Darwin and Slavery

In the late 18th century, about 20 years before Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was born, his maternal and paternal grandfathers-to-be—the potter Josiah Wedgwood and the physician Dr. Erasmus Darwin—became noted English opponents of slavery. Wedgwood manufactured hundreds of copies of a cameo showing a black slave in chains with the words: “Am I not a man and a brother.” Dr. Darwin, in his poetry book The Loves of the Plants, had an anti-slavery stanza that ended:

…hear this Truth sublime

He, who allows oppression, shares the crime.

(Howard E. Gruber and Paul H. Barrett, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, 1974, p. 66)

Charles Darwin probably learned about these impassioned opinions of his grandparents when he was a boy. When he was 17 and a medical student at Edinburgh University, he received letters from his older sisters Caroline and Susan—who had educated him after the death of his mother—and his younger sister Catherine, which expressed sentiments of sympathy “for the sufferings of the poor slaves” and “hot” anger at those who supported slavery. (Caroline Darwin to Charles Darwin, March 22, 1826, and Catherine and Caroline Darwin to Darwin, April 11, 1826, in Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, eds., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1, 1821-1836, 1985, pp. 36, 40) Darwin appears to have fully shared these sentiments. At this time, although England had banned the slave trade, slavery still existed in some English colonies.

In Edinburgh Darwin met John Edmonston, an elderly freed slave, who had been taught taxidermy by the famous naturalist-traveler Charles Waterton and who he now paid to teach him how to stuff birds. He found Edmonston “a very pleasant and intelligent man” and the two often sat and conversed. (Ibid., p. 29; Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1958, p. 51) This convivial and instructive episode may have been his first contact with a black man.

When Darwin was 19-22, and a pre-Divinity student at Cambridge University, his anti-slavery sentiments had already deepened. A Cambridge friend later recollected that “It stirred one’s inmost depth of feeling to hear him descant upon, and groan over, the horrors of the slave-trade….” (Francis Darwin, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 1896, Vol. 1, p. 143)

Following this, during the voyage of the Beagle, he sojourned in Brazil for several months in 1832. Here he experienced his one actual confrontation with slavery, which he would afterwards much reflect and elaborate on. While in Brazil he formed two sharply contrasting views of slaves and slave masters. “I was told before leaving England,” he wrote his sister Catherine,

that after living in Slave countries: all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the Negro’s character. It is impossible to see a negro & not feel kindly towards him; such cheerful, open honest expressions & such fine muscular bodies; I never saw any of the diminutive Portuguese with their murderous countenances, without almost wishing for Brazil to follow the example of Hayti; & considering the enormous healthy looking black population, it will be wonderful if at some future day it does not take place. (Darwin to Catherine Darwin, May 22-July 14, 1833, in Burkhardt, Correspondence 1, pp. 312-313)

In the same letter he commented that it would be a “a proud thing for England” if it became the “first European nation which utterly abolishes” slavery (Ibid., p. 312). In 1833 the English Parliament passed a law emancipating the slaves in all the English colonies.

In his Beagle “Diary,” after observing that “by far the greater part of the slave population is far happier than one would be previously inclined to believe,” he added, “But it is utterly false … that any, even the very best treated, do not wish to return to their countries.” (Nora Barlow, ed., Charles

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Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, 1933, pp. 42-43) When Beagle Captain FitzRoy told him how a slave owner “had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free” and how all the slaves had answered “No,” he replied, perhaps with a sneer, whether FitzRoy “thought the answers of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything.” It was a reply that made FitzRoy “excessively angry.” (Barlow, Autobiography, p. 74)

In the first three years after his return to England from the Beagle voyage, Darwin wrote down several further memories of, and opinions on, Brazilian slavery. In his published Journal of Researches, which he based on his Beagle “Diary,” he made his first public statement on slavery. After noting the callousness and “blindness of interest and selfish habit” of slave owners in separating slave women and children in front their men, he gave his recollection of one slave:

I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavouring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal. (Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, etc., 1839, p. 28)

This recollection does not appear in his Beagle “Diary” or Beagle notebooks, and is apparently recounted from memory. In his Journal of Researches, he describes it as a “very trifling anecdote, which at the time struck me more forcibly than any story of cruelty.” (Ibid.)

