But Darwin argues that, if we go far enough in time, we would see that all plants and animals sprang from the same primeval source. He doesn’t speak about humans directly until The Descent of Man, which comes about a decade later. You write, “anti-slavery activists eagerly embraced On the Origin of Species because they believed the book advanced the cause of abolition.” Unpick the connections for us.Īt first it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense because Darwin’s book famously has nothing to say about humans. Last, but not least, was Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist author, who was beginning a kind of second career as a scientist. Bronson Alcott, the oldest person at the meeting was a great friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transcendental philosopher, and the father of Louisa May Alcott. He was also what they called a “red-hot abolitionist.” Franklin Sanborn, then a young man, was an even more red-hot abolitionist, one of the so-called Secret Six, who had helped fund the John Brown raid on Harpers Ferry. The other is this book, Origin of Species, which has been carried from Boston to Concord by Charles Loring Brace.īrace is a child welfare reformer who’s now best known for his creation of what were called “orphan trains,” which took the orphans of recent European migrants and relocated them in the West. Editorials in the North and South are looking at the new year with much trepidation, when four very interesting, but dissimilar, intellectuals gather at a house in Concord, Massachusetts, the home of transcendentalism in the U.S. It is an extremely cold, New England winter evening. You begin the book with a dinner party at the home of abolitionist Franklin Sanborn, where the first copy of On the Origin of Species brought to America was discussed. Darwin’s book eliminated the role of God, the need for that Biblical narrative of God creating humans in his own image.
In the U.S., there had long been an ideology that the nation was one divinely chosen by God to lead the world, primarily through the example of democracy. That’s one of the reasons the book was almost immediately embraced by a number of intellectuals, who thought Darwin was describing the world they lived in. In drops this book that, among other things, suggests that the state of nature is one of constant struggle, combat, war, and violence. There is language in newspapers of the time, both in the North and South, that we are two separate peoples, in a struggle to survive. John Brown’s botched raid on Harpers Ferry had just occurred, and that had ratcheted up tensions over slavery. When Darwin’s book arrived on these shores in 1859, the U.S. But it caused uproar in America when it appeared, didn’t it? Take us back in time. Today, Darwin’s theory of evolution is part of the cultural wallpaper.
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