This ascendant theory of race as biological was formulated and embraced by slaveholders. Thomas Jefferson, in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote that he was not sure “whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarfskin, or in the scarfskin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion.” A modern reader of this list might wonder what “scarfskin” is or what “other secretion” Jefferson might be speaking of—but the truth is that Jefferson did not know. As he guessed where race “resided,” Jefferson offered a series of half-invented anatomical features for its bodily location. His equivocal list implies that Jefferson had no idea what race was or where it was located, which makes his conclusion all the more strange: he was nevertheless certain that race was contained inside the body and “fixed in nature.” In the decades that followed, the scientific establishment worked to supply the empirical proof of this difference and give evidence for slavery’s rightful basis in some natural, permanent hierarchy.
Easton’s Treatise directly confronted the biological theory of race. The abolitionist’s central claim was that “no constitutional difference exists in the children of men.” Humans had become variegated, he wrote, but the cause of this variegation “cannot be found in nature.” Where, then, and how? For Easton, the mechanism of racial differentiation was to be found in the “incidental circumstances” of human life—that is, in human history. It is easy to miss the scientific nature of Easton’s Treatise because so much of it is spent on discussing the past; the bulk of the introduction contrasts the history of Europe with the history of Africa. But this is exactly Easton’s point: racial difference was not a product of nature. It was a product of history.
In Easton’s telling, European history was defined by war, conquest, and savagery, whereas African history consisted of lavish cultural achievement and peacemaking. This history had turned European-descended people into a “barbarous and avaricious” race. In the modern era, this race had focused its violence on Africans in the form of slavery. The history of slavery was the turning point in racial differentiation, for the brutality of slavery had transformed a once thriving people into what Easton assessed as a “degraded” race. This diagnosis—that black Americans had become “degraded”—could strike us now as acceding to the racism of the white scientists Easton was writing against, a group that would come to be known as the American School of Ethnology. It is true that Easton agreed that race was manifest biologically, that it expressed itself in the shape of the head and nose, in the texture of hair, in a person’s posture and gait. Easton did not argue that the American School misread the signs of race; he argued that they misread the cause, and here is where his assessment of “degradation” assumed its antiracist shape. Whereas the American School pointed to the signs of race as empirical proof of natural African inferiority, Easton pointed to them as visible evidence of racist systems. These systems, particularly slavery, had written themselves onto the very bodies of African-descended people. Easton’s radical, antiracist claim was that everything his fellow Americans thought they were seeing about race was actually about racism. His criticism was not of black Americans as individuals or as a people but of the system that brutalized them.