About the time he was writing the recollection he had also begun to secretly search for a theory of evolution, and to fill a succession of pocket notebooks with newly imagined patterns of evolutionary relationships among diverse living things. In his second notebook he was influenced by his thoughts of humans enslaving animals and other humans to first write: “Animals—we have made our slaves—we do not like to consider our equals. Do not slaveholders wish to make black man other kind? Animals with affections, imitation, fear of death, pain, sorrow for the dead—respect.” (Paul Barrett, et al, eds., Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, 1987, p. 228) A page later he went on to write:

if we choose to let conjecture run wild then our animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, & suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amusements. They may partake from our origin. In their one common ancestor we may be all netted together. (Ibid., pp. 228-229)

The above passage was a powerful and unusual vision of evolutionary relationships among common, everyday things. Referring to it, a 1958 Darwin biographer commented:

There are very few youths of today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in a friendly fashion at a sunning turtle at the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, “We are all one—all netted together.” (Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It, 1958, p. 352)

While Darwin was inspired to have this vision by many intellectual and emotional forces—including his knowledge of biology and his intuitive belief in evolution—his most immediate inspiration appears to have been his feelings of equality and closeness for slaves and animals, which he then changed into feelings of poignancy for the evolutionary origins and togetherness of all living things.

In his third notebook, as he considered the evidences for the animal origins of man, Darwin wrote about the “arrogance” of those who “like to think … [man’s] origin godlike….” He observed that this attitude was similar to that of “the white Man who has debased his nature & [who] violates every best instinctive feeling by making slave of his fellow black….” (Barrett, Darwin’s Notebooks, p. 286)

As an evolutionary scientist, Darwin knew that he was vulnerable to reprobation from leading English scientists—including his old mentor Charles Lyell—who regarded the concept of evolution as unscientific and unsound. Therefore,

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when he was with Lyell and other scientists he remained silent about his evolutionary theory. However, in some public comments about slavery he once alluded to his feelings of vulnerability.

The immediate stimulus for these comments was a just-published book by Lyell, Travels in North America, which reported—without any expression of feeling—how American slave husbands and wives were sold separately and how slave children were brought up apart from their families. In a letter Darwin accused Lyell of taking a “placid” view of slavery, and he let himself have an “explosion” of his angry feelings by adding two long anti-slavery passages to a second, 1845, edition of his Journal of Researches. (Darwin to Charles Lyell, August 25, 1845, in Burkhardt, Correspondence 3, p. 242) After citing new instances of “heart-sickening atrocities” inflicted by masters on their slaves—which he had either witnessed or “authentically heard of”—he commented:

Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sins. (Darwin, Journal of Researches, pp. 499-500)

In these comments Darwin, in addition to articulating his passionate anti-slavery feelings—feelings that made his “blood boil” and “heart tremble”—was also alluding to his position as an evolutionary theorist among his scientific colleagues: the “cheerless” position of a slave—lowly, isolated, and vulnerable. Like his Brazilian black in the ferry (who he had described in the first edition of his Journal) silently cringing in fear of a rebuke. He was angry with Lyell not only for failing to support his theory, but also for failing to understand what his slave position was really like.

Thirteen years later, in the summer of 1858, Darwin determined to publicly elaborate on the details of his theory and began to write The Origin of Species. In March 1859, as he was working under great pressure to complete the Origin and laboring at rewriting—he wrote with difficulty, and then corrected and re-corrected what he had written—he grimly compared himself to a slave who was being flogged. “On my life,” he told a friend, “no nigger with lash over him could have worked harder at clearness than I have done.” (Darwin to Hooker, May 11, 1859, in Burkhardt, Correspondence 7 1858-1859, 1991, p. 296) His comparison was probably most immediately stimulated by his having read, between October 1858 and February 1859, Frederick Law Olmsted’s two books on the American slave states: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States and A Journey Through Texas. (“Darwin’s Reading Notebooks,” Burkhardt, Correspondence 4, p. 494) While he was interested in Olmsted’s picture of America on the eve of civil war, he also told his son William of the “horror of his sleepless nights when he could not keep out of his mind” some of Olmsted’s reports of the maltreatment of slaves. (Henrietta Litchfield, ed., Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters, 1915, Vol. 2, p. 169)

Soon, however, as antipathies developed between England and the North American Union, Darwin’s anti-slavery sentiments became conflictual and compromised. The antipathies began in November 1861 when a Union warship stopped the unarmed English mail-packet Trent and then forcibly removed two Confederate Commissioners. The Times editorialized that this was an “outrage that has been offered by the Federal Government of America to the British flag” (November 29, 1861, p. 6) and an American in London reported that 999 Englishmen out of a thousand were for “immediate war” with the North. After reading The Times report, Darwin told an English friend that he regarded the North “as a nation of unmitigated blackguards.” (Burkhardt, Correspondence 10 1862, 1997, p. 25) He was revealing a side of himself that was patriotic, deeply moved by English military and naval panache and displays of the English flag, (Barlow, Diary, p. 75) and deeply angered by public affronts to English symbols.

As the Civil War progressed, Darwin became convinced, along with many others in England, that the North hated Eng-

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land; could not subjugate the South; and that the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 would be ineffective. In a February 1863 letter to Asa Gray, a leading American botanist and Professor of Natural History at Harvard, Darwin resigned himself to the existence of a Southern slavocracy: “I think if I had power, which thank God I have not, I would let you conquer the border states & all west of Mississippi & then force you to acknowledge the Cotton States.” (Burkhardt, Correspondence 11 1863, 1999, p. 167) In recognizing a slavocracy, Darwin had compromised his passionate anti-slavery views. Yet at this time in England such a compromise was not unusual. After the war ended, and as Anglo-American relations then became amiable, Darwin’s antipathy toward America ceased.

Darwin did not remember correctly when he stated in a letter to Gray that he had “always thought that the destruction of slavery would be well worth a dozen years war.” (Darwin to Gray, April 19, 1865, Botany Libraries, 22 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts) He was forgetting his willingness to compromise and let the slavocracy Confederacy survive, and his mental conflicts and feelings of guilt over this compromise—where he had seen himself as “a poor blinded fool.” After 1865 he seems to have put the memories of his conflicts and guilt out of his mind. He gave his son William the impression “that he had always been strongly on the side of the North in the American war.” (William Darwin’s recollections of his father, January 4, 1883, Darwin Archives (DAR), 112 (ser. 2), p. 3b)

On one occasion, however, memories of his unwelcome thoughts may have caused him to experience an unusual episode of anger. The occasion centered on the case of Governor Edward Eyre of Jamaica, who in 1865 had killed and tortured hundreds of rebellious Jamaican blacks. His actions had stimulated a public controversy which divided English intellectuals into two group: one formed a Jamaica Committee to prosecute Eyre for murder, while the other met him at the port of Southampton—where he had landed in the summer of 1866, upon his return from Jamaica—and publicly lauded him. Darwin followed the controversy, experienced a resurgence of his anti-slavery sentiments, and in November 1866 “subscribed to the Jamaica Committee. For the more I hear about it the more atrocious the case appears.” (Darwin to Hooker, November 20, 1866, DAR, 115: 305)

About this time Darwin was visited by his son William, who lived in Southampton, and the two conversed about Eyre. William recollected that:

as I happened to think it was too strong a measure to prosecute Governor Eyre for murder, I made some foolish remarks about the prosecutors spending the surplus of the fund in a dinner. My father turned on me almost with fury and told me if these were my feelings I had better go back to Southampton; the inhabitants having given a dinner to Gov. Eyre on his landing, but with which I had had nothing to do…. Next morning at 7 o’clock or so my Father came up into my bedroom and sat on my bed and said that he had not been able to sleep from the thought that he had been so angry with me. He spoke in the most tender & gentle way. So I said that it had served me quite right for my stupid joke; after a few more kind words he left me. (William Darwin’s Recollections, January 4, 1883, p. 3b)

