A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (review)

As recