Darwin's Sacred Cause

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I was quite delighted… to hear of all your varied accomplishments and knowledge, and of your higher attributes in the sacred cause of humanity.

Darwin, writing in 1859 to the naturalist/anti-slavery activist Richard Hill, the first gentleman ‘of colour’ in the Jamaican magistracy, assigned to adjudicate between former slave-holders and slaves

Illustrations

Endpapers: Britannia under a scriptural banner declaring all the races ‘of one blood’ and protecting Africans from slavery. This propaganda label from the Wedgwood family papers was used during the 1850s to rally opposition to the continuing illegal slave trade. (By courtesy of the Wedgwood Museum Trust, Barlaston, Staffordshire)

Darwin's family tree of life, 1837. (Darwin Manuscripts, DAR 121, p. 36, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

Darwin's family tree of primates, 1868. (Darwin Manuscripts, DAR 80 (ser. B), f. 91, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

The logic of anti-slavery – the gorilla is our kin. (From Punch, 18 May 1861, James Moore)

1. Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion. (By courtesy of the Wedgwood Museum Trust, Barlaston, Staffordshire)

2. Iron mask with a punishment collar. (From T. Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant, 1807, by courtesy of the US library of Congress)

3. The young Charles Darwin. (Pencil sketch by George Richmond, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)

4. Thomas Clarkson. (By permission of Wilberforce House Museum, Hull Museums and Art Gallery)

5. Katherine Plymley diary, September 1825. (Shropshire Archives 1066/ 134, by kind permission of Mr Norman Corbett)

6. The Revd Joseph Corbett, Archdeacon of Shropshire. (By permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

7. Edinburgh University Museum. (By permission of Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections, Gen. 129/121)

8. Bones of the frontal sinus. (From G. S. Mackenzie, Illustrations of Phrenology, 1820, facing p. 246, pl. 1, fig. 3, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, VII. 11.44)

9. Facial goniometer. (From S. G. Morton, Crania Americana, 1839, p. 252, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, XI.I .28)

10. Anti-Slavery Society invoice. (By courtesy of the Wedgwood Museum Trust, Barlaston, Staffordshire)

11. Brazil's central slaving coast. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

12. The Brazilian slaver Veloz. (From R. Walsh, Notices of Brazil, 1830, 2: facing p. 479, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, 675.1.c.80.3)

13. Domestic punishments. (From J. M. Rugendas, Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil, 1835, by permission of Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections, JZ 224, 4: pl. 10)

14. Thumbscrew. (From T. Clarkson, History of the… Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1808, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, SA 1175.31.2)

15. Separate species of man in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. (From J. B. G. M. Bory de Saint-Vincent, Distribution primitive du genre humain, 1827, by courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection)

16. Hottentot dandy. (From N. J. Merriman, The Kaffir, the Hottentot, and the Frontier Farmer, 1854, copyright and by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, E.151.g)

17. Darwin and his first-born, William. (By permission of The Library, University College London)

18. Knox's ‘Bosjesmans’ family. (From Pictorial Times, 12 June 1847, p. 376, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, L.533.a.1)

19. Hottentot beauties. (From J. C. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 1837, James Moore)

20. Louis Agassiz. (From the Archives of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University)

21. ‘Renty’ of the Congo tribe. (© 2008 Harvard University, Peabody Museum Photo 35–5–10/53037)

22. Tableau of Agassiz's primordial human species. (From J. C. Nott and G. R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 1854; James Moore)

23. Fancy pigeon races. (From Illustrated London News, 18 January 1851, p. 48, Adrian Desmond)

24. Darwin's genealogy of the ‘eleven chief races’ of fancy pigeons. (From C. Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, James Moore)

25. Asa Gray. (By courtesy of the Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University)

26. The Garden House, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (By courtesy of the Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University)

27. Charles Darwin in 1861. (By courtesy of the Archives of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University)

29. Charles Lyell in 1863. (From L. A. Reeve, Portraits of Men of Eminence, by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Ii.4.35)

30. The ‘Wilberforce oak’. (By permission of Wilberforce House Museum, Hull Museums and Art Gallery)

Acknowledgements

Trekking in the hinterlands of Darwin's world, we have amassed a large number of debts. Many individuals, each with their own expertise in wide-ranging fields, have shared all manner of esoteric knowledge with us – the sort that can often be gained nowhere else.

For answering specific queries, sometimes at short notice, we thank colleagues at universities, research libraries, historical societies, museums, professional bodies, heritage sites and scholarly projects around the world: Stephen Alter, Patrick Armstrong, Rich Bellon, Robert Bernasconi, Daniel Brass, Nick Cooke, Martin Crawford, David Daby-deen, John W. de Gruchy, Jeremy Dibbell, Mario di Gregorio, Richard Drayton, Martin Fitzpatrick, Sheila Hannon, Keith Hart, Uwe Hossfeld, Karl Jacoby, Peter McGrath, Chris Mills, Richard Milner, Duncan Porter, Greg Radick, Tori Reeve, Peter Rhodes, Nigel Rigby, Kiri Ross-Jones, Nicolaas Rupke, Matthew Scarborough, Lester Stephens, Keith Thomson, David Turley, Gene Waddell, Sarah Walpole, James Walvin, R. K. Webb and Leonard Wilson.

Without the help of dedicated library and archival staff we would still be searching for vital documents. In particular, for making materials available to us, we are grateful to the libraries of the American Philosophical Society (Valerie-Anne Lutz van Ammers), Christ's College (Candace Guite) and Corpus Christi College (Gill Cannell), Cambridge; Dartmouth College Library (Sarah Hartwell, Rauner Special Collections); Edinburgh University Library; John Murray Archives; John Rylands University Library, Manchester (Les Gray); Keele University Library (Helen Burton); National Library of Jamaica (Nicole Bryan); National Library of Scotland (Anna Hatzidaki, Robbie Mitchell); Parliamentary Archives, House of Lords Record Office (Mari Takayanagi); Smith College Library (Susan Boone); Southampton Reference Library (Vicky Green); Suffolk County Record Office, Ipswich (Pauline Taylor); University College London Library; and Waring Library, Medical University of South Carolina (Kay Carter).

We wish to express special gratitude to William Darwin for permission to publish extracts of Darwin's letters and manuscripts and to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for allowing us to quote from unpublished materials in the Charles Darwin Collections and in other manuscript deposits.

For permission to study, and in some instances quote from, documents in their collections, we also thank: A. K. Bell Library, Perth, Scotland; American Philosophical Society (Samuel George Morton Papers); Birmingham University Library (Harriet Martineau Papers and Church Missionary Society Unofficial Papers); Cambridgeshire Archives Service; Dartmouth College Library (Ticknor Autograph Collection); Down House and English Heritage (Beagle Field Notebooks); Durham University Library (Political and Public Papers of 2nd Earl Grey); Edinburgh University Library; Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (Darwin–Haeckel Correspondence); Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard University (Asa Gray Papers); Houghton Library, Harvard University (Louis Agassiz Papers, Charles Eliot Norton Papers, Charles Sumner Correspondence); Imperial College of Science and Technology (Thomas Henry Huxley Archives); Jesus College, Cambridge (Arthur Gray Notes); Mitchell Library, Sydney (Philip Gidley King the Younger Journal, Autobiography and Reminiscences); National Archives, Kew (Logs of HMS Beagle and Samarang); National Library of Jamaica (Feurtado Manuscript); Natural History Museum, London (Richard Owen Correspondence and Alfred Russel Wallace Family Papers); National Library of Scotland; Shropshire Archives (Katherine Plymley Diaries); The Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (Asa Gray Letters); Royal College of Surgeons of England; Royal Society of London (FitzRoy–Herschel Letters); Suffolk County Record Office, Ipswich; UK Hydrographic Office, Taunton (FitzRoy–Beaufort Correspondence); Wedgwood Museum Trust, Barlaston, Staffordshire, for permission to quote from materials in the Wedgwood Archive; Zoological Society of London.

A handful of colleagues went the second mile, conjuring arcana on demand: special thanks to Andrew Berry at Harvard University, Tim Birkhead and Ricarda Kather at the University of Sheffield, Helen Burton at Keele University Library, Lisa DeCesare at the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Rachel Mumba at Durham University and Vanessa Salter at the Wilberforce House Museum. Gwen Hochman at Harvard Law School went the third mile, traipsing around Boston. Nor can we forget our English and American editors, Stuart Proffitt, Amanda Cook and Jane Birdsell, who kept us firmly targeted.

Writing on Darwin's Sacred Cause began in early 2007 while Moore was a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University. He is especially grateful to Ash Amin, the Executive Director, for timely discussions about the book; and to Maurice Tucker, Master of University College, and members of the Senior Common Room, for Castle's good fellowship. Members of Moore's spring 2005 graduate seminar, ‘Darwin, Sex and Race’, in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University were a tremendous stimulus: Topé Fadiran, Adam Green, Max Hunter, Sarah Legrand, John Mathew, Aaron Mauck, Matt Moon, Mac Runyan, Alex Wellerstein and Nasser Zakariya.

Our personal debts are many. Ralph Colp Jr, David Livingstone, Mark Noll, Bob Richards and Nicolaas Rupke gave us early sight of their latest fine books. In Cambridge, Nick Gill, Boyd Hilton, Simon Keynes, John Parker and Simon Schaffer generously shared their encyclopaedic knowledge (respectively) of Darwin's manuscripts, Georgian politics, the Beagle voyage, Victorian botany and everything else. Editors at the Darwin Correspondence project, especially Samantha Evans, Shelley Innes, Alison Pearn and Paul White, let us interrupt them from time to time. Tony Lentin and Sheila Thorpe in England, Gordon Moore in the United States and Maggie Fankboner in Canada cheered Darwin's Sacred Cause to the finish line. John Greene, Randal Keynes and David Kohn saw us through. Such debts can only be repaid in kind. Warmest thanks to all.

Introduction:
Unshackling Creation

Global brands don't come much bigger than Charles Darwin. He is the grizzled grandfather peering from book jackets and billboards, from textbooks and TV – the sage on greeting cards, postage stamps and commemorative coins. Darwin's head on British £10 notes radiates imperturbability, mocking those who would doubt his science. Hallow him or hoot at him, Darwin cannot be ignored. Atheists trumpet his ‘atheism’, liberals his ‘liberalism’, scientists his Darwinism, and fundamentalists expend great energy denouncing the lot. All agree, however, that for better or worse Darwin's epoch-making book On the Origin of Species transformed the way we see ourselves on the planet.

How did a modest member of Victorian England's minor gentry become a twenty-first-century icon? Celebrities today are famous for being famous, but Darwin's defenders have a different explanation.

To them Darwin changed the world because he was a tough-minded scientist doing good empirical science. As a young man, he exploited a great research opportunity aboard HMS Beagle. He was shrewd beyond his years, driven by a love of truth. Sailing around the world, he collected exotic facts and specimens – most notably on the Galapagos islands – and followed the evidence to its conclusion, to evolution. With infinite patience, through grave illness heroically borne, he came up with ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’ and published it in 1859 in the Origin of Species. This was a ‘dangerous idea’ – evolution by ‘natural selection’ – an idea fatal to God and creationism equally, even if Darwin had candy-coated this evolutionary pill with creation-talk to make it more palatable. Evolution annihilated Adam; it put apes in our family tree, as Darwin explained in 1871 when he at last applied evolution to humans in The Descent of Man. Secluded on his country estate, publishing book after ground-breaking book, Darwin cut the figure of a detached, objective researcher, the model of the successful scientist. And so he won his crown.

The most that can be said for this caricature is the number of people who credit it. Not only evolutionists and secularists, but many creationists and fundamentalists see Darwin's claim to fame – or infamy – in his single-minded pursuit of science. Doggedly, some say obstinately, he devoted his life to evolution. A zeal for scientific knowledge consumed him, keeping him on target to overthrow God and bestialize humanity. Brilliantly, or wickedly, Darwin globalized himself. By following science and renouncing religion, he launched the modern secular world.

This isn't just simplistic; most of it is plain wrong. Human evolution wasn't his last piece in the evolution jigsaw; it was the first. From the very outset Darwin concerned himself with the unity of humankind. This notion of ‘brotherhood’ grounded his evolutionary enterprise. It was there in his first musings on evolution in 1837.

Today we are beset by polemics of every stripe, comic attempts to pummel Darwin into this shape or that, to convict or acquit Darwin of beliefs – atrocities even – associated with his name. (A recent title about German history says it all: From Darwin to Hitler.)

To reverse Marx's dictum for a moment: the point is not to change Darwin, the point is to understand him. Darwin was neither saint nor satan. Looked at in his own day, he was complex, sometimes even contradictory, never quite as one imagined, but vastly more interesting and informative. And the real story behind his journey to evolution – human evolution – is much richer than anyone realizes. It is a story we have been piecing together for years, trying to grasp what could have made this gentle naturalist such an anomaly in his age, and so determined in the face of overwhelming odds.

Darwin was the most gentlemanly gentleman anyone had ever met. He was diffident, afraid to ruffle feathers, at home with the conservative Anglican dons, wanting only his own quiet vicarage lifestyle, away from urban tumult and religious harangues. The dons he emulated detested a bestial human evolution – so hysterically that the Cambridge cleric who taught him geology talked of stamping with ‘an iron heel upon the head of the filthy abortion’ to ‘put an end to its crawlings’. Yet even as Darwin listened to his mentors after the Beagle voyage, he was privately musing on a missing ‘monkey-man’, our ancestor.¹ How could this be? What drove him to deny the cherished tenets of his privileged Christian society? Surely it had to be some overwhelming impulse that outweighed all others, pitching Darwin into words and deeds that frightened even him.

People have been looking in the wrong place for the answer. With the opening up of Darwin's treasure trove of unpublished papers over the past generation, the clues began to appear – some were even there in his most famously little-read book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (to give its full and telling title). But this was the end point of Darwin's journey, and its contents have so confused readers that they even now call it ‘two books’ on different subjects, sex and ancestry, and so miss the point entirely.² Darwin's human project remains obscure. But it is foundational, and without understanding it, we cannot understand why Darwin came to evolution at all.

‘Roots’ is where we begin, Roots as in Alex Haley's stirring historical novel – the enslavement of black Africans that so outraged Darwin's generation. It was Darwin's starting point too, his abhorrence of racial servitude and brutality, his hatred of the slavers’ desire, as he jotted, to ‘make the black man [an]other kind’, sub-human, a beast to be chained.³ Roots were what Darwin's human project was all about. And to understand why he started thinking about the roots – the origin – of black and white races, we have to appreciate his moral anchorage in the noontide of the British anti-slavery movement. It is the key to explain why such a gentleman of wealth and standing should risk all to develop his bestial ‘monkey-man’ image of our ancestry in the first place.

Always retiring, often unwell, Darwin never threw himself into abolitionist rallies and petitions (as his relatives did). While activists proclaimed a ‘crusade’ (his word) against slavery, ⁴ he subverted it with his science. Where slave-masters bestialized blacks, Darwin's starting point was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’. Adamic unity and the brotherhood of man were axiomatic in the anti-slavery tracts that he and his family devoured and distributed. It implied a single origin for black and white, a shared ancestry. And this was the unique feature of Darwin's peculiar brand of evolution. Life itself was made up of countless trillions of sibling ‘common descents’, not only black and white, but among all races, all species, through all time, all joined up in bloodlines back to a common ancestor.

It was in Darwin's most generous, relativistic phase, at the height of Britain's radical political period in the late 1830s, when the slaves in the colonies were finally freed, that he extended the kinship to all groaning, degraded, disparaged races of animals. He saw them sharing our own deep ancestry; ‘we may all be netted together’, we may all feel a common pain, he jotted in a notebook.⁵ He had saved the blacks, stopped the slaves being seen as some ‘other kind’. But by embracing the whole of creation – breaking life's shackles and allowing it too to evolve, as black and white men had done from a joint ancestor – he ironically opened himself to vilification by the Christian world whose belief in racial brotherhood he shared. A major criticism of the Origin of Species (particularly during the American Civil War) was that Darwin had now bestialized the white man, by contaminating his ancestral blood. Darwin had upturned the racist logic, only to ‘brutalize’ his own Anglo-Saxon kind (as it was said), uniting them, not only with black people, but with black apes.

Here was Darwin at his most paradoxical. And in this impasse lies the moral of our story, literally. Rather than seeing ‘the facts’ force evolution on Darwin (other circumnavigating naturalists had seen similar phenomena all over the globe), we find a moral passion firing his evolutionary work. He was quite unlike the modern ‘disinterested’ scientist who is supposed (supposed, mark you) to derive theories from ‘the facts’ and only then allow the moral consequences to be drawn. Equally, he was the reverse of the fundamentalists’ parody, which makes his enterprise anti-God, inhuman and immoral. We show the humanitarian roots that nourished Darwin's most controversial and contested work on human ancestry. The ensuing picture is, as a result, dramatically different from previous ones, revealing a man more sympathetic than creationists find acceptable, more morally committed than scientists would allow.

Our reconstruction of Darwin's trajectory – lighting the path he trod after returning with the Beagle, through his private notes and drafts to the Origin itself – finally explains some of his otherwise anomalous statements. Reading the greatest one-origin-for-all-the-races work, by an anti-slavery advocate (James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Mankind), Darwin scribbled, ‘How like my Book all this will be.’⁶ ‘My Book’ was of course what became the Origin of Species. And, as this suggests, it too was meant to discuss mankind. The irony is that the Origin ultimately said next to nothing about human origins. Explanations of the human races and of an ape ancestry were dropped at the last moment.

Why, in the book that critics knew was really about mankind, had Darwin decided to say next to nothing on the subject? And why was he forced to come clean twelve years later and write the Descent of Man, and then incongruously fill the book with butterflies and pigeons and ‘sexual selection’? Sexual selection is critical to our reading of Darwin's morally-fired ‘human brotherhood’ approach; it was central and critical, too, in Darwin's answer to the American South's (and London's) pro-slavery pundits who proclaimed the black and white races as separate species. Understand Darwin's strategy, and the oddities of his books and their anomalous timing make sense.

Today Darwin is the ‘scientist’ to reckon with. His theories about people and society are debated more widely than ever. The media buzzes with stories about evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and eugenics, about gender, race and sex differences and the possibility of improving human nature.

Some choose to emphasize the darker side to Darwin's evolution, notoriously hinted at in the Origin's subtitle: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. From Albania to Alabama, from Russia to Rwanda, Darwin's theories have been used to justify racial conflict and ethnic cleansing. Perpetrators of the worst atrocities have seen themselves as ‘favoured races’ surviving Darwin's bloody ‘struggle’. And so an ocean of ink has been spilt to prove that none of this was in Darwin's works, nor was it a logical consequence. Darwin's was a pure, untainted science.

We aren't out to prove the uncorrupted purity of Darwin's corpus, or indeed deify his corpse. Nor do we celebrate any unsavoury consequences of his work, or coerce him into siding with religious groups or atheists. We undercut all of these contrasting attempts to hijack Darwin for today's ends. The real problem is that no one understands Darwin's core project, the nucleus of his most inflammatory research. No one has appreciated the source of that moral fire that fuelled his strange, out-of-character obsession with human origins. Understand that and Darwin can be radically reassessed.

In sounding the depths of Darwin's anti-slavery we have exploited a wealth of unpublished family letters and a massive amount of manuscript material. We use Darwin's notes, cryptic marginalia (where key clues lie) and even ships’ logs and lists of books read by Darwin. His published notebooks and correspondence (some 15,000 letters are now known) are an invaluable source: sixteen of the projected thirty-two volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin have already been published by an international team whose deciphering and transcribing can only be called heroic. Add to this the extraordinary growth of historical studies on transatlantic race, racism and slavery, and we are equipped to connect Darwin for the first time with the most forceful moral movement of his age.

