A hideous monster of the mind: American race theory, 1787-1859

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States and Europe the idea arose that "race" is a matter of biology, internal "essence," a thing having real existence and permanence. Fifty years earlier, the Enlightenment had seen race as an ephemeral function of climate, geography, and mode of life. Based mainly on published primary sources, this dissertation traces the intellectual history of environmentalism's decline and racial essentialism's rise in the United States, from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War.;I begin by examining anew the American response to "natural history" and the emergence of the first distinctively American race theories. Next, the dissertation considers the appearance of the first formal African-American theories of race as "black" people themselves began to see "blackness" as a real entity with long-term persistence and special meaning. In an attempt to develop a truly "integrated" intellectual history of the concept of race, I examine both major black and white views of environmentalism, "modern" science and scholarship, race, and slavery. At several points, particular attention goes to one pervasive image--Ancient Egypt--that became a major nexus of antebellum racial controversy. For blacks, Egypt symbolized black benevolence and magnificence. Whites, including the members of the internationally renowned, racist "American School of Ethnology," attempted scientifically to prove that in Egypt of old, fount of civilization, School of Moses, whites had ruled and blacks had toiled. Either way, with "blacknes" seen as the badge of permanent, biological inferiority or emblem of redemptive moral superiority, "race" had become a "real" entity in America by the eve of Fort Sumter.