Empire of skulls, p.23
Empire of Skulls, page 23
It’s hard to imagine a clearer-cut statement of white supremacy. In Caldwell’s hands phrenology authorized white subjugation of other races and conquest of the world. The science also provided, according to Caldwell, stark evidence of polygenesis—the belief that human races have separate origins. Black people and white people, and those from all the other races besides, began in different places and are distinct by nature. In addition, the races are more or less static given their varied origins. Neither the African race nor any other race could ever catch up to Caucasians, whose superior endowments made them natural rulers.5
The Fowlers knew and respected Caldwell. He was a champion of their beloved science and an ally to their cause. And in some instances, they made statements that sounded a lot like those of the slaveholding Kentuckian. In The Illustrated Self-Instructor, for instance, a pamphlet that was often distributed when sitters paid for an examination, the Fowlers insisted that “the Caucasian race is superior in reasoning power and moral elevation to all the other races, and, accordingly, have higher and bolder foreheads, and more elevated and elongated top heads.” Of course, that was just not true—a sweeping generalization about groups of human beings that remains a very real part of phrenology’s problematic legacy.6
If such stereotypes were the extent of the Fowlers’ discussion of race, they would align squarely with the conservative, racist end of the phrenological spectrum. Yet, as with all things phrenology, the story is more complicated. The Fowlers also made many statements that undercut exactly what Caldwell argued. They stood resolutely opposed to slavery and even funded abolitionist initiatives. These seeming contradictions were common at the time and certainly not limited to the Fowlers. But in their worldview, problematic statements about race and the fight for liberty and equality could exist side by side because of phrenology’s central promise—namely, improvement. Real progress in individuals and groups was always possible, they argued, so even if white people were supposedly superior to other races in terms of reasoning power and moral elevation, it didn’t have to stay that way. The possibility of intellectual advancement was baked into human nature, which meant that people had an inherent right to develop their minds properly. Practical phrenology could actually become a strong, useful argument for racial progress.
That’s what Orson tried to communicate in his 1843 book on human lineage and development. Titled Hereditary Descent: Its Laws and Facts, Illustrated and Applied to the Improvement of Mankind, the book explored the role of ancestry in the progress of individuals, families, and nations. He hoped that people who were thinking about becoming parents would read his work, visit a phrenologist, and think hard about how their characters would combine in their offspring. It was a tough but essential topic for Americans to contemplate, and Orson had no patience for “those who are so very extra delicate and refined that they cannot investigate this subject without a blush.” Anyone that delicate, he insisted, is too modest to get married in the first place: “If true modesty need not be offended by marriage, it certainly need not blush to learn the duties and relations necessarily connected with, and growing out of, that marriage.”7
Much of the book concerned how traits were handed down from one generation to the next, both in humans and in other animals. Along the way Orson offered a wealth of examples from his travels as a practical phrenologist, including about families with similarly large heads despite their small stature; kin with six fingers on one hand; siblings with hair discolorations in the same spot; and generations of “porcupine men,” whose skin contained distinct bunches of “hairy substances growing out on them quite analogous to the quills of porcupines.” Beyond these familial appearances, he explained the way diseases, both of body and mind, were handed down from one generation to the next. He even explained that insanity was as much a disease as anything else, not some divine punishment.8
Yet practical phrenologist that he was, Orson insisted that inheritance was not the only controlling factor in one’s existence. Education played an important role, and people could always improve on what their parents had given them. As with so many texts in the Fowler canon, Hereditary Descent was a book about progress on small and large scales. “The present is emphatically an age of reform,” Orson wrote.
The ice of the dark ages, which has bound the river of society and fettered its current since the creation of Adam, is beginning to break up. Mankind are freeing themselves from the shackles of ages, and attempting various reforms in government, politics, the arts, sciences, religion, morals, temperance, etc., and with partial success, but none of the reforms now in progress can extend far or effect much, till they begin with the root of vice, and make it a root of virtue—till they commence with the germ.