The discovery and recovery of Darwin's letters is still something of a rolling revolution. Even as we write new ones are turning up – not least, from the son of the most famous ‘immediatist’ abolitionist in the world, the American William Lloyd Garrison. It confirms what we had come to suspect, that Darwin was an admirer of the most uncompromising, non-violent Christian leader in the anti-slavery movement. Garrison was, in Darwin's words, ‘a man to be for ever revered’. Darwin was overjoyed on hearing that the blistering anti-slavery passage in his Beagle journal had been read to the elderly Garrison, whose son reported to Darwin how it shed ‘a new and welcome light on your character as a philanthropist’. To think, Darwin replied, that a man ‘whom I honor from the bottom of my soul, should have heard and approved of the few words which I wrote many years ago on Slavery’.⁷ This correspondence shows how much is still to be learned about Darwin.

Not only is the evolutionary upshot of his hatred of slavery unknown, Darwin's humanitarian imperative itself has never been brought adequately to the fore.⁸ We try to show how it locks him into the context of nineteenth-century abolitionism, and how it speaks directly to our post-colonial age, with its hatred of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Ours is a book about a caring, compassionate man who was affected for life by the scream of a tortured slave.

Finally, a word about terminology. Although ‘scientific racism’ is said to start about 1860 – taking over from an earlier xenophobia – we believe that such a hard-and-fast line is problematic. If ‘racism’ is taken to mean categorizing difference in order to denigrate, control or even enslave, then its scientific components and rationale can be traced much earlier. It is generally unknown that American slavery-justifying race-agitators were actually booming their hatreds as early as 1841 at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Even before that they were linking subjugation to the anatomical ‘inferiority’ of blacks. These ideologies and slaving justifications bathed the cultural debates embroiling Darwin throughout the 1840s and 1850s, and we think that ‘racism’ is an acceptable historical term in Darwin's context.

We must add to this an apology for our ethnological faux pas. All the actors in our story – Darwin included – held derogatory views of other peoples to some extent, and used terms to match. While we try at times to mention the modern self-appellations of peoples, it would be confusing to mix Darwin's and modern ones, and so we have stuck to contemporary usages in most places. That goes for inclusive language also. We use a mix of contemporary and modern terms for Homo sapiens: ‘man’, ‘mankind’, ‘humankind’, ‘humanity’ and ‘human beings’. Of course we regard such terms, along with ‘savages’, ‘Kaffirs’, ‘Bantu’, ‘Hottentot’ and so on, together with ‘race’ and ethnic labels generally, as historically constructed, but it would be tedious to place them in inverted commas every time; so also ‘Negro’, a respectful period-term for black people, and ‘mulatto’, a negative term.

This, then, is the untold story of how Darwin's abhorrence of slavery led to our modern understanding of evolution.

The Intimate ‘Blackamoor’

No ‘evil more monstrous has ever existed upon earth’. So said the leading anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson on celebrating the end of the slave trade. Clarkson was supported and part-financed by Charles Darwin's grandfather, the master potter Josiah Wedgwood. But the words could equally have been Darwin's – or those of his other grandfather, the libertine, poet and Enlightenment evolutionist Erasmus Darwin. For all of them slavery was a depravity to make one's ‘blood boil’, in Charles Darwin's words, a sin requiring expiation: ‘to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants… have been and are so guilty’. The trade – transporting snatched Africans to labour till their deaths in the fields and factories of the New World and elsewhere – was outlawed in the British dominions in 1807. That was two years before Darwin was born, and he would grow up awaiting abolition of the damnable slavery system itself in the British colonies (which came in 1833).

Even then Charles Darwin continued to see the worst excesses of slavery for himself on the Beagle voyage (1831–6) and he was revolted by its ‘heart-sickening atrocities’.¹ Slavery, justified by the planters’ belief that black slaves were a separately created animal species, was the immoral blot on his youthful landscape and a spur to his emancipist study of origins – evolution, we call it today. The enormity of the crime in the eyes of the Darwins and their Wedgwood cousins was understandable: the African slave abductions had resulted in probably the largest forced migration of humans in history.

The mass action against slavery between the 1780s and 1830s engendered a new feeling of patriotic pride in British liberty after the loss of the American colonies. The campaign made anti-slavery ‘unprecedentedly popular’ in Darwin's formative years.² He was not alone in growing up in such a humanitarian environment; he was not alone in sharing its goals. But Darwin's undermining of slavery was a unique scientific response and it would shape the modern world.

Charles Darwin's family engagement with abolitionism began with his grandfathers, the doctor, philanderer, poet and prodigiously fat Erasmus Darwin on the one side, and the stern Unitarian and industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood on the other. These men would meet on full-moon-lit nights, with other prime movers who would power a technological revolution, in an informal Lunar Society of Birmingham.

Birmingham was a proud manufacturing town, full of self-made industrialists, its iron foundries exporting goods through Liverpool docks. But some trade items were sinister. In Erasmus's day almost 200 British ships were plying the slave trade between Africa and Jamaica, more than half out of Liverpool. These ships alone transported 30,000 slaves a year. The city had grown fat on the trade in flesh and was ‘so risen in opulence and importance’ as to be inured to the immorality of it all. The tall ships heading back to Africa carried ‘a cheap sort of fire-arms from Birmingham, Sheffield, and other places’, as well as powder, bullets and iron bars, all made in the Birmingham area, and all used to barter for the slaves. The local trade was partly funding slavery. There was a growing awareness of the fact: in 1788 the ex-slave Olaudah Equiano had passed through Birmingham on a propagandist anti-slavery tour and been well received. There was plenty of call on the new industrial furnaces, with Jamaica's slaves being punished by having ‘iron-collars [fastened] round their necks, connected with each other by a chain’.³ Erasmus Darwin was livid in 1789 on learning of the destination of these foundry products. Already planning ways to get Parliament to stop the trade, he wrote to Josiah Wedgwood: ‘I have just heard that there are muzzles or gags made at Birmingham for the slaves in our islands.’ One of these instruments, scarcely suitable for beasts, could be ‘exhibited by a speaker in the House of Commons’ during a coming debate. Or what about a specimen of the ‘long whips, or wire tails’, used in the West Indies? When it came to swaying a debate, ‘an instrument of torture of our own manufacture would have a greater effect, I dare say’.⁴ Wedgwood canvassed the likely impact with his London friends.

All emancipation stirred Erasmus Darwin. In the 1780s, when Quakers and then Anglicans began organizing against the trade, Erasmus lent them his devastating pen. Like everyone, he stood aghast at the Zong slave-ship atrocity, in which 133 sickly blacks were flung overboard so that the owners could claim the insurance on their lost ‘property’. Fellow Lunar members were equally affected by the Africans' plight, not least Darwin's best friend and eccentric in benevolence, the Rousseauian Thomas Day (who so cared for animals that he refused to break horses). He versified in The Dying Negro on a runaway slave who chose suicide rather than be separated from his white lover.⁵ Verse best served the cause, and in mastering the art, Erasmus himself mastered his passions. He could celebrate ‘the loves of the plants’ in his bucolic Botanic Garden, but then out of the blue, the sunny lines flashed incandescent, a lightning rod for his wrath:

E'en now in Afric's groves with hideous yell

Fierce SLAVERY stalks, and slips the dogs of hell;

From vale to vale the gathering cries rebound,

And sable nations tremble at the sound! –

– YE BANDS OF SENATORS! Whose suffrage sways

Britannia's realms, whom either Ind obeys;

Who right the injured, and reward the brave,

Stretch your strong arm, for ye have power to save!

… hear this truth sublime,

‘HE, WHO ALLOWS OPPRESSION, SHARES THE CRIME.’⁶

The whip, the sting, the spur, the fiery brand,

And, cursed Slavery! thy iron hand…⁷

The revelations of slave misery and brutality were such as no enlightened Europe should endure.

And Erasmus was a child of the Enlightenment. A fervid republican, he flag-waved for the American and French revolutions. He invented machines, predicted the future and wrote poetry copiously. All progress for him was linked to an upward-sweeping, sex-driven material evolution, as set out in his vast bio-medical treatise on ‘the laws of life’, Zoonomia. That evolutionary vision might have been buried in the book but for Erasmus's popular poetry. Verse made the doctor's love of sex and progress a political force. ‘Darwinianism’, it was dubbed – to versify in the manner of Erasmus Darwin. In the long years of Tory crackdown in Britain following the French Revolution, his works were slammed as atheistic and subversive. Even young Charles Darwin at Edinburgh University in 1825–7 would read diatribes on his grandfather's ‘unbounded extravagance’, which ‘benighted, bewildered, and confounded’ readers with its near blasphemous idolatry of the material world.⁸ And it would provide a salutary tale, reminding the grandson of the need for circumspection.

Old Erasmus loathed cruelty, whether to man or beast. All creatures in his evolving world were sensitive, suffering and deserving of respect, even the humblest. Never holier-than-thou, he delighted in being lowlier-than-thou. Zoonomia trumped the Bible's ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard’ with ‘Go, proud reasoner, and call the worms thy sister!’ With mind reaching so low in the scale of nature and morality held so high in this vaunted ‘age of reason’, nothing would keep Erasmus from fighting against cruelty to any beast, or any human with skin-deep difference. To achieve the greatest health and happiness there should be ‘no slavery… no despotism’. In his botanical Phytologia, on the subject of West Indies’ sugar cane, he burst out, ‘Great God of Justice! grant that it may soon be cultivated only by the hands of freedom, and may thence give happiness to the labourer, as well as to the merchant and consumer.’⁹

His fellow members of the Lunar Society concurred. Skilled ‘mech-anicks’ and ‘chymists’, manufacturers and doctors, poets, even the radical Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley: the Lunaticks some called them, and they were indeed mad about science, with nine of the twelve being elected Fellows of the Royal Society. Iron, coal and steam were elemental to them, fly-wheel revolutions as vital as political revolutions. Their beam engines and great factories seemed to be driving forward the progress that Erasmus saw running up through nature, with no end in sight. Science-based enterprise would elevate and emancipate humanity as surely as good men acting together would stamp out the barbaric slave trade.

Most were strong Dissenters (they stood outside the state-established Church of England and suffered discrimination as a result – thus many were political and moral reformers). The Lunaticks held a progressive, unconventional faith like Erasmus's. One was his patient Josiah Wedgwood I, Charles Darwin's maternal grandfather, renowned for his fashionable tableware and vases. Prosperity was no hedge against mortality for the master potter – ailments plagued the Wedgwood family. Josiah's smallpox-affected right leg was amputated below the knee, a terrifying ordeal without anaesthetic. Josiah insisted on watching the operation. Afterwards the anniversary became ‘St Amputation Day’, but he endured shooting pains for the rest of his life from a phantom limb and ill-fitting wooden prostheses.¹⁰ Josiah and Erasmus both knew suffering.

In his potting sheds at ‘Etruria’ in Staffordshire, Wedgwood sought to make ‘such machines of the men as cannot err’, and a timepiece ran the shifts clockwork fashion. His religious universe ran in a similar way. The family were ‘rational Dissenters’, discarding the Trinity and Jesus's divinity as corruptions of early Christianity. In their creedless Unitarianism – taught rigorously by Wedgwood's factory chemist Priestley – God's world was like a self-perfecting engine, with each person improved by following the perfect man, Jesus. Salvation was open to all, without regard for rank, ritual or race. Women found the levelling ethos empowering, and the next generation of Wedgwood wives and daughters would contribute more than their equal share to the anti-slavery cause.

Such radicals did not fare well in the rumour-ridden aftermath of the French Revolution. In July 1791 Priestley's chapel, house and laboratory were gutted by a reactionary mob crying, ‘No philosophers – Church and King for ever!’ Other Lunar men, terrorized, armed themselves and their factories.¹¹ Darwin and Wedgwood became more circumspect after Priestley fled to America. The next generation made its peace with the Church, baptizing their children (thus Charles Darwin was christened an Anglican). A Wedgwood grandson even became the family's vicar and young Charles Darwin, after failing at medicine, would be sent to Cambridge University to prepare for ordination.

Josiah and Erasmus had teamed up to fight the slave trade, the corpulent doctor with his sharpened pen, poised like a spiky buttress beside the peg-leg potter, whose flair for merchandising and London showroom gave him metropolitan connections. Parliamentary petitions against the slave trade had sprung up in 1788, over a hundred of them countrywide, the people's voice in an age when few had the vote. Erasmus sent Josiah's on to the Lunatick ‘Birmingham F.R.S.s’ for their signatures and forwarded it on for more to ‘Dr Darwin of Shrewsbury’, Erasmus's son Robert, Charles Darwin's father. But the sugar merchants and planters’ lobby was powerful, and Parliament only agreed to regulate conditions on the slave ships. Even so, as William Wilberforce, the leading parliamentary spokesman for abolition, prepared to open the first debate in the House of Commons, a shocking broadsheet appeared on the streets. It showed the section of a loaded slaver with 482 black bodies packed below decks, the legal limit being an appalling 454.¹² All parties redoubled their efforts to counter this black agony brought on by white greed.

The anti-slavery side of manufacturing fought back. In London, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, founded in 1787, needed an official seal. Wedgwood, one of the first on its Committee, produced the image: a black man on one knee, shackled hand and foot, with eyes and hands pointing heavenward, pleading ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ The words might have been his but the kneeling figure resonated as a piece of Christian art. A seal and woodcut were made, and Etruria cast a small oval medallion, with the slave shown in relief, ‘in his own native colour’. It stood out in the pottery's range of collectable cameos. But it was not for sale. Wedgwood produced thousands at his own expense for distribution by the Society and its friends. In 1789 Benjamin Franklin, president of Philadelphia's abolition society, was sent a consignment. Batches were continually fired to keep pace with parliamentary debates, and inevitably the tiny ovals became a must-have solidarity accessory, a sort of poppy or yellow ribbon of its day.¹³ Gentlemen mounted it on snuff-boxes, women in hair-pins, bracelets and pendants. Commercial variants came out, with coat-buttons, shirt-pins, medals and even mugs showing, sometimes ignominiously, ‘the poor fetter'd SLAVE on bended knee / From Britain's sons imploring to be free’.

Darwin printed those lines beside a woodcut in his Botanic Garden, with a note explaining the cameo was ‘of Mr. Wedgwood's manufacture’. He had ‘distributed many hundreds, to excite the humane to attend to and to assist in the abolition of the detestable traffic in human creatures’. Darwin continued, imploring:

Hear, oh, BRITANNIA! potent Queen of isles,

On whom fair Art, and meek Religion smiles,

Now AFRIC'S coasts thy craftier sons invade,

And Theft and Murder take the garb of Trade!

– The SLAVE, in chains, on supplicating knee,

Spreads his wide arms, and lifts his eyes to Thee;

With hunger pale, with wounds and toil oppress'd,

‘ARE WE NOT BRETHREN?’ sorrow choaks the rest;

– AIR! Bear to heaven upon thy azure flood

Their innocent cries! – EARTH! Cover not their blood!¹⁴

In London, Josiah shared his business skills with the Committee. At home he distributed tracts and held ‘country meetings’ to rouse the gentry. Were they to know a ‘hundredth part of what has come to my knowledge of the accumulated distress brought upon millions of our fellow creatures by this inhuman traffic’, they would rise up in protest. He helped former slaves, notably Olaudah Equiano. An Igbo, kidnapped in Nigeria as a child, Equiano had endured every trial and was now tramping the country, proselytizing and publicizing his autobiography. Bristol lay on his itinerary, but it was a dangerous slave-sugar port, and he turned to Josiah for help. He feared being press-ganged ‘on the account of my Publick spirit to put an end to the accursed practice of slavery’ and ending up back in chains. Josiah stood ready to have his London business manager intercede with the Admiralty, should the need arise.¹⁵

The frail, earnest Wilberforce became abolition's most effective parliamentary vote-winner. He kept Wedgwood abreast of evidence submitted to the slave-trade Select Committee, set up by the government as a delaying tactic. After Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood heard of the ‘muzzles’ being forged in Birmingham, Wilberforce's motion to ban slave imports into the West Indies was defeated: the Tory evangelical Wilberforce went to the Whig Unitarian's pottery works to talk strategy:

… to Wedgwood's – Etruria, got there to dinner – three sons and three daughters, and Mrs. W. – a fine, sensible, spirited family, intelligent and manly in behaviour, – situation good – house rather grand… Discussed all evening.¹⁶

Morals, manners and money spanned the ideological divide, as they would always do in British anti-slavery. The children noted by Wilber-force in his diary were Charles Darwin's future aunts and uncles – and Susannah, who would be his mother.

The Spirit rather than steam-power animated the ‘Saints’, another London lobby looking to Wilberforce as its parliamentary voice. So called for being righteous, the Saints hated slavery as the deepest sin, which, without repentance, would surely bring down God's wrath on the nation. Some sat on the London abolition Committee. The families intermarried and a few put down roots in Clapham, a village south of London: hence they became more prosaically the ‘Clapham Sect’. As a young man, Charles Darwin had relatives in the village who still preserved its ethos.

Clapham's was a rarefied air, far from the factory din. Most of the Saints had inherited wealth: the Member of Parliament Henry Thornton massively so, with Bank of England directors in the family. At his mansion, Battersea Rise, the Saints met in the library to pray and plan for a worldwide moral revolution. Wilberforce lived here before moving into ‘Broomfield’ next door. His own neighbour in ‘Glenelg’ was another MP, Charles Grant, director of the East India Company. These men ran banks and businesses and practised law, and favoured Cambridge for their sons: Charles Darwin, raised in similar privilege, would join them at the University.

The Saints were Anglican evangelicals, living in hope of eternal salvation more than material progress. Their religious life centred on the parish church. Here the moral revolution planned at Battersea Rise acquired God's conquering grace and would stretch even to ‘the uttermost parts of the earth’. With five Saints Members of Parliament they added political clout to the power of grace. Their Church Missionary Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society became world brands, but the Abolition Society was the jewel in Clapham's crown. Numerous other societies were set up to regenerate morals and manners, from ‘bettering the condition of the poor’ to the ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’. The latter sanctified an ‘extension of humanity to the brute creation’, and Darwin, fifteen when the SPCA was formed, would have seen it that way. He could be left white with rage at the sight of a horse being whipped, or later in life prosecute a local for mistreating sheep.¹⁷ He shared the Society's core values.

So a coalition of disparate groups formed around a slave crying, ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ The man who acted as a lynchpin holding these parties together was another guest at Wedgwood's Etruria. Thomas Clarkson was a grim, intense, tall and burly investigator and propagandist. He trudged from port to port collating evidence from slave-ship sailors, merchants and customs officials to build damning reports on the brutality of the slave trade. He was supported through thick and thin by Wedgwood, who provided a Midlands base and finances. No one did more to shape the culture of anti-slavery into which Charles Darwin was born than Clarkson.

Wilberforce may have taken up abolition during a talk with prime minister William Pitt at his home on the Kentish North Downs in May 1787. As legend has it, seated ‘in the open air at the root of an old tree at Holwood just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston’, Wilberforce heard God's call to fight the slave trade (the spot would lie within strolling distance of Down House where Charles Darwin lived half a century later). In truth, his action had followed months of arm-twisting by Clarkson, then a young activist sitting with Wedgwood on the Abolition Society's Committee.

Educated at St John's College, Cambridge, Clarkson overlapped with Wilberforce and other future Saints. At Magdalene College, too, a set of earnest evangelicals thrived under the mastership of the Revd Peter Peckard, a reforming Whig who admired their sincerity almost as much as he hated the slave trade. In these colleges abolition first took root in the university, feeding into Clapham and then the wider movement.¹⁸ The defining moment for Clarkson came in 1784 when he heard Peckard thunder against the slave trade as a ‘Sin against the light of Nature, and the accumulated evidence of divine Revelation’, from the towering twenty-foot University pulpit in Great St Mary's.

Darwin's Sacred Cause

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Unshackling Creation

1

The Intimate ‘Blackamoor’

Introduction:
Unshackling Creation