This article examines a previously unexplored chapter in the history of atheism: its close links with nineteenth-century racial anthropology. These links are apparent especially in many atheists’ interest in polygenesis, the theory that human races had separate origins, in contrast to the orthodox Christian doctrine of monogenesis that said all races descended from a single pair, namely Adam and Eve. The article's focus is Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), the founder of the National Secular Society in 1866 and the first openly atheist Member of Parliament in 1880. Bradlaugh was arguably the most important British atheist of the era, representing the radical working-class, secularist movement that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Bradlaugh was an autodidact whose work touched on many topics, including republicanism, biblical criticism, metaphysics, imperial reform, and science, but his racial views have attracted virtually no attention from historians.Footnote 1 While Bradlaugh is the focus, the article also provides other examples of atheists in Britain and the United States who held similar views. Bradlaugh, however, best exemplifies the ways in which ideas about race could intersect with atheism in this period.
Bradlaugh and others were interested in racial anthropology and polygenesis for its own sake, but primarily as a way to undermine the Christian story. One strategy was to employ the idea of the “conflict thesis”—a narrative that developed in the mid-nineteenth century that sought to show that science and religion were inevitably in conflict. Here, Christian opposition to polygenesis was seen as yet another case of Christianity's scientific backwardness in the face of what seemed to be cutting-edge science. While Christians clung to outdated theories of monogenesis, atheists and freethinkers saw themselves as fearlessly pursuing research that demonstrated the truth of polygenesis, untrammeled by theological commitments. Polygenesis also had the potential to deal a serious blow to the Genesis Creation story and, with it, some atheists argued, the entire Christian worldview. If human races had separate origins, the argument went, this would contradict the Genesis account that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, and this would in turn call into question the veracity of the Bible. Even worse, if all humans did not descend from Adam, then only a subsection of humanity would inherit his Original Sin, meaning that Jesus’ atonement would not apply to all of humanity. If polygenesis were true, in this view, the entire Christian story would come crashing down. It was for these reasons that atheists like Bradlaugh closely followed the work of leading polygenist anthropologists on both sides of the Atlantic, in particular Josiah Nott from the United States and James Hunt and the Anthropological Society in Britain.
Even if atheists’ use of polygenesis was mostly instrumental, it also meant an acceptance of racial hierarchy and a static view of humanity and indeed all life. Central to polygenesis was the idea that races were permanently immutable, but this contradicted the idea of Darwinian evolution that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Atheists, Bradlaugh included, accepted Darwin's ideas as a way to undermine the Genesis Creation story, yet continued to use polygenist arguments, even though the two were for the most part incompatible. Another complication to the story is that even though Bradlaugh and others accepted the idea that there were distinct races that could be ranked hierarchically, this did not necessarily translate into a support for racist policies. In fact, Bradlaugh's political career saw him advocating on behalf of Britain's nonwhite colonial population, particularly for Indians.
Historians can face a danger of sliding into a Whiggish narrative of the history of atheism, in which atheists and other religious skeptics have inevitably advocated for progressive causes, including abolition, women's rights, and freedom of expression, and supported “correct” scientific explanations in contrast to “incorrect” religious ones.Footnote 2 There is much to be said for such a position and one can compile a lengthy list of atheists and other nonbelievers who have held political or scientific views that were radical in their own times, but that would now seem commonplace in our twenty-first-century society. However, this narrative need not be seen as some kind of law of history, and might blind us to particular historical contexts in which atheists sometimes adopted seemingly counterintuitive—yet, for them, rational—views. The case of polygenesis is one example to show that we need to be cautious about assuming that atheists have inevitably held progressive views throughout history.
The article will begin with an overview of the development of polygenesis and its specific manifestations in the United States and Britain, focusing on Josiah Nott and James Hunt, two of the main sources for Bradlaugh's anthropology. It will then go on to show the ways in which Bradlaugh, and atheists more broadly, used polygenist ideas against Christianity and how these ideas informed their worldviews. The article will also deal with some of the contradictions between affirming both polygenesis and Darwinian evolution. Finally, the article will briefly problematize the extent to which polygenesis influenced Bradlaugh's politics, paying attention to his criticism of the British imperial project in India.
THE DEVELOPMENT AND RECEPTION OF POLYGENESIS
For much of the history of Christianity, it was taken as a fact that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, about six thousand years ago.Footnote 3 This idea first came under threat upon the European discovery of the Americas and the previously unknown people who lived there. Since the Bible was silent about these mysterious people, various authors—the most important being Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676)—rejected the orthodox view and instead speculated that there must have been men who existed alongside or before Adam. There were, in other words, multiple Adams, or multiple origins for the various races of mankind. For the advocates of polygenesis, it seemed implausible that such widely variant races could have descended from only one pair of humans and then differentiated from each other in such a short time span. (The best-known calculation of the age of the Earth came in the seventeenth century by the Irish archbishop James Ussher, who dated the creation of the world precisely to 23 October 4004 BCE.) Because polygenesis meant that every human race was permanently separate from every other, it easily allowed for racist readings. Polygenists emphasized the anatomical and psychological distinctiveness of each race and encouraged the ranking of these races in a hierarchical fashion, with whites inevitably on top. From here, arguments for slavery and against racial mixing often followed, although it should be noted that monogenists often made similar arguments, even if they maintained the theoretical equality of all races.
Some early modern figures were interested in polygenesis as a way to reformulate, not dismantle, the Christian story and to make it better fit new understandings of the diversity of humanity and the discovery of non-Western chronologies in Egypt, India, and China that seemed to push the age of the Earth back beyond that discerned from the Bible. In the late eighteenth century, with the beginnings of agitations against slavery, the scientific question whether human races had one origin or many gained increasing importance. Advocates of monogenesis, by far the majority, enlisted the help of science to show that the differences between races came about through gradual change and were, at least in theory, ultimately superficial since everyone was related by their descent from Adam and Eve. As a general rule, monogenists were typically motivated by their strong faith in Christianity, with many adopting antislavery views, while polygenists were comparatively hostile to orthodox Christianity and occasionally, though not always, sympathetic to slavery.
In the nineteenth century, racial scientists in Britain and the United States made the doctrine of polygenesis central to the nascent discipline of anthropology. These thinkers used the language of science as they described, classified, and ranked races. The issue of humanity's origins still had theological implications, but racial scientists insisted that clarifying the nature and origin of various racial groups should fall under the domain of science. Polygenesis first found a scientific basis in the United States, particularly in the work of Samuel Morton (1799–1851), a Philadelphia physician and anatomy professor whose work on his collection of crania—the largest in the world—demonstrated, as he saw it, the diversity and permanence of racial types.Footnote 4 Another important figure here was Louis Agassiz (1807–73), the famous Swiss scientist known for his work establishing that the world had passed through an ice age. Agassiz moved to America in 1846 and later became a professor at Harvard. A major coup came for the polygenist camp in 1850, when Agassiz, one of the world's leading scientists, declared his support for the polygenist position.Footnote 5
Following the death of Morton in 1851, the torch of polygenism was passed to Josiah Nott (1804–73), a physician who was born in South Carolina but spent most of his adult life in Mobile, Alabama. Nott, along with George Gliddon (1809–57), an English-born American consul in Egypt, produced the “most systematic statement” of American polygenesis, Types of Mankind (1854).Footnote 6 Both men were alert to the heretical implications of polygenesis, but unlike their mentors Agassiz and Morton, they actually relished tangling with the clergy. Gliddon referred to clergy as “skunks”; in one letter to a collaborator, Nott wrote, “Some of Gliddon's skunks will be at me & I may be compelled to do some skinning.”Footnote 7 Nott delighted in the idea that his polygenist lectures would “stir up hell among the christians [sic].”Footnote 8 Nott's negative attitude toward religion formed while he was a young man. According to Nott's biographer, his father was probably nonreligious, though his mother was a Scots Presbyterian.Footnote 9 While a student at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina), Nott was exposed to the views of Thomas Cooper, an English freethinker and the college's president. Cooper frequently clashed with the state's clergy over his unorthodox religious views, but the student body repeatedly rallied behind him.Footnote 10 Nott's brother, Henry, also got into trouble with the state's clergy. He became a professor at South Carolina College and, much like Cooper, attracted their ire for his freethinking views.Footnote 11 For much of his early life, then, Nott had considerable exposure to freethought ideas and the ways in which they could lead to conflict with the clergy. Later in life, Nott attended the Episcopal Church in Mobile at the urging of his wife, but a fellow physician's wife noted that in fact Nott was “a disbeliever in religion.”Footnote 12
Nott began making a name for himself by speaking on racial topics in the 1840s, arguing that the evidence of diverse races dating from the ancient Egyptian monuments, the sterility—or at least reduced fertility—of racial hybrids, and the vast anatomical and mental differences between races all suggested separate origins. But it is too simplistic to say that Nott's primary goal in advancing these views was to justify white superiority, since his works also had theological aims. In his early lectures, Nott took pains to convince the audience that while his scientific views on race seemed to conflict with the Bible, in fact “[t]he words and works of God, if properly understood, can never be opposed to each other—they are two streams which flow the from the same pure fountain, and must at last mingle in the great sea of truth.”Footnote 13 Nott denied that he wished to generate religious controversy in his lectures about race, but insisted that his goal was merely to ensure that the Bible was not used as an authority on mankind's origins.Footnote 14
As Nott's prominence increased, he became acquainted with Gliddon, and together they produced Types of Mankind, a work that quickly became a best seller. The book's first half, written by Nott, described and classified the various races, while the second, by Gliddon, analyzed the book of Genesis and argued that it only referred to a small group within Palestine, rather than all of humanity. Over nearly eight hundred pages drawing together evidence from archaeology, Egyptology, comparative anatomy, biblical exegesis, and other fields, the authors reaffirmed the conclusion that the races did not descend from a single pair, but originated separately and formed to suit their individual environments.
While their polygenist arguments might be made compatible with some version of Christianity, ultimately Nott and Gliddon were more interested in constructing an argument that championed the supremacy of scientific explanations over religious ones. This was in line with what historians have called the “conflict thesis” which would receive fuller expression later in the century by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Historians have noted how, in the nineteenth century, a new scientific elite was emerging in Britain and the United States that constructed a narrative in which “religion” and “science” were in perpetual conflict as a way to demarcate themselves from the religious elite.Footnote 15 In the view presented by white racial scientists, and endorsed by white atheists and freethinkers, a religious mind-set stifled scientific research into racial differences. Opposition to polygenesis was based, in their view, not in science and reason, but in outdated theological commitments. The view that religion must concede much of its domain to science is littered throughout Nott and Gliddon's work. At one point they wrote, “the diversity of races must be accepted by Science as a fact, independently of theology.”Footnote 16 At another, they complained that while they attempted to make their arguments “in the most respectful manner,” their “opinions and motives have been misrepresented and vilified by self-constituted teachers of the Christian religion!”Footnote 17 Nott and Gliddon imagined the history of science as a progressive story of science triumphing over religion time and again. In his earlier lectures, Nott had mentioned the persecution that Galileo suffered due to his advocacy of heliocentrism.Footnote 18 Nott must have assigned himself, Gliddon, and his fellow polygenists a place in this larger narrative of scientists bravely resisting the bigoted dogma of the religious in the fight for progress.
Terence D. Keel has pointed out the ways in which Christian ideas persisted in Nott's polygenist views, even if Nott saw his science as specifically distinct from religion. Examples include Nott's seeming acceptance that Noah and his sons were real people (who were the progenitors of only the Caucasian race, not of all humanity), his insistence on using the short chronology of the Bible, and his belief in a fixed creation of distinct races, equivalent in some ways to early modern ideas of natural theology in which each organism had been created by God for a specific environment.Footnote 19 But it is also important to see Nott's work in the context of hostility to revelation and anticlericalism. These commitments are seen throughout his work, but this is also how contemporaries viewed him. John Bachman, for example, argued that a preferable title for Types of Mankind might have been “Types of Infidelity.”Footnote 20 Even though Nott and Gliddon made reference to a deity (“the Almighty” or “the Creator”), they certainly loathed the clergy, especially those who seemed to defend unsubstantiated biblical claims that properly fell under the domain of science.
This was why white atheists and freethinkers considered proponents of the American school of anthropology as fellow travelers in the war against Christianity. Nott and Gliddon's work enjoyed a positive reception in the atheist press, in both the United States and Britain. The British periodical the Reasoner—edited by the leading secularist of the time, George Holyoake—gave a favorable review to Types of Mankind, a “large and valuable volume.” The author of the review, presumably Holyoake, declared that the work “contains passages of great interest to the freethought reader” and “is written with a manly, scientific independence of scripture.”Footnote 21 The reviewer was less convinced, however, about Nott and Gliddon's argument about the inferiority of blacks:
We are not competent to decide what truth there is in the physical inferiority ascribed to the negro, but we are quite sure there are sufficient moral facts known about the race, to demand that they should have the same chance as the whites, and we have no confidence in any theory which would deny them this full freedom.
Despite this quibble with the work's political implications, the reviewer hoped that it “will find universal readers.”Footnote 22 The freethought paper the Boston Investigator likewise reprinted a review of the work from the New York Evening Post. “This work,” the review explained, “is destined to create something of a commotion in the religious world. The idea of the unity of the race of man is totally discarded by the authors, one and all.”Footnote 23 Additionally, both the National Reformer—the London-based freethought paper then edited by Charles Bradlaugh—and the Boston Investigator published excerpts from Types of Mankind in their pages.Footnote 24
John Watts, who edited the National Reformer from 1863 to 1866, was similarly influenced by Nott and Gliddon. In one article, he listed them alongside the giants of nineteenth-century science, like Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and T. H. Huxley. The contribution of these men, to Watts, was to show that “man existed on this earth many centuries prior to the 6,000 years of Genesis.”Footnote 25 Even decades after the publication of Types of Mankind, the work was still used to support freethought arguments. To show how “the human race has descended from at least five pairs of original progenitors,” in contradiction to the biblical story, in 1879 the American freethinker Kersey Graves recommended Types of Mankind, which was “compiled from the writings of the ablest naturalists of the age.”Footnote 26 In 1888 the Boston Investigator reprinted an article that disputed the universality of religious belief with reference to Types of Mankind.Footnote 27 All of this demonstrates the enduring influence of Nott and Gliddon's work even late in the nineteenth century and how freethinkers sought to align themselves with scientific provocateurs who challenged the Genesis story.
American anthropology was not the only source of polygenist thought for atheists: the Anthropological Society of London was similarly influential. Learned societies established to study anthropology—and other nascent disciplines—sprang up in the nineteenth century, the first being the Société d'anthropologie de Paris formed by Paul Broca in 1859. This group inspired the formation of a similar society, the Anthropological Society of London (ASL), in 1863. Led by James Hunt, the ASL was a breakaway from the Ethnological Society of London (ESL), the traditional stronghold of monogenesis and humanitarianism. Hunt instead wished to promote his own polygenist ideas that demonstrated the inferiority of nonwhite people in an arena free from religious dogma.Footnote 28
Hunt's racial ideas were strongly influenced by Robert Knox, a promising Edinburgh anatomy lecturer who was disgraced by unknowingly accepting bodies of murder victims for his anatomy classes. Knox initially enjoyed a thriving career, but after the scandal—though officially exonerated of any wrongdoing—he became unemployable.Footnote 29 This gave him free reign to publish his racial views since he no longer had to worry about the potential damaging effects to his career. He produced a polemical tome, The Races of Men, in 1850, with an extended second edition in 1862. In the work he argued that race was the key to understanding all of human history. In his oft-quoted phrase, “Race is everything: literature, science, art—in a word, civilization, depend on it.”Footnote 30 Knox's theories were also deeply pessimistic and bitter, and denied the possibility of progress. Differing from more straightforward racists, Knox had negative things to say about every race, not just the darker ones, even if he did allow that the “fairer races” had the sole capacity for civilization. Like other polygenists, Knox believed that racial intermixing was folly since a race of hybrids could never be permanently established. There was an anti-imperialist bent to Knox's work as well. Knox had the chance to see colonialism firsthand, working at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa from 1817 to 1820 as an army surgeon. This experience seemed to spark his interest in ethnology.Footnote 31 Races, Knox argued, could only survive in their own environments and attempts to transplant them to other climes was doomed to failure. Even the Saxon race could not survive indefinitely in the Americas. The fact that they appeared to be stable there was only the result of continual immigration of new Saxon stock, but if this dried up, the Saxons there would ultimately die out.Footnote 32
As with some of the American racial scientists, Knox was proudly iconoclastic. His nineteenth-century biographer and former pupil, Henry Lonsdale, wrote that Knox “made no religious declaration, and therefore belonged to no Church,” but Lonsdale was coy about assigning a label to his views.Footnote 33 Knox, in his account, saw all religions as “having their origin in idolatrous credulity and ignorance” and believed that they persisted due to “artful schemers, whose purposes are best served by enslaving humanity and binding it down to the yoke of governmental and priestly tyrannies.”Footnote 34 The famous series of Bridgewater Treatises, published by leading natural theologians in the 1830s to show the elements of divine design in nature, Knox scorned as the “Bilgewater” Treatises.Footnote 35 One catches glimpses of this same iconoclasm in The Races of Men. There he declared the “Jewish chronology” to be “worthless” and the Bible “no more a history than it is a work of science.”Footnote 36 He also railed against the influence of priests, which he saw, along with a hereditary monopoly on government, as the main obstacles to social progress.Footnote 37 Perhaps because of his own circumstances, he complained that “throughout Europe, at the present time, to cease to be orthodox, to cease to conform, is to forfeit all, or most of, the privileges of citizenship.”Footnote 38 He nevertheless believed that a deity was clearly at work in nature, though he mocked those who held an anthropomorphic conception of God. For example, these people called “fossil remains . . . ‘Foot-prints of the Creator,’ as if the creative Power had feet and hands.”Footnote 39
Because of his radical science and his disregard for orthodoxy, Knox's work appealed to freethinkers. Autonomos, a pseudonymous contributor to the atheist periodical edited by Bradlaugh, the National Reformer, published a number of lengthy excerpts of Knox's work, with his own additional notes. Three excerpts, “respectfully dedicated [by Autonomos] to theologians in general,” discussed the racial character of the Jews.Footnote 40 In another series of excerpts, eight in total, Autonomos used Knox's racial views as a way to critique colonialism. Rather than providing support for European intervention against nonwhite people, Knox's racial theories actually intended to discourage these kinds of intervention by noting the inability of white races to survive in tropical climates. Despite this, the white races had a natural desire for conquest and plunder, an inclination that was cynically justified in part by the Christian duty to evangelize. Instead the lessons of anthropology seemed to be a kind of racial relativism in which the inequality of the races had to be accepted.Footnote 41
Nonetheless, the basic assumption of Knox's followers in the ASL was that nonwhite people were inferior, and, while their president, James Hunt (1833–1869), sought to maintain religious neutrality in public, their work often took on an antireligious character. In his early speeches to the society, though, Hunt focused on the need to study man dispassionately, while being “careful never to attack the religious conviction of any one.”Footnote 42 Several years later, however, he lashed out at the society's opponents, including those “persons suffering from . . . the religious mania,” an incurable ailment marked by “symptoms of arrested brain-growth.”Footnote 43 John Beddoe, another member of the ASL, noted Hunt's “skepticism of religion.”Footnote 44 Like Josiah Nott, Hunt also drew parallels between himself and Galileo in their fight against religious dogmatism and in defense of science.Footnote 45 At a lecture in 1869, the year of his death, Hunt nevertheless reiterated his view that the society was not about transmitting irreligious opinions. One clerical member of the society, Rev. Dr Kernahan, rose to affirm Hunt's statement and said that in all his years of attendance, “he had never heard a word offensive to Christian faith or life.”Footnote 46
Several scholars have noted that Bradlaugh moved in circles frequented by members of the Anthropological Society or the Cannibal Club, the society's social club,Footnote 47 although he was not formally a member of the ASL, nor is he listed in the Royal Anthropological Institute's database of individuals involved with the society. Bradlaugh nonetheless knew James Hunt and referred to him in one publication as “my friend.”Footnote 48 Other freethinkers were directly involved in the ASL, however, like Moncure Conway, minister of the freethought South Place Chapel in London. He was sought out for his knowledge of slavery in the United States, having been born in Virginia, yet he did not remain a member for long, as he quickly “found that it was led by a few ingenious gentlemen whose chief interest was to foster contempt of the negro.”Footnote 49 Conway hoped to promote his own antislavery viewpoint in the ASL, but without success. “[Thomas Henry] Huxley pointed out to me privately the fallacies of Hunt,” Conway explained, “and I made speeches in the Anthropological Society, but it became plain to me that anti-slavery sentiment in England was by no means as deep as I had supposed.”Footnote 50 The split between the ASL and the ESL would ultimately not last, and the death of James Hunt in 1869 smoothed the path for the merger of two societies under the name of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1871.Footnote 51
Bradlaugh, given his connection with Hunt, was knowledgeable about the development of the polygenist theory. In Heresy: Its Utility and Morality (c.1870), Bradlaugh constructed a story of science's inevitable triumph over religion and included the ASL as a prominent example of a modern heresy standing up to Christian bigotry in search of the truth. Bradlaugh's inclusion of the society in his history tells us about his view of the importance of anthropology, as well as the society's irreligious character:
Against the late Anthropological Society charges of Atheism were freely levelled; and although such a charge does not seem justified by any reports of their meetings, or by their printed publications, it is clear that not only out of doors, but even amongst their own circle, it was felt that their researches conflicted seriously with the Hebrew writ. The Society was preached against and prayed against until it collapsed; and yet it was simply a society for discovering everything possible about man, prehistoric as well as modern. It had, however, an unpardonable vice in the eyes of the orthodox—it encouraged the utterance of facts without regard to their effects on faiths.Footnote 52
The influence of the Anthropological and Ethnological Societies extended to other freethinkers. Freethought periodicals regularly reported on news from these societies. Advertisements for the Ethnological Journal appeared in the Reasoner,Footnote 53 and the Boston Investigator reported positively on the formation of the ASL, which was formed, in their words, “to prove that all foreign missionary operations not only do no good, but inflict a positive injury on mankind.”Footnote 54 In another case, the National Reformer reported on a speech made in 1865 by John Crawfurd, the president of the ESL, that demonstrated the “mental inferiority” of blacks.Footnote 55 That paper also reprinted, on its front page, James Hunt's speech when he resigned the presidency of the ASL in 1867.Footnote 56 In another edition of the National Reformer, J. P. Adams noted that the remarks of Hunt at the 1867 Anthropological Conference in Dundee “comprise so much that recommends itself to the approval of Freethinkers with respect to the mode in which all controversy should be conducted, that we think them entitled to a place in the pages of the N. R.” Adams argued that Hunt and the National Reformer were equally placed “under a sort of scientific ban” for questioning central dogmas within the society.Footnote 57 Many freethinkers saw their goals as overlapping with the ASL, since both groups struggled to transmit their views against the protests of the religious.
