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Between John Brown and Eugenics

2023; Michigan State University; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/jstudradi.17.2.0021

1930-1197

Dan McKanan,

Medical History and Research

Admirers of Henry David Thoreau often marvel that the hermit of Walden Pond, lover of wilderness and solitude, was also a fiery abolitionist and champion of direct action against slavery. When John Brown launched his fateful attack on Harper's Ferry, Thoreau rushed into Concord's public square to endorse Brown's treason and declare that “the only government that I recognize . . . is that power that establishes justice in the land.”1 Thoreau's antislavery radicalism can seem all the more impressive when he is compared to the next generation of American environmentalists, many of whom couched their pleas for wilderness preservation in the language of manifest destiny, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and eugenics. John Muir harbored such disdain for the original inhabitants of his beloved Yosemite that his own Sierra Club has compared his legacy to Confederate monuments that should be “taken down.”2 Perhaps the most influential American theorist of white supremacy, Madison Grant, was by profession primarily a conservationist who founded the Bronx Zoo and played the central role in early twentieth-century campaigns to save the redwoods and the bison.3 The apparent gulf between Thoreau's racial views and Grant's may seem so wide that they can only be explained as a quirk of the two men's personalities, with no larger significance for the environmental movement in which they both participated. But things are not so simple.A closer look at the conservation movement of the late nineteenth century, especially in metropolitan Boston, reveals that neither Thoreau's abolitionism nor Grant's eugenicism were idiosyncratic. A remarkable number of early conservationists had ties not only to abolitionism in general, but also to John Brown in particular. And some of these same conservationists laid important foundations for the eugenics movement that flourished half a century after Brown's death. To be sure, the sheer chronological gap means that few individuals were personally involved in both abolitionist and eugenicist organizations. But it would be a grave mistake to imagine that there were two separate currents of early conservation, one abolitionist and antiracist, the other imperial and eugenicist. To understand early conservation, we must recognize the ways that racist and antiracist ideas could coexist in a single community of inquiry and activism.We must also recognize how easily the “radicalism” of one era can metamorphose into the mainstream of the next, or even into a new radicalism of a seemingly contrary stamp. American conservation was decisively shaped by one such metamorphosis. The rise of the Republican Party, and the Union victory in the Civil War, gave many radical abolitionists abrupt access to sweeping political power. As they enacted policies that had once seemed fantasies, they and their successors traded radical idealism for a mindset that I will refer to as “problem solving.” A radical embraces a few absolute principles and seeks to carry them through without regard for consequences: hence Thoreau's refusal to acknowledge any government save one of perfect justice. A problem solver starts not with principles but with problems, and seeks to resolve them through dispassionate scientific inquiry and coalition building. When radical abolitionists became problem solvers, they planted the seeds of future radicalisms of both left and right.This story could be told in many contexts. In this article I focus on the community of activists who began the work of preserving forests in the suburban communities of metropolitan Boston. This might seem a minor story of purely local interest, and in fact most environmental historians have instead emphasized campaigns to protect Western ecosystems through federal legislation. Yet the Massachusetts campaign for forest protection was earlier and more successful than its Western counterpart. What's more, its focus was on the reforestation of disrupted landscapes rather than on the protection of supposedly “untouched” wildernesses. Since the entire globe has now been disrupted by the burning of fossil fuels and by industrial agriculture, the Massachusetts forest campaign has special relevance for environmentalists today.4The story began around 1846. At the peak of deforestation in Massachusetts, the Boston-based citizen scientist George Barrell Emerson raised the alarm. He warned that cutting too many trees would disrupt the water cycle, leading to desertification and other changes to the climate.5 A year later, abolitionist editor Elizur Wright, Jr., suggested that a possible solution might be the creation of a new sort of “park,” much larger in scale than existing parks and managed only minimally, “for nature is what we want to get at.” Noting that Boston's Common was hardly adequate to the needs of Boston's burgeoning population, he suggested that the city might acquire a square mile of mountain land between five and ten miles from the center.6 At the time, Wright imagined that such a park would be located in the Blue Hills to the South of Boston, but when he himself moved north of town to the suburb of Medford, he began lobbying for a park in the rocky woods known as Middlesex Fells, directly adjacent to his home. Wright galvanized a network of activists who, between the 1870s and 1890s, created four overlapping models for the legal preservation of forests. Some protected forests were owned by cities and towns, others by local nonprofit organizations, others by statewide nonprofits, and still others by the state government.Two pieces of legislation made public ownership of forests possible. The Public Domain Act of 1882, also known as the “Forest Law,” enabled towns and cities to hold forested or reforesting parcels of land, acquired by donation or purchase or eminent domain.7 And the Metropolitan Park Act of 1893 created a statewide board to care for a coordinated network of parks throughout the metropolitan area, especially those that straddled town boundaries.8 This legislation ensured the preservation of most of the large natural areas that are easily accessible to Bostonians today, among them the “rock hills” of Middlesex Fells and the Blue Hills, much of the Atlantic shoreline, and the banks of the three major rivers connecting the shoreline to the hills. More than six thousand acres of land were directly preserved as a result, none of it “virgin” forest but all of it ripe for reforestation.9 Shortly before this momentous event, the Trustees of Reservations had emerged from the Appalachian Mountain Club as a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving “such scenes and sites in Massachusetts as possess either uncommon beauty or historical interest.”10 It created the paradigm for subsequent land trust organizations, such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society, that added to the acreage of preserved land.All of this put Massachusetts on the path to restoring most of its original forest, even as the nascent National Park movement failed to stem the tide of deforestation and desertification in the American West. What's more, forest preservation in Massachusetts expressed an essential principle that was largely absent from Western conservation: that it is possible to foster greater biodiversity in landscapes that have previously been disrupted by human activity, and where human beings continue to live, work, and play.The visionary at the heart of the Massachusetts forest campaign, Elizur Wright, Jr., epitomizes the transition from radicalism to problem solving. Personally, he held the two styles together in creative tension. He was an absolutist when it came to human rights and the rights of trees, but he was also a mathematician and scientist who delighted in backing up his arguments with calculations. And he lived long enough to participate in both the radical beginnings of abolitionism and the flowering of problem solving after the Civil War. In the 1840s, when he first proposed that metropolitan Boston establish a forest park, he was striving to unite antislavery and agrarian currents of radicalism in a “Liberty League” devoted to the “sisterhood of reforms.” Four decades later, he devoted his final energies to the forest cause, but died with the work still incomplete. The successors who brought it to fulfillment were aligned with the “Mugwump” movement for civil service reform, which was the consummate political embodiment of problem solving.Wright is rarely mentioned in histories of environmentalism, in part because forest preservation was just one of several causes to which he devoted his zealous attention. The title of his most recent biography, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist, aptly expresses his range, but the book still relegates his environmentalism to a ten-page final chapter that also covers his family life and his death.11 Yet the fact that Wright cared about many other things besides forest preservation tells us something important about nineteenth-century environmentalism. With the notable exception of John Muir, conservationists were not single-issue reformers, but wide-ranging public citizens whose views on forests were inseparable from their ideas about slavery, poverty, science, and society.Wright was born in the woods of northwestern Connecticut in 1804, then moved with his family to Connecticut's “Western Reserve” in what was becoming the state of Ohio. The Wrights were committed to the energetic revivalism then dominant at Yale College, and Elizur Sr. expressed his religious and educational commitments by founding the Western Reserve Bible Society and conducting an academy in the new village of Tallmadge. It was here that Elizur Jr. first met John Brown, who was a fellow student. Like his father before him, Elizur Jr. excelled as a student at Yale. He briefly taught school in Groton, Massachusetts, then took a position as a math and science professor at Western Reserve College, where both his father and John Brown's father were trustees. Almost immediately, he was caught up in the controversy surrounding the “immediatist” abolitionism inaugurated by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831. Wright persuaded his faculty colleagues, his father, and Brown's father to embrace immediatism, but a majority of the college trustees remained committed to the “colonizationist” position that slaves should be freed gradually and then sent “back” to Africa. The resulting schism was the first major clash over slavery at an educational institution, and the upshot was that Wright left his teaching position to become a founder and the first national secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He then established himself as a journalist, editing abolitionist papers in New York City and Boston. When the abolitionist movement experienced a three-way schism in the 1840s, Wright became a founder of the Liberty Party, which saw third-party political action as the most promising strategy for ending slavery.The radicals of the Liberty Party gradually made common cause with antislavery elements of both the Whig and Democratic parties. This led to the formation first of the Free Soil and then of the Republican Party. Elizur Wright participated in this process as editor of Boston's Chronotype, a newspaper he founded in 1846 to support the Liberty Party, and subsequently the Commonwealth, which had the same financial backers but was aligned with Free Soil. It was at this point of transition from the absolutism of the Liberty Party to the pragmatism of Free Soil that Wright first proposed a forest park on the edge of Boston. His thinking was likely influenced by a collision between abolitionism and another current of American radicalism, the agrarian land reform movement led by George Henry Evans.12In 1844 Evans posed a challenge to Wright's friend Gerrit Smith, one of the most generous supporters of abolitionist causes. Smith had inherited his fortune from his land-speculating father, and Evans asked how Smith could reconcile his commitment to human rights with a land monopoly that left many of his neighbors locked in poverty.13 Smith couldn't, and he soon began distributing his land to small farmers, both Black and White. He and Wright also embraced the platform of Evans's National Reform Association. This called upon the federal government to give Western lands to urban workers in small parcels of about 160 acres. These farms would be held under a restricted title, making them exempt from seizure for debt, but also restricting their sale to other landless workers.14 Elizur Wright devoted many articles in the Chronotype to spelling it out in detail and answering critics. Wright also hoped that limiting the size of farms would have ecological as well as social benefits. Big farmers, he believed, ruined their land with “capital and machinery,” while small farmers had the time to improve the soil with intensive manuring.15 This was a direct rebuttal to the then-common practice of acquiring as much land as possible, working it to depletion, and then moving further west.The common thread connecting Wright's park idea with his support for land reform was the idea of a democratically managed “public domain.” By the 1840s, the federal government had a long-standing tradition of amassing landholdings, usually through war and ethnic cleansing, and then either turning those lands over to land speculators or else using them for canals and other public works that would primarily benefit merchants and industrialists. Wright opposed all of this, and he also opposed the high tariffs that enabled the federal government to engage in such activities without seeking the consent of the people. But unlike the Garrisonian abolitionists, whose antipathy to government verged on anarchism, Wright did not see “no government” as the alternative to government by slaveholders and plutocrats. He wanted to replace tariffs with direct taxes on wealth and income, reasoning that if the people were directly paying for government activities, they would insist that the government act only for the benefit of the people as a whole. These public benefits would include both parks and homesteads. An “honest direct property tax,” Wright added, would bring about a “radical revolution” by “shifting . . . the burdens of government from the backs of labor, to that of capital.”16As articulated by Evans, Smith, and Wright, land reform was a radical idea. Land reform could be reduced to a pithy slogan, such as Wright's affirmation that “the land was made for mankind and not for speculators.”17 Wright and Smith assumed they were becoming more radical, not less, by juxtaposing land reform with abolitionism. In 1847 they transformed the single-issue Liberty Party into a “Liberty League” committed to a “sisterhood of reforms” that included abolition of slavery, land reform, women's rights, and