missionaries also allowed Garner to present those who believed people of African descent deserved equal treatment as deluded, unmanly, and dangerously ignorant of racial boundaries. In one essay, Garner noted: “One fatal error of which all missionaries are more or less guilty is teaching the social heresy of equality. In their desire to impress the savage with the beauty and purity of the religion they teach, the missionaries coddle the savages and fratranise [sic] with them until they are persuaded that religion removed the barriers that nature has erected.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Proponents of egalitarianism victimized people of African descent in the United States with “undue adulation, holding out false ideals that could never be realized.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Advocates of Africans and African Americans denied reality just as religious believers tricked themselves with imaginary deities at odds with logic and science. Garner presented himself as a principled observer who sought to dispel illusions based on emotional fancy and deceit, whether on religious matters or on race.

Garner despised missionaries for personal reasons as well as theoretical ones. French Catholic missionaries had confirmed his anti-Catholic prejudices. During his first visit to Gabon in 1892 and 1893, he claimed to have conducted his research alone in an iron cage not far from the Sainte Anne mission in Fernan Vaz. Garner accused one priest of abandoning him when they traveled together in the interior of southern Gabon during that time.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, his ire came from a more serious charge. Priests at the mission informed French journalists that Garner had almost immediately abandoned the cage and stayed with them, and these charges eventually reached American audiences. Thus, they undercut his entire self-representation as a brave researcher willing to risk his life. Doubts about Garner's truthfulness haunted his career and cut him off from funding and public acclaim in the United States until shortly before World War I. Gregory Radick has explained how the military metaphors of conquest and armed crusaders used by proponents and opponents of Darwinist ideas in Europe and North America influenced Garner's accounts.Footnote ⁸⁷ The missionaries' comments helped to turn many European and North American scientists against Garner and only confirmed Garner's deep-seated distrust of Catholics and most missionaries. The Holy Ghost Fathers religious order that staffed Catholic missions in Gabon was “a propagander [sic] of hatred . . . [and] a league of venomous persecutors who sacrifice every principal of justice to the selfish ends of their own acquittal.”Footnote ⁸⁸ An exposé of the results of Catholic missionaries could serve as a weapon against their influence.

Gabonese Christians provided Garner with ammunition for his long struggle with missionaries. “We always knew when Sunday came in the bush,” he assured his American readers in 1920, “because on that day our boys refused to work, having learned from the missionaries that Sunday was a holy day of idleness.”Footnote ⁸⁹ He opined, “A native who can read or write, no matter how poorly, will no longer do any kind of manual labor, he becomes meddlesome, officious, and presumptious [sic] to an overwhelming degree.”Footnote ⁹⁰ To counter claims of true conversion through missionary teachings, Garner noted statues used in bwiti rituals had come to resemble the Virgin Mary, the Holy Family, and other Catholic imagery. “Catholic teachings and ceremonies are far more harmful than the Protestant because they lend themselves so much more readily to the native fancy for ostentation and display,” the American researcher opined as he noted the prevalence of Gabonese Catholics participating in indigenous spirituality.Footnote ⁹¹

Much of Garner's lone crusade against Christians is valuable for historians of early colonial Gabon, even if his failure to publish his findings meant these stories did not reach freethinkers in America. For example, Garner wrote down coastal Gabonese versions of Christ's resurrection that described the Holy Spirit as the master of powerful supernatural forces that made it invisible. For Garner, such stories were incontrovertible proof of the failure of missionaries to truly spread their faith to Africans. A retelling of Samson's story by some Fang-speaking converts featured a mystical talisman made of elephant bone and made a dispute over marriage payments the central reason for Samson's fight against the Philistines.Footnote ⁹² Fang communities often battled one another over marriage disputes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and priests, and Fang catechists, may have translated the Samson narrative in ways that Fang people could reshape to fit local concerns.

The polyvalent nature of Gabonese spiritual beliefs had little place in Garner's dichotomy between missionary degradations and unspoiled Africans. Southern Gabonese people had long exchanged esoteric knowledge between different groups. Christian converts in the early colonial period often combined indigenous spiritual practices with mission teachings, and Gabonese outside of Christian communities appropriated elements of Catholic dress and liturgy.Footnote ⁹³ Neither Garner nor most American and French missionaries in the early twentieth century could imagine the survival of Gabonese spiritual traditions and their cross-pollination with Christianity. When Garner toured southern Gabon with his phonograph in 1905, he entertained himself by frightening people with his ability to conjure up the voices of the dead with his device. While Garner wished to show off the backward nature of Gabonese people, he did not recognize that they responded to him in the same guarded fashion as they did to the arrival of any new religious practice, whether Christian or indigenous.Footnote ⁹⁴ Again, Garner's discussions of local traditions aimed to highlight his own abilities and downgrade Christianity, rather than plumb the complexities of what Gabonese people actually believed.

Colonial officials and indeed American and French missionaries generally shared Garner's gloomy views on Gabonese Christians by the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹⁵ Several Frenchmen who lived in Gabon jokingly described how female graduates of mission schools in Libreville nearly always became the lovers of Frenchmen.Footnote ⁹⁶ But, no other writers attacked missionaries with the virulence of Garner. The anti-clerical movement sweeping France in the era of the Dreyfus Affair and the first decade of the twentieth century stayed in Europe. No matter what their individual difference on spiritual matters or the repugnance some missionaries felt toward the violence and incompetence of the colonial government in Gabon, they shared a common sense of superiority toward Africans and recognized that European rule and missionary efforts served church and state alike.

Though Garner saved most of his vitriol for clergy, he condemned other aspects of French colonialism. The French government had given a monopoly over trade in Fernan Vaz to a private concessionary company in 1899. Gabonese people detested the company for extorting rubber and ivory for practically nothing, even as French authorities created a poll tax in 1902 that most communities could not afford to pay.Footnote ⁹⁷ Scenes of colonial guards snatching livestock and dragging people to jail during tax collection expeditions angered Garner and played on his paternalistic views of Africans. “A more ruinous system of trade was never devised and a more unjust and arrogant claim was never made by any gold hunter nor protected by any government,” he noted.Footnote ⁹⁸ Colonialism violated the truth of racial divides and white southern honorable manhood. During his residence in Gabon from 1904 to 1908, Garner railed at the “strutting, petty tyrants” who governed the colony: “The sudden elevation of such men—or boys as some of them are—is a crime against civilization.”Footnote ⁹⁹ European rule in Africa consisted of a “barbarous military system” in which “the negro becomes a mere hand organ monkey with his tail of savagery protruding from beneath his little red coat. . . . It is not only a farce in which the negro is made to burlesque himself and his race; it is a cruel injustice.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, Garner kept quiet about these views—most likely because he needed French approval to stay in the colony—and went so far as to praise the French government in a 1920 article.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Garner's anti-colonialism diverged to some degree from other U.S. critics of empire, even if some of them used racist arguments against imperialism. Mark Twain's searing attack on European colonialism, King Leopold's Soliloquy, featured Leopold II as a crucifix-kissing hypocrite who ignored the exploitation and ruthlessness of his regime in the Congo.Footnote ¹⁰² Rather than attacking missionaries as deranged enemies of the color bar, Twain presented American missionary accounts of abusive colonial policies as acts of heroism that contradicted Leopold II's complaints about their meddlesome and untrustworthy nature. The famed novelist had rejected Christianity but not the courageousness of its evangelists.Footnote ¹⁰³ Another difference between Twain and Garner was the concessionary system in French Central African territories, which lacked a single villainous (and Catholic) target for freethinking ire. Because the French colonial state did not rely much on Christian platitudes to justify its existence the way that Leopold's regime did, Garner could not mock colonial officials for not living up to the Gospel.

Garner made no pretense of his profound dislike for most Africans, unlike opponents of Leopold II, who described Congolese people as innocent Africans. His writings on animal behavior repeatedly highlighted the brutal nature of Gabonese people. Some Gabonese spectators who mocked two chimpanzees in Libreville exemplified the malevolence of Africans: “The ruling impulse of nearly all natives appears to be cruelty, and they cannot resist the temptation to tease and torture anything that is not able to retaliate.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A thirty-six-page paean by Garner to his beloved dog stated that “it is one of the singular mental characteristics of the negro race to believe the worst of every living creature.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The same piece described Garner's amusement when his pet tried to bite some children in the groin.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Black people exhibited the same inability to hold abstract ideas as simians, he asserted. Both could only deal with concrete and tangible concepts, because “the concrete must precede the abstract in the development of the race.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Garner's denial of the unique and superior nature of man upheld racial inequality.

His diary and letters further distanced himself from viewing Africans as equals. A typical entry from his journal noted, “My bush negroe [sic] is too devout to work on Sunday, but I am not too devout to charge him for the day. These lazy dirty beggars resort to anything on earth to avoid work.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He sarcastically noted to a friend in 1918, “I find some consolation in remembering the pictures I have seen of angels as they are presented in the Bible and Sunday-school books of my youth and there is not one black among them—not even a mulatto—from which I draw the happy deduction that no negroes go to heaven and when I go there I will never have to deal with them again.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Garner's idea of paradise was one that many other southern advocates of white supremacy could have sympathized with, even if they generally might have had far more faith in its existence than Garner.