In a later version of this recollection William would change his account of his father’s angry mood from “almost with fury” into “fury of indignation.” (Litchfield, Emma Darwin, Vol. 2, p. 168)

It was unusual for Darwin to verbalize anger to another person, and his son Francis claims that “I do not believe he ever spoke an angry word to any of his children in his life.” (Francis Darwin, “Reminiscences,” p. 112) In 1866 he was close to William who was becoming his financial confidant. It seems likely that his sudden outburst of “fury” at his son was stimulated by his sudden recognition that William’s criticism of the Jamaica Committee tended to condone Eyre’s “atrocious” actions and that it was similar to Darwin’s criticism of the American North, which had condoned Southern slavery. In wanting to send William back to Southampton he was trying to expel from his consciousness the object which reminded him of his unwanted past memories. When he then reflected on how his anger had hurt his beloved son he became remorseful, and this remorse then enabled him to repress his anger and his unwanted memories.

After this, during the last 16 years of his life, Darwin would experience pleasant recollections of his anti-slavery sentiments. In 1872 he was visited by the American abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had published a book, Army Life In a Black Regiment, giving a sympathetic account of black soldiers whom Higginson

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had commanded during the Civil War. After the visit Darwin’s wife read him the book and he then wrote Higginson: “I always thought well of the negroes, from the little which I have seen of them; and I have been delighted to have my vague impressions confirmed, and their character and mental powers so ably discussed…. Your descriptions have vividly recalled walks taken forty years ago in Brazil.” (Darwin to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, February 27, 1873, Francis Darwin, Life and Letters, Vol. 2, pp. 354-355) In this sentence he was recalling his 1832 Beagle visit to Brazil and his warm feelings for Brazilian blacks, which were similar to Higginson’s feelings for American blacks.

In 1879 he was again reminded of his Brazilian visit when he received in the mail a just published American book, What Mr. Darwin Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship Beagle, along with a letter from its editor, Wendell Phillips Garrison—son of the late famous American abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. In his letter Wendell Garrison first explained that his book was an abridgment and popularization for children of Darwin’s Beagle Journal—“compiled … originally for the benefit of my children….” He further wrote: “during the last illness of my father … I had the pleasure of calling his attention to your remarks on the subject of slavery, which I have so carefully preserved in my abridgment, and which shed for him a new and welcome light on your character as a philanthropist.” (Wendell Phillips Garrison to Darwin, October 4, 1879, DAR 165) Darwin’s reply, which has been lost, caused Wendell Garrison to write: “Your kind approval of my little work is reward enough for all pains spent upon it, while your expressions concerning my father will be treasured by his children as precious beyond comparison.” (November 9, 1879, Ibid.)

What is noteworthy about the history of Darwin’s anti-slavery feelings is the intensity of the emotional empathy that he felt for slaves, and how he sustained this intensity—except for a brief diminution during the American Civil War—throughout most of his long life. He was influenced to form this empathy by intellectual and emotional forces that included the impassioned anti-slavery art and poetry of his grandfathers, the “hot” anger of his sisters toward those who supported slavery, and by his being what a recent biographer has described as “a vulnerable personality.” (John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Biography, 1990, pp. 72-79) Thus, as a boy who had suffered the loss of a mother and who feared rebukes from his father, he was timid and afraid to stand up for himself in school, and as a man he was fearful of hostile criticism and needed friends and admirers to support his ideas. (Ibid., p. 75) He could have empathy for the vulnerability of slaves to criticism and cruelty because he had experienced this vulnerability in himself. And (as has been observed) when he became an evolutionary theorist this increased his vulnerability, which then increased his empathy for slaves.

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