direct taxation. Yet the very multiplicity that made the Liberty League more radical than its predecessor also opened a door to a more pragmatic politics in which each reform in the sisterhood had the potential to bring additional voters into coalition. Guided by this line of thinking, the Chronotype's financial backers nudged Wright to shift his support to the Free Soil Party. The Free Soilers then used even more pragmatic strategies to build political power, such as trading their support for a Democratic candidate for Massachusetts governor in order to get Free Soiler Charles Sumner elected to the Senate.In recognition of his loyalty to the Free Soil cause, Elizur Wright was invited to join his benefactors’ weekly gatherings at a Boston hotel, known as the “Bird Club” in honor of one member. When the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law turned Massachusetts sentiment decisively against slavery, the Bird Club became Boston's political center.18 Though Wright was neither wealthy nor an elected official, the Club gave him access to some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Massachusetts, reinforcing the tendencies toward pragmatism that had separated him from the more absolutist Garrisonian abolitionists. At the same time, Wright was able to ensure that other Bird Club members would lend their wealth and power to radical causes. When the Fugitive Slave Law brought slavecatchers to the streets of Boston, Wright joined the Boston Vigilance Committee and was charged but not convicted for his role in the escape of Shadrach Minkins. Soon Bird Club members were sending money and guns to Wright's old classmate John Brown and other abolitionist settlers in Kansas. When Brown decided to confront slavery directly at Harpers Ferry, his “secret six” financial backers included three Bird Club members, as well as Wright's old friend Gerrit Smith. Those same Bird Club members would all eventually support Wright's forest preservation activities. By that time, though, many had transformed themselves from idealistic radicals into pragmatic problem solvers.Elizur Wright's environmentalism was at once radical and pragmatic. He articulated sweeping principles, including some that had scarcely been thought of before, and challenged his neighbors to put those principles into action. Among these were the new idea that disruptions to the carbon cycle posed a grave threat to human health, and the unusual idea that trees are persons with inherent rights. Wright also drew on his radical heritage by seeking to call a mass movement into being in support of these principles. His appeals were directed to the entire Massachusetts community, not to a narrow circle of experts. At the same time, Wright was pragmatically open to multiple paths to forest preservation, both public and private. And he did not hesitate to build new alliances with people who would hardly have shared his abolitionist vision, but had personal attachments to local forests.Wright was not the first or the only Massachusetts conservationist to warn that deforestation would lead to climate change. As early as 1839, his friend Wilson Flagg had worried that “since the clearing of the forests, the character of the seasons is greatly altered.”19 George Barrell Emerson offered a fairly thorough explanation of how forests stabilize and moderate climates by retaining water in his 1846 book. Nor was Wright the discoverer of the greenhouse effect. This was the achievement of New Yorker Eunice Foote, who in 1856 delivered a paper at a chemistry conference in which she spelled out the heat-trapping qualities of carbon dioxide in precise detail.20 Irishman John Tyndall made a similar discovery three years later, but neither he nor Foote drew the inference that human activity might change the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus change the climate. Credit for that goes to Svante Arrhenius, whose 1896 research on ice ages led him to draw correlations between changing carbon dioxide levels and changing temperatures. Sixteen years earlier, Wright had also noticed that human activity might alter carbon levels, but he did not know of Foote's and Tyndall's research—a bit surprising, since Foote had moved in many of the same abolitionist and suffragist circles. He focused on a different climatic risk: that local rather than global changes in carbon dioxide levels might render the air unbreathable for humans.Wright's distinctive contribution was especially relevant for the study of radicalism. He was the first to agitate the issue of climate change, that is, to try to build a mass movement for forest preservation by warning his neighbors of what might happen if both water and carbon cycles were disrupted by the cutting of trees, or by the burning of coal. The fact that Wright did not correctly identify the mechanism makes his argument more, rather than less, ecologically significant. What he recognized most clearly was that in an interconnected world, changes that initially involve only one part of the whole, such