Turning the root of vice into a root of virtue meant understanding what parents passed down to their kids, and the ways that education could redirect natural instincts. Indeed, Orson reminded his readers time and again, parents have a responsibility to future generations. When choosing a mate, people must consider what their offspring will inherit rather than thinking only of satisfying their “animal indulgence.”9
Orson Fowler in his later years
Orson’s point about reproduction based on a concern for future generations trod on dangerous ground. The logic of the argument was the same logic that appeared in social Darwinism later in the nineteenth century and in eugenics in the twentieth century. Yet Orson’s thinking went in a very different direction than these later sciences. After spending dozens of pages discussing different races, including the “colored race,” the American Indian race, the Jews (which Orson classified as a nation instead of a race), the Chinese (again, a nation), and the Caucasian race, Orson made a pivotal point: Ultimately, the human race is defined by similarity, not difference—unity, not division. “Slight changes,” he wrote at a time when such sentiments were dangerous, “induced by climate and circumstances, appear in different races and ages, but at heart, all appear to have been the same . . . The oneness of our race is most apparent. The avenues to the human heart are the same in all.” In fact, unity is so controlling in humanity that “he who has learned human nature once, need not learn it again.”10
This did not mean that there were no differences among the races. Orson offered more sweeping generalizations about head shapes and facial features of different groups. Yet as the book reached its culmination, Orson complicated the matter by confronting perhaps the most taboo subject of the day: race mixing. In fact, just as readers might have expected Orson to make a case for keeping races and bloodlines pure, as many thinkers at the time were wont to do, he argued just the opposite. When people of different races have children, the characteristics of those races create new combinations and modifications for the benefit of future generations, resulting in “new phases of character” and
physical propensities hitherto unknown, which, instead of dying with those individuals or generations in which they originated, will not only live and spread throughout the countless millions of their descendants, but also form new bases or causes, the product of which will be phases of character and kinds of talent now unknown and inconceivable to mankind.
For Orson, intermarrying was not only permissible but highly advantageous to the progress of humanity, given that “the diversity existing among mankind touching mental qualities” was “infinitely greater than that appearing to their looks and other merely physical conditions.”11 In other words, whatever changes happened physically when races mixed were of little concern in light of the benefits that humanity received from new mental combinations.12
If the point weren’t clear enough, Orson turned directly to the kind of race mixing happening in the United States:
The first child produced by the union of a Caucasian and an African parent was a mulatto, differing in color and form of body, and in cast of mind and tone of feeling, from all other members of the human family. Nobody like him, either mentally or physically, had ever before existed. His children then intermarried, perhaps with whites, perhaps with blacks, and produced children unlike either parent or ancestor, because compounds of two parents the like of one of which had never before existed, and therefore the compound of this unique parent with one unlike himself, necessarily proceed another sui generis; and their intermarriages, others possessing a mixture of qualities never before exactly equaled, or if equaled, the conditions and circumstances of the parents and all the ancestors of these two, were not exactly alike . . . And this principle applies to every member of the human family, past, present, and prospective; and hence, mainly, the diversity of the human character and physiology.13
This was a view of the human family radically different from the view of Charles Caldwell. Although both perspectives were premised on phrenology, Orson seized on the idea of improvement to argue that humanity was stronger through diversity. When Black people and white people had children, they added to the range of bodies and minds that existed, and all of us benefited. The argument was practically unheard of at the time, particularly in antebellum America. Yet Orson’s mission to “improve the stock of mankind” meant laying “the axe of reform to the root of this tree of vice and misery” and planting in its place “a root of virtue.” Diversity was that virtue.14
A SLIGHT, BESPECTACLED man with strong eyes and a high, arching forehead, the prominence of which was accentuated by a vanishing hairline, William Lloyd Garrison was abolitionism’s righteous prophet. His advocacy effectively kicked off a movement in the United States that sought both the immediate end to slavery and equal rights for African Americans.
As a prominent reformer interested in remaking America, Garrison had been aware of phrenology for years and first had his head felt in 1836. As the story goes, he did not identify himself when he sat for Lorenzo and Orson in New York. Yet, as The Liberator—Garrison’s fire-spitting newspaper published out of Boston—noted in publishing his phrenological description: “We see not how the striking accuracy with which the prominent traits of his character are delineated, can be accounted for in any other way, than by supposing the science of Phrenology to be founded in truth.” Sliding his fingers across the bald curvatures of Garrison’s cranium, Lorenzo found a remarkable head. With “an active mind, quick perception, strong investigating powers, great imagination, great determination and pride of character,” Garrison operated with tremendous courage, using “a moral weapon” in his cause instead of “a physical one.” And yet his Destructiveness was large, meaning that he was positioned to tear down whatever stood in the way of his moral war. Fortunately his large Destructiveness was properly directed through his fully developed religious faculties. “On the subject of religion,” Lorenzo found, “he takes general and liberal views, and is not guided at all by creeds and ceremonies . . . He was born to take the lead, rather than be led. He always engages with his whole soul in anything he undertakes.”15