As further evidence of the influence of anthropology on atheists and freethinkers, C. Carter Blake, a member of the ASL, became a frequent writer for the National Reformer in the 1870s and 1880s. Here he portrayed himself and his fellow anthropologists as fearless men of science, establishing facts about the world “without any particular assistance from text-clippers.”Footnote 58 Blake, though a polygenist, believed that both monogenesis and polygenesis appeared bad for orthodoxy: “Monogeny goes with long chronology alone. Polygeny is the logical outcome of the short chronologists.”Footnote 59 In other words, monogenesis worked only if the Earth were much older than six thousand years, yet if one held to a short chronology, the only possible explanation for the diversity of races was polygenesis. Blake's articles also contained his views on other racial issues that did not directly involve religious criticism, including the futility of racial intermixture,Footnote 60 the inferiority of blacks,Footnote 61 and the division of races within Europe.Footnote 62 But not every freethinker was favorable to the goals of the ASL. The English radical and journalist W. E. Adams, a frequent contributor to the National Reformer, was one of the chief opponents of slavery in the columns of the paper during the Civil War and routinely attacked members of the ASL for denying a common humanity, which served to justify slavery and the poor treatment of blacks.Footnote 63
The leading anthropologists in Britain and the US found their way into a dictionary of freethinkers compiled by the Scottish freethinker Joseph Mazzini Wheeler in 1889. The dictionary included anyone who “contributed in their generation to the advance of Freethought.”Footnote 64 The entries were brief and in neutral, matter-of-fact language without any editorial comment. Both Hunt and Nott received entries,Footnote 65 and although neither Gliddon nor other leaders of the American school of anthropology received their own entries, the French polygenist and anthropologist Paul Broca was included.Footnote 66 Wheeler did not explicitly give his approval or disapproval of the subjects of his dictionary, but he clearly saw Hunt and Nott as belonging within the freethought fold. Freethinker J. N. Morean provided a similar, though less exhaustive, list to the Boston Investigator of “the great and good men who buckled on the armor to defend the principles which your paper advocates, of Universal Mental Liberty.” This list included Samuel Morton and George Gliddon, but excluded Nott.Footnote 67
BRADLAUGH AND THE USES OF POLYGENESIS
Given the influence of anthropologists on freethinkers, it was no surprise that they were familiar with the arguments of polygenesis and its implications for the Genesis story. A number of atheistic authors around the middle of the century used polygenesis as an example of how Christian doctrines seemed to conflict with the “obvious” facts about reality.Footnote 68 John E. Remsburg, an American freethinker, used Christians’ defense of monogenesis as a way to demonstrate their unscientific attitude in a 1907 work evaluating the Bible. As Remsburg explained, science “does not admit that man is the result of a divine creative act, that all the races have descended from a single pair, or that his existence here is confined to the brief period of sixty centuries.”Footnote 69 Still, the dismissal of monogenesis received only a few lines in Remsburg's larger argument about how Christianity contradicted current scientific knowledge about the world, indicating that it was not central to his case. The issue of unscientific Christian support for monogenesis made no appearance in John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874), one of the classic works of the “conflict thesis,”Footnote 70 while Andrew Dickinson White's similar work, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), contained only a brief mention of Isaac La Peyrère, an early modern exponent of polygenesis.Footnote 71
Charles Bradlaugh, however, was the atheist who most clearly grasped how polygenesis could be used against Christianity. As we have already seen, Bradlaugh was linked with James Hunt and the ASL. His library furthermore contained a copy of the eighth edition of Types of Mankind, as well as journals from the ASL, the ESL, and the Anthropological Institute.Footnote 72 His interest in anthropology was such that in the fall of 1881 he gave four lectures at the London Hall of Science on the subject, which were subsequently published in an 1882 pamphlet. Again, Bradlaugh gave Nott, Gliddon, Agassiz, and Hunt an important place in the development of anthropology.Footnote 73 Three of Bradlaugh's theological polemics dealt with polygenesis. These include Were Adam and Eve Our First Parents? (c.1865)Footnote 74 and The Freethinker's Text-Book, Part I. Man; Whence and How? or, Revealed and Real Science in Conflict (1876).Footnote 75 While both of these works contained detailed discussions of polygenesis, his Genesis: Its Authorship and Authenticity (1882)—revised from his previous work, The Bible: What It Is! (c.1857)—also dealt with the topic.Footnote 76
It should be noted that for Bradlaugh, anthropology always meant physical, not cultural or social, anthropology. In other words, Bradlaugh saw anthropological research as concerning the study of human anatomy and physiology and the bearing this had on humans’ relation to other animals, namely apes, and the relationship between different human races. This was in line with the goals of the Anthropological Society during the 1860s. Another facet of the anthropological tradition involved uncovering the origins of language, culture, and religion. Certainly the divisions between the physical and the cultural or social were not always clear-cut and many anthropologists or ethnologists had studied both since the start of the nineteenth century.Footnote 77 Freethinking anthropologists like E. B. Tylor were also concerned with the study of the origins of human culture, with religion occupying a large part of this project,Footnote 78 but Bradlaugh appeared unconcerned with this area of inquiry. Bradlaugh's anthropology lectures described above, for example, were entirely devoted to physical anthropology and contained nothing on cultural anthropology.Footnote 79 Other freethinkers found studies of so-called primitive cultures useful as a way to discern the naturalistic origin of religion and thereby undercut its truth claims,Footnote 80 but, curiously, this was one topic to which Bradlaugh seemingly paid little attention. For Bradlaugh, anthropological research was interesting primarily or entirely as a way to show that humans could not have descended from Adam and Eve through a study of the diversity of races.
Bradlaugh saw the story of Adam as central to the biblical narrative. As he explained, the “account of the Creation and Fall of Man” was “the foundation-stone of the Christian Church” and “if this stone be rotten, the superstructure cannot be stable.” It was here that polygenesis played a part in disrupting the biblical story. If all humans did not trace their descent from Adam, but rather were members of separately created races, they would not share in his Original Sin. But then, Bradlaugh asked, “what becomes of the doctrine that Jesus came to redeem mankind from a sin committed by one who was not the common father of all humanity?” In other words, if one could cast doubt on the story of Adam, all of Christianity would come tumbling down as well. As Bradlaugh put it, “Reject Adam, and you cannot accept Jesus.”Footnote 81 Central to Bradlaugh's argument was the existence of diverse and permanent races. Assuming that the world was six thousand years old, as the orthodox Christian view did, it seemed inconceivable that the kind of human diversity seen in the world could have come about in such a short time. With such vast differences among humanity, Bradlaugh argued that these distinct races did not descend from Adam and Eve but were “indigenous to their native soils, and climates.”Footnote 82
Bradlaugh looked to Nott and Gliddon to supply evidence about the durability of racial types in contrast to the monogenist idea that there was gradual change, citing both Types of Mankind (1854) and their later work, Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857). The existence of ancient Egyptian statues that pre-dated the biblical flood revealed that racial types within Egypt had been stable for at least five thousand years. In addition, Bradlaugh, on Nott's authority, argued that climate could not change one's physical features, like skin color. Sunburns, for example, could not be passed down to one's offspring and skin color could not therefore change upon moving from one climate to another. Indeed, such a change of natural climates was harmful to individuals, as Bradlaugh argued: “The fact is, that while you don't bleach the colour out of the dark-skinned African by placing him in London, you bleach the life out of him; and vice versa with the Englishman.”Footnote 83
In somewhat of a contradiction, Bradlaugh also highlighted new research that indicated the extended chronology of the Earth as another weapon against Adam's existence. Bradlaugh cited the research of Baron Bunsen, the Egyptologist, who argued that the Egyptians’ own history extended the age of the Earth to at least 22,000 years. In addition, geological and archaeological evidence put the Earth at tens or even hundreds of thousands of years old.Footnote 84 The theory of monogenesis became much more plausible as the age of the Earth was extended back further, giving more time for the races to differentiate from their original source. But Bradlaugh nonetheless continued to assert that even if the age of the Earth were extended back beyond six thousand years, evidence from the Egyptian monuments of the permanency of racial types shows that the races were distinct well into the distant past.Footnote 85 While Bradlaugh said that he was reluctant to weigh in on the controversy over whether man had one origin or many, he did give his own preference: “I am inclined to the opinion that the doctrine of a plurality of sources for the various types of the human race is a correct one.”Footnote 86
Bradlaugh was not the only freethinker to exploit polygenist arguments in service against Christianity. Two Americans freethinkers, B. F. Underwood and Robert Ingersoll, both mentioned the evidence from the Egyptian monuments as ways to suggest the permanency of racial types and therefore to show the flaws of the Bible.Footnote 87 A cartoon by the cartoonist of the leading American freethought periodical, the Truth Seeker, Watson Heston, titled “A Question for Theological Ethnologists,” similarly illustrated the problem of polygenesis. It showed a variety of exaggerated racial caricatures and asked, since “God created man in his own image,” “Which is the image? After what images were the other fellows fashioned[?]” (See figure 1.)Footnote 88
“A Question for Theological Ethnologists,” in Watson Heston, The Freethinkers' Pictorial Text-Book (New York, 1890), 123. Image from https://archive.org/details/freethinkerspict00hest, accessed 8 December 2016.
Arthur Moss's 1887 Truth Seeker article on human origins drew from the polygenist arguments found in Bradlaugh's The Freethinker's Text-Book. Earlier parts of his article discussed archaeological and paleontological evidence of man's antiquity on the Earth, but “[a]nthropological science is equally strong in its proof of the vast antiquity of man” and showed the diversity of the races.Footnote 89 Like Bradlaugh and the others, Moss pointed to evidence from Egypt about the permanence of racial difference, in addition to the fact that “for more than four thousand years the Chinese type has undergone no very important changes.” But he also drew upon evolutionary arguments, noting “that man is an evolution from lower forms.”Footnote 90 A rejoinder came from J. W. Grabill, who dismissed the idea that there were more than one species of humans by using scientific arguments from Huxley and the leading British monogenist in the first half of the nineteenth century, James Cowles Prichard, even though Grabill wrote from a Christian perspective.Footnote 91 Particularly telling about this exchange was that monogenesis and polygenesis were still being debated even in 1887 and that the racial arguments from early and mid-nineteenth-century figures continued to be thought of as authoritative.
EVOLUTION AND POLYGENESIS
Also telling was the persistence of polygenist arguments long after Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), which argued for the evolution of species based on natural selection. While the book was silent on human evolution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore have made a convincing argument that Darwin's evolutionary research was driven by a hatred of polygenesis and the ways it could be used to justify slavery and other racist policies.Footnote 92 This became clearer in his 1871 work, The Descent of Man, which laid out how the human race descended from one common ape ancestor.Footnote 93 Indeed, in the Darwinian view, not just humans, but all life on Earth, came from a single source. With this in mind, it is clear that a polygenist view in which each human race has a separate origin was not compatible with Darwinian evolution.
This line of argument was picked up in a criticism of Bradlaugh's polygenist arguments. One reader, named R. Newstead, responded to a condensed version of Bradlaugh's argument for polygenesis in an 1864 article in the National Reformer.Footnote 94 Newstead noted that Bradlaugh's arguments were “quite at variance with the great principles taught by Darwin in his work on the ‘Origin of Species.’” This was because, “If it is difficult to believe ‘that climate, mode of life, and congenital or accidental’ divergencies [sic] are capable of producing the different varieties of mankind, then how much more difficult to believe the same effects capable of developing man from the animal next in order to him[?]” In other words, if Bradlaugh could not imagine how humans could diversify, how could he imagine whole new species arising through natural means, as Darwin suggested? Newstead insisted that “the probabilities are, that mankind is descended from a single pair.” But Newstead's defense of monogenesis was based purely on atheistic grounds. He rejected appeals to divine Creation in favor of explanations in terms of natural laws.Footnote 95 To Newstead, then, Bradlaugh's arguments were contrary to Darwin's work and indeed to science. Rather than confronting Bradlaugh's naive racial views from a religious perspective, Newstead used his interpretation of Darwinism to refute Bradlaugh's polygenesis.
Retrospectively we realize the considerable influence of Darwinism, but as the above confrontation indicates, British atheists were actually slow to incorporate Darwin's ideas into their argument against Christianity. Edward Royle argues that it was not until Edward Aveling (1849–98), an anatomy lecturer at the London Hospital and King's College London, became a leading figure in the freethought movement in the late 1870s that Darwinism became central in their arguments.Footnote 96 Further indicative of the ambiguous adoption of Darwin by freethinkers was that a 1905 list in the British periodical The Freethinker on “The Hundred Best Books” of freethought contained no works by Darwin in the section on evolution, even as Aveling's Darwin Made Easy was included, as were other works by T. H. Huxley, Winwood Reade, and Herbert Spencer.Footnote 97 This indicates that nineteenth-century atheists’ understanding of Darwin was secondhand and jumbled with the ideas of other evolutionary thinkers, meaning that Darwin's central message about the unity of the human species was lost.
Bradlaugh never appeared to respond to Newstead's Darwinian arguments directly, but his later discussions of polygenesis, particularly in The Freethinker's Text-Book, touched on Darwin's theories. He admitted that his point was not to prove the polygenist account true or to provide an explanation for the origin of life, only to disprove the Genesis account of Creation: “it is enough to show in antiquity such variations of human type as render impossible the hypothesis of a common origin in one pair less than 6,000 years ago.”Footnote 98 But Bradlaugh did wade into a brief discussion of the scientific hypotheses for man's existence. He acknowledged that it was difficult to determine the origin of life and wrote that experiments about “spontaneous generation” had not yet been conclusive. Nonetheless, life
can clearly be moulded, augmented, and diminished in its presentations. By artificial processes and modes of culture, varieties of vegetable and animal life may most certainly be produced, departing more or less from the parent stock. How far such varieties, so artificially created, can become permanent, or whether their permanency is possible, is an open question.Footnote 99
While Bradlaugh was reluctant to support Darwinism unconditionally, it was enough to simply refute the biblical chronology: “There is no burden on the Freethinker, who finds evidence to reject the Bible story of man, that he should adopt therefore without reservation the views of Mr. Charles Darwin or of Mr. Herbert Spencer.”Footnote 100 Nonetheless, a few pages later, Bradlaugh seemed slightly more inclined to accept evolution:
The evolution of man from lower forms of life scarcely, as yet, takes rank as a scientific truth; it is rather a grand hypothesis, which, if verified, may throw light on many problems of existence, and is, at least, in analogy with the workings of nature, so far as we know them. When we first catch a glimpse of man, he is, as has been already shown, but a half-human animal dwelling in caves, disputing with his co-brutes for existence; we can trace him thence upwards to the civilised European; it seems reasonable, then, to trace him downwards also to the unintelligent life in its lowest forms, halting only when organic and inorganic blend together in the far-off yesterday.Footnote 101
Bradlaugh seemed to highlight how Darwinism could refute a short biblical chronology, yet his Darwinism coexisted side by side with polygenesis in the same work, even though the two ideas were largely at odds with one another.
In Bradlaugh's 1881 lectures on anthropology, he spoke positively about Darwinism but saw it as an extension of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), a leading French evolutionist in the early nineteenth century known for his argument for evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Bradlaugh saw no conflict between Lamarckism and Darwinism; in fact, the latter was simply a restatement of the former. While “Lamarck's doctrine” was mocked in its own time, Bradlaugh explained, it was now “triumphant in Darwinism.”Footnote 102 It was for this reason that Bradlaugh sounded like a Lamarckian when he wrote that poor nutrition would lead the individual to become “short in stature” and “[i]f this be repeated through many generations it will become habit, and then a regularly transmissible character.”Footnote 103 This reading of evolution stemmed in part from Bradlaugh's own liberal commitments to the possibility for social reform, but also from interpreting Darwinism and Lamarckism as both concerning the evolution of species, rather than the mechanism by which this occurred (natural selection or the inheritance of acquired traits). As Peter Bowler explains, while evolution was accepted fairly rapidly following Darwin, the idea of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution was not fully accepted until the Darwinian synthesis in the early twentieth century.Footnote 104
Even with his somewhat muddled understanding of Darwin, Bradlaugh still accepted many of the central points of polygenesis, particularly that certain races were suited for corresponding environments. Indeed, the study of anthropology could have practical consequences for colonial policy given the diffusion of whites throughout the world. But anthropological research showed that one race “has a tendency to die out in a country where another thrives easily”; while in time all humans could become adapted to any climate, this was “only after great struggling.”Footnote 105 In another lecture, Bradlaugh recommended a “slight crossing with native races, or with settled races with greater power of acclimatisation” as a way to ease the transition process. For example, “a small shade of negro blood lessens the tendency of the European to contract yellow fever.”Footnote 106
Bradlaugh's discussion of evolution also used anthropological measurements to construct a gradation from the apes to humans. Bradlaugh cited T. H. Huxley's research from Man's Place in Nature (1863) about the differing cranial capacity between the lower and higher apes, and the higher apes and man.Footnote 107 He also drew upon the French physician Jules Cloquet's facial angle, measuring “an [sic] European, a Negro, an infant chimpanzee, a full grown chimpanzee, a male gorilla, and a Newfoundland dog” to show that the facial angle was highest for a European and gradually became lower as one moved down to the lower races and nonhuman animals.Footnote 108 By studying anatomical differences, and especially cranial measurements, Bradlaugh believed one could best determine how to categorize the various races. On cranial capacity, Bradlaugh reported that Australians had the smallest capacity, but the “capacity increases in the yellow races, and attains its maximum in the white.”Footnote 109 The rest of the skeleton also yielded clues to help classify races. For example, the arm of “the Negro” was longer than that of the European and was nearly indistinguishable, proportionally, from a gorilla's.Footnote 110 These anatomical differences could have consequences for various races’ intellects, though Bradlaugh held out the possibility of improvement among lower races.Footnote 111 For Bradlaugh, then, the idea of distinct races that could be ranked hierarchically was not merely a weapon to be wielded against Christianity but also part of his understanding of the diversity of humanity.
BRADLAUGH AND INDIA
While Bradlaugh's worldview was clearly informed by polygenist anthropology, things become more complicated when we consider his views of nonwhite people in practice. Bradlaugh was sympathetic to the plight of all Britain's imperial subjects. When he was elected to Parliament in 1880, he took up the cause of a group of Maori imprisoned for their nonviolent protests against the incursions of white settlers. In the National Reformer, he complained of the injustice of holding them without a proper trial: “To hold them in custody without trial is exceedingly cruel. One native prisoner has already died, and several of the others are said to be pining to death.” He mockingly contrasted their supposed savagery with the actions of his own government: “They are the savage Pagan subjects of a civilised Christian Government.”Footnote 112
But it was India that most attracted Bradlaugh's attention. It is possible that Bradlaugh's sympathy for India came in part through his close friendship with Annie Besant (1847–1933), a leading secularist at the time, and later a convert to theosophy and supporter of Indian nationalism. Besant's interest in Indian culture dated to the late 1870s, but it became even more apparent in her conversion in 1889 to theosophy, a new religion composed of elements taken from Eastern creeds and Western science and mysticism. The conversion finally severed her links with the rest of the secularist movement, already tenuous because of her unpopular commitment to socialism. After the 1891 death of theosophy's founder, Helena Blavatsky, Besant became one of the leaders of the international theosophy movement.Footnote 113 In this position, she visited India numerous times and, while she initially eschewed involvement with politics, on future visits she grew closer to the movement for Indian home rule. She helped to found the Home Rule League in 1916 and in 1917 was elected for a one-year term as president of the Indian National Congress.Footnote 114
Bradlaugh shared similar interests to those of Besant in the rights of Indians. This in part came from his republican ideology. As David Nash explains, for republicans like Bradlaugh, the despotic actions of the British monarchy in India seemed to offer a grim warning for what would happen if Britain's precarious democracy were ever rolled back. Further to this, many republicans produced idealized visions of pre-Raj India in which Indian communities were self-governing quasi-republics made up of independent farmers. The rule of the British changed all that, to republicans, in a parallel to the fate of equally idealized Saxon communities after the Norman invasion.Footnote 115 In this sense, then, Bradlaugh's advocacy for India was an extension of his republican politics at home.
As an MP, Bradlaugh took up the unofficial mantle of the “Member for India,” the member who expressed the greatest interest in Indian affairs, and repeatedly pressed the government on issues of cost overruns and nepotism in the administration of India. In Parliament and in other public speeches, Bradlaugh advocated for greater self-rule for Indians and even challenged race-based justifications for British rule. He defended the controversial 1883 Ilbert Bill, which proposed that British whites could be tried by Indian judges. In a speech, he countered arguments that insisted on the right of whites to be judged by those of their own race. The proposed bill was not unfair in Bradlaugh's eyes: “If you go to a foreign country for your own benefit, why should you have a superior position to the people who belong to that country and to whom that country belongs? You are an intruder there.”Footnote 116 He also refuted opposition to the bill coming from the High Court judge James Fitzjames Stephen, who said that it was “the privilege of the European not to be tried by a Hindu.” But Bradlaugh rejected that “privilege”: “If any Englishman puts himself in contact with the Hindu, knowingly beforehand, he is bound to submit himself to the law and he has no right to privilege which prevents his crime from punishment.”Footnote 117
Bradlaugh also advocated for gradual Indian home rule. Indians had to be patient, he argued, but they would in time be granted “the fullest right of self-government.”Footnote 118 Bradlaugh also suggested that if the British governed well and “if we win the heart and brain of India gradually to the higher standard of Western civilisation,” then the Indians might wish to remain within the empire.Footnote 119 Bradlaugh's advocacy for Indian home rule, even if gradual, put him outside the mainstream of British imperial thought and made him a hero in India, where he traveled in the winter of 1889–90. An 1889 report from the Hindu newspaper, reprinted in the National Reformer and written in advance of his visit, predicted “a scene of genuine and excited enthusiasm” when he visited the country to attend the Indian National Congress meeting in Bombay, since he “has won for himself a home in the hearts of thousands of Indians who have never seen him, but who recognise his fearless advocacy of justice and truth.”Footnote 120 Bradlaugh gave a rousing speech to the Congress on 29 December 1889 and said, “I feel proud to be fellow-subject with you, in the hope that the phrase fellow-citizen may grow into reality even before my life is ended.”Footnote 121 The speech drew to a crescendo as he declared, “Born of the people, trusted by the people, I hope to die of the people. (Renewed cheering.) And I know no geographic or race limitations to this word ‘people’.”Footnote 122 Bradlaugh's visit to India was a great success and reports from Indian newspapers described the large crowds that gathered to see him off.Footnote 123 His impact was also felt among Indians then living in Britain: his funeral was attended by a large contingent of Indians living in London, among them a young Mohandas Gandhi, then training as a lawyer in the city.Footnote 124
This phrasing in Bradlaugh's speech, that he knew no “race limitations” to the word “people,” is curious because, as we saw, Bradlaugh championed anthropological research that showed the division and hierarchy of racial groups. It seems unlikely that Bradlaugh's racial views had changed dramatically by the end of his life, but perhaps more likely is that Bradlaugh's thinking on racial science was somewhat compartmentalized from his thinking on more concrete questions of imperial governance and republican politics. Considering races in their social and political context brought about different conclusions than when thinking about them purely as anthropological abstractions. This was also true as he championed the cause of the Maori prisoners. That said, Bradlaugh also believed that certain climates were inhospitable to certain races, meaning that imperialism was bound to fail. This was a view inherited from mid-nineteenth-century polygenist thought. Indeed, Josiah Nott made the argument that whites died off in India.Footnote 125 Nevertheless, this leads one to question a direct correlation between holding views about the superiority and inferiority of some races, and supporting policies that oppressed nonwhite colonial subjects.
CONCLUSION
This article has examined the links between atheism and racial thought, particularly with reference to the racial worldview of Charles Bradlaugh. Bradlaugh and other atheists were interested in the idea of polygenesis as a weapon to wield in anti-Christian polemics. Polygenesis appeared to show how Christians’ belief in monogenesis was unscientific and stifled further research out of fear that it might contradict the Bible. Even worse for Christians, if polygenesis were true, this would mean that the entire narrative of Original Sin and the redemption of Jesus would collapse, as Bradlaugh argued. This was why Bradlaugh and other atheists were so interested in the evidence presented by polygenist scientists like Josiah Nott, Robert Knox, and James Hunt, who were often themselves iconoclastic with regard to religion.
But by using the polygenist argument, Bradlaugh and others put themselves in the awkward position of accepting the short chronology of the Bible. Monogenesis became much more plausible if the age of the Earth was pushed back thousands or millions of years. By the middle of the nineteenth century, developments in archaeology and geology had begun to demonstrate just how old the Earth was. Bradlaugh accepted this research as well, since it too seemed to contradict the Genesis Creation story. But this meant that the polygenist arguments were often disingenuous because they made the most sense if the Earth were a few thousand years old; with the age of the Earth extended, monogenesis became much more plausible. The story of descent from Adam could be countered both by recent geological research and by polygenist arguments. Bradlaugh often used both arguments, even as the two contradicted one another. This was also the case with Darwinian evolution, which Bradlaugh tentatively accepted, even as it contradicted polygenesis.
While Bradlaugh and other atheists’ use of polygenesis had clear instrumental value, as we have seen, polygenesis and hierarchical ranking of races were accepted independently of their use against Christianity. However, it is another question whether this acceptance of polygenesis influenced Bradlaugh's views on racial issues in practice. In other words, would an acceptance of polygenesis lead to support for discriminatory policies or colonial domination of nonwhite peoples? For Bradlaugh at least, the answer appears to be no, given his advocacy for nonwhite people under British rule during his time in Parliament.
The article has hoped to complicate straightforward narratives that might see atheists inevitably advocating progressive views on social or scientific questions. Certainly there is some truth to such narratives, yet to assume that they are always applicable can lead us to overlook areas of intellectual life where a seemingly irrational position could make sense to a particular group in a particular time. Closer engagement with the intellectual context of atheists and other freethinkers might therefore reveal other surprising and counterintuitive findings.