Garner's commitment to whiteness in his everyday life in Gabon most likely trumped any of his rhetorical displays of anti-colonialist and anti-missionary fervor. By the time he wrote his most critical essays on colonial rule, Garner had become an accepted member of white society by the several hundred French officials, British and German traders, and even missionaries who lived in Gabon before World War I. Concessionary company agents allowed the American expatriate logistical support to track down gorillas, and Garner formed friendships with two governors of the colony: Charles de Noufflard (governor, 1906–07) and Casimir Guyon (1914–16).Footnote ¹¹⁰ The bonds of white sociability even allowed Garner to temporary make peace with his supposed clerical enemies. A U.S. missionary couple stayed with Garner for several weeks in 1908. “They are rigid Presbyterians and they know I am not, but we get along all right and I don't discuss religion very much,” Garner reported to his son.Footnote ¹¹¹ Astoundingly, Garner even dined at the Catholic mission in Fernan Vaz twice in 1907.Footnote ¹¹² Perhaps Garner's pragmatism also helps to clarify why he did not aggressively proclaim his commitment to free thought.

Garner's skepticism inspired his ethnographic studies of Gabonese people. His own prejudices toward black people on both sides of the Atlantic did not preclude Garner from praising Gabonese spiritual practices as dignified and worthy of respect. Such a position allowed him to perform his persona as a kind-hearted protector of true African culture against fanatical missionaries and cruel colonialists. He thus creatively transplanted the model of southern race experts teaching northern whites about the value of Jim Crow into a colonial African setting. Furthermore, his selective praise for aspects of Gabonese culture allowed him ample room to blast the pretensions of Christians that missionaries brought progress to benighted peoples. The fact he personally despised most Gabonese did not interfere with his pose of tolerance.

This article uses Garner to suggest a new angle from which to think about the broad and diverse expressions of skepticism in the United States. If one is to move beyond a hagiographic approach to the history of American religious skepticism, it will be necessary for scholars to find how freethinkers engaged with major issues in American cultural life. A cursory glance at major freethinking periodicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries clearly indicates that race was a major concern for many other American skeptics besides Garner. His career is one example of how freethinkers also acknowledged and engaged with the powerful presence of imperialism in U.S. culture and politics during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Neither historians of the United States in a global context nor specialists on American irreligion have done much besides highlight Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain as anti-colonial skeptics.

Despite the assumptions of most scholars and most Americans, agnosticism and atheism attracted some southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richard Garner furnishes an opportunity to explore the contours of southern irreligion in the heyday of free thought between the 1870s and World War I. Unwilling—or perhaps unable—to publically express his atheism, Garner never reached the national recognition of southern skeptics such as William Cowper Brann or Charles Clifton Moore, let alone major advocates of irreligion such as Mark Twain or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Nevertheless, his life offers an example of a southern freethinker who engaged with imperialism, race, and gender in this era. Researchers might move beyond conventional sources and well-trod ground—overwhelmingly located outside of the South—in order to see if Garner's effort to merge atheism with much more conventional white southern middle-class attitudes toward race and masculinity characterized southern free thought.

Garner's career illustrates the diversity of southern skepticism as well as the national free thought movement's ambiguous attitude toward race. Garner's more famed southern contemporaries William Cowper Brann and Charles Clifton Moore advocated different views on race, from Moore's paternalism to Brann's vicious race baiting. Garner, unlike Brann or Moore, made expressing racial distinctions central to his ideas about religion. He imagined himself a paternalistic protector of Africans and a fiercely honest example of southern manhood in the face of Christian delusions and treacherous critics. In the end, Garner found a way to make his unusual views on religion correspond to his endorsement of dominant views on race and masculinity.

Perhaps Garner's most notable contribution to a better understanding of free thought in America is his ethnographic work on Gabon. His research may have never had any impact on American free thought, but it offers a less palatable example of skeptics confronting empire and race than the well-known positions of Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce. Missionaries, traders, travel writers, and authors peddled a range of stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of Africans to American readers.Footnote ¹¹³ Just as evidence that monkeys and men shared language and emotions in common denied their separate creation, Garner's tactic of showing links between Christian and African religious practices assaulted the clarion call of mission efforts to save African pagans. Thus, a southern freethinker used Africa as platform to criticize religious orthodoxy and ideas of racial equality at home.