Standing in the room at the time to help with the examination, Orson quipped, “You would make a roaring abolitionist.”16
To Garrison, this phrenological reading robustly confirmed the truth of the new science. And it wasn’t just the character description that stood out to him, accurate though it was. It was also the way phrenology muscled through the slings and arrows of its critics. Garrison saw a striking parallel between phrenology’s rise and the abolitionist fight he was leading. “Thus far,” he wrote in 1840, “phrenology, like a rough diamond, has grown brighter by attrition. Placed in a fiery ordeal, it has lost nothing by the dross of ignorance and obscurity, in which it has lain hidden for ages.” Indeed, the Fowlers’ “zeal, enthusiasm, and hope” places them in the company of leading reformers doing their damnedest to change the world.17
That was a big reason why Garrison covered phrenology regularly in the pages of The Liberator. Over the years he praised The American Phrenological Journal for its contributions to human knowledge and encouraged his readers to subscribe to it, along with a host of other Fowlers and Wells publications. He stood up for Orson when David Meredith Reese deemed phrenology one of the greatest humbugs of the age, which was not surprising to Garrison, given that the foolhardy, incorrigible Reese had also lambasted abolition. He reprinted a lengthy account of the time that Orson, while blindfolded, examined the heads of other abolitionists at the American Anti-Slavery Society’s office, which was just a couple doors down from the Phrenological Cabinet. He praised the time when the Fowlers attended the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting and debated a critic of phrenology before publicly examining heads to the delight of the audience. He lauded the phrenological examination the Fowlers gave to the abolitionist and reformer Lydia Maria Child as “very remarkable” and evidence of “the truth of phrenology as an accurate and valuable science.” On top of all that, Garrison covered various Fowler lectures and highlighted the ways their science bolstered other reform movements, including temperance, women’s rights, and vegetarianism.18
Throughout the 1840s Garrison interacted regularly with the Fowlers at various reform gatherings, and they developed both a friendship and a trust, which became particularly valuable to the cause of abolition in 1851. That year Lorenzo agreed to serve as an expert witness in a legal case involving a fugitive slave. John Bolding was born into slavery in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1824, but he managed to escape to Poughkeepsie, New York, as an adult. In 1851, he was working as a tailor and married to a free woman when Robert Anderson, slaveholder from South Carolina, paid residents in Poughkeepsie and federal marshals to get his “property” back. After outrage from locals, the incident moved to federal court in Lower Manhattan, where abolitionists came up with a rather brilliant argument: Bolding was not actually African American. The claim, which was only possible because of Bolding’s light skin, hinged on evidence of his lineage.
On August 28, 1851, Lorenzo took the stand in Manhattan to explain. Recounting the time he examined the man blindfolded, without knowing anything about him, Lorenzo concluded that there was nothing in the examination to suggest that Bolding had “any African blood in him.” He then held up the skulls of an American Indian and an African in court, demonstrating their differences and noting that Bolding’s head was much more like the American Indian skull than the African skull. Despite this testimony, and corroborating testimony from Samuel Wells, the judge ruled that Bolding was the property of Anderson.19
Garrison, Lorenzo, and the other abolitionists involved in the case knew that Bolding was an escaped slave. But in response to the Fugitive Slave Law, they also knew they needed to use whatever weapons were at their disposal to keep people free. Lorenzo’s testimony used phrenology for advancing a novel argument that Bolding’s head was not the stereotypical head of an “African.” The argument didn’t stick, but it was a valiant effort to use the stereotypes in which phrenology trafficked for a man’s freedom.
When the Union claimed victory in the Civil War and began the slow, uneven, difficult process of emancipating slaves, Garrison began the process of shutting down his famous abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Lorenzo, a longtime subscriber, heard the news and sent a letter of gratitude to Garrison, which appeared in the paper in August 1865. Titled “Letter from L. N. Fowler, the Eminent Phrenologist” and addressed to “My Old Friend, Wm. Lloyd Garrison,” Lorenzo’s note spoke of the pain he felt upon hearing that The Liberator would cease publication, but also the pleasure of the news because the cause for which the paper was founded “no longer exists.” He went on to praise Garrison for winning “a martyr’s fame by a martyr’s labors, bearing opposition, imprisonment and calumny when the cause was weak.” Lorenzo even went on to suggest that the paper not cease publication but change its name to The Liberated and provide an outlet for former slaves to “tell their experience, give their views, and make known their rejoicings as they become educated.”20
The friendship and common cause between the great abolitionist and the great phrenologist surfaced again in 1867, when both Garrison and Lorenzo were in England. Garrison had reached out to Lorenzo in the hope that the two men could visit together, but the timing just wasn’t right. “Friend Garrison,” Lorenzo wrote in reply, “I am sorry I shall not be able to see you while in Manchester . . . You have many friends there. I am thankful with thousands of others that your life has been spared to see the end of slavery in America.” Lorenzo then thanked his friend for being “instrumental in the hands of God to bring freedom to the lands and bodies of millions of human beings.” He signed off simply, “Your old friend, L. N. Fowler.”21
OTHER ABOLITIONISTS WHO embraced phrenology included Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Like Garrison, they saw the science’s promise of equality through improvement as a foundation for abolition and suffrage. In addition, both Sarah and Angelina Grimké had their heads read and championed phrenology, as did newspaper editor and minister Joshua Leavitt and education reformer and transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, along with many others. Then there was Theodore Weld, who not only embraced the science but enlisted the Fowlers in his abolitionist crusade.