as trees or coal, will eventually extend out to touch everything.To my knowledge, the first occasion on which Wright made his argument about the carbon cycle was at a public gathering in Middlesex Fells on October 15, 1880. Wright observed that the complementarity of “vegetable and animal life” was “a well-established” scientific fact, then explained that “our health depends, in a great measure, on pure air, and trees are the greatest purifiers, because they absorb the carbon and restore to the air the oxygen essential to the life of animals.” For this reason, he claimed that the destruction of a single healthy tree would shorten some human life, and that if all the forests were destroyed “mankind would smother in the poison of their own breath.”21 At a similar gathering nearly two years later, Wright put this argument about the carbon cycle into the context of evolutionary history, and added a prescient warning about the burning of fossil fuels. Even more than other animals, Wright explained, humans need to breathe “an atmosphere of pure oxygen diluted with nothing but carbon.” For this reason, “the saurian monsters” might have been able to breathe “before the first gigantic forest growths had absorbed the carbon out of the atmosphere, making the vast coal formations.” But humans would have not survived in such an environment, and likewise they won't be able to survive “if they burn up the coal at the rate of 280,000,000 tons a year and destroy the forests.” Thus, we have a “sacred” obligation to ensure that one quarter of the earth's surface remains forested.22Wright's argument made clear that he was familiar with the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, which had been disseminated through the United States for the previous two decades. His understanding of the carbon cycle was influenced by Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley, who in 1874 had spoken at the dedication of a statue of Unitarian minister and scientist Joseph Priestley, who had isolated oxygen from the atmosphere a century before. Huxley said, and Wright agreed, that Priestley's discovery of the “complementary actions of animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the atmosphere” was the most important scientific discovery of all time. This underscored the peculiar use of Darwin that Wright made: the essential discovery was not “red in tooth and claw” competition, but rather the complementary relationship of diverse species.Wright was also radical in his insistence that forests, and the individual trees that comprised them, had intrinsic value independent of their usefulness to human beings. Because he also made abundant arguments for the instrumental value of forests, this aspect of his argument was not necessarily adopted by others in the forest conservation movement. I see no evidence of it, for example, in the founding documents of either the Metropolitan Park Commission or the Trustees of Reservations. But Wright first hinted at his belief in tree personhood when he published a “Petition of the Big Elms and Buttonwoods on the Mall, to the Corporation of the City of Boston” in the Chronotype in September 1847. That piece was perhaps too whimsical to be clearly interpreted: The petitioners complained about having their roots suffocated with cinders and gravel, but also urged the thinning of newer trees that were blocking human views.23But when Wright repeated the rhetorical trick in his 1883 essay entitled “The Voice of a Tree from the Middlesex Fells,” he was both humorous and fully in earnest. In this piece, a white pine directly addresses a human audience, speaking not “for myself only, but for all my kind, to your kind, for the vegetable to the animal world.” Appealing to the natural friendship between humans and trees, this pine urges those who have “teeth, axes and saws” to “use them, but not to your own hurt.” The tree makes a joke about its family ancestry, suggesting that ancient pines inspired the invention of the wheel because of the spoke-like pattern of their branches. It then whispers into its reader's ear that “our food is your poison,” as a prelude to an explanation about the carbon cycle. It also recapitulates the argument about the water cycle and the risk of desertification, and concludes by explaining the need for forest parks. One might interpret all of this as a rhetorical fancy, and not an expression of Wright's genuine belief in the personhood of trees. After all, Wright's writing was consistently marked by ironic humor. But as if to ward against such a reading, Wright included a passage that flagged just how seriously he wanted us to take his tree. Answering the objection that trees cannot feel and have no consciousness of the harm done to them, “Pinus Strobus” replies, “But how do you know that? How do you know that? Have you ever been a tree yourself? And if you do know it, what difference does it make in regard to your obligation to us?”24 By highlighting the shaky epistemological foundation of human exceptionalism, Wright suggested that it made more philosophical sense to assume the presence of tree personhood than its absence.The ultimate expression of Wright's abiding radicalism was his commitment to mass mobilization. This was expressed in the series of “Forest Festivals” that he held at the Middlesex Fells. These combined the practices of what we today would call “citizen science” and “climate activism.” Participants spent part of the day directly observing the flora and fauna of the Fells, and part of the day listening to speeches and appeals for their support. Unfortunately, the custom of holding Forest Festivals did not outlive Wright himself, and this had tragic consequences for forest preservation in Massachusetts. After the creation of the Metropolitan Park Commission, ordinary citizens largely withdrew from the task of safeguarding the rock hills, shoreline, and rivers of Metropolitan Boston. This was work for the government, not the people, and for much of the twentieth century the government did it in a neglectful and haphazard manner, allowing private businesses to encroach on public land and pollute the protected rivers. The legacy of Elizur Wright was not fully undone, for the land remained in public ownership and was thus available when 1970s environmentalism inspired a new wave of citizen activists to press for a style of management that was attentive to biodiversity.I have suggested that Wright's commitment to mass mobilization reflected his abiding radical sensibilities. His problem-solving streak was evident in another aspect of the forest campaign. In the wake of the 1882 Forest Law, Wright began soliciting “conditional obligations” from people who promised to donate either land within the Middlesex Fells or funds for the purchase of such land. None of the obligations were to be binding until the total amount raised was sufficient to preserve the entire area. (This project was cut short by Wright's death; ultimately, the Fells were preserved only after the Metropolitan Park Act brought an infusion of state funds.) This funding strategy was intended to demonstrate that the problem of deforestation could be easily solved, without creating a significant new tax burden. It also allowed Wright to build a new coalition of committed allies. Wright published the names of the trustees of his fund as well as of its donors, and these lists show that he had the support of old friends from the Liberty Party, wealthy property owners who hoped to honor their ancestors by protecting the forest, and Mugwump reformers who wished to shift political power from the masses to dispassionate experts.25Abolitionist commitment to the forests is evident in the fact that Wright's trustees included one member of the Secret Six (Thomas Wentworth Higginson) and the widows of two others (George Luther Stearns and Samuel Gridley Howe). But as far as I can tell, it did not include any of the African Americans who worked with Wright to liberate the victims of the Fugitive Slave Law. In fact, virtually everyone who contributed to the Middlesex Fells project could—like Wright himself—trace their ancestry to the founding generation of Massachusetts Puritans.A case in point was Elizur Wright's “lifelong personal friend” Samuel Sewall (1799–1888), whose name appears second in the list of trustees. For Sewall, abolitionist zeal and ancestral piety went hand in hand. As a young man, Sewall had attended William Lloyd Garrison's first Boston lecture along with his first cousin Samuel Joseph May and May's brother-in-law Bronson Alcott, and all three men were involved in the founding of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Sewall broke with his early Garrisonian allies to support the Liberty and Free Soil parties, serving as gubernatorial candidate for the former and as an elected state senator for the latter. It was in this context that he first got to know Elizur Wright. As a lawyer, Sewall made an especially significant contribution to the abolitionist cause through litigation involving fugitive slaves. In 1851 Sewall wrote an unsuccessful writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive slave then in police custody in Boston. Elizur Wright was criminally charged for his role in the subsequent rescue of Minkins. And in 1860 Sewall's nephew married Elizur Wright's daughter, cementing a familial tie between these long-standing allies.Like Wright, Sewall loved the forest enough to purchase his own small bit of it, and like Wright he instilled an equally fervent love in his daughters. Lucy Ellen Sewall was one of Boston's first female physicians, and she greatly enjoyed the healing solace of her father's woods. After both Lucy and Samuel died, Lucy's sister Louisa donated “Sewall's Woods” in their honor, with the wish “that none of the trees on said premises shall be cut down unless decayed, or that it shall be considered necessary to do so for the benefit of the remaining ones, or for the benefit of the public use of said woods, and that the woods shall be maintained as far as possible, or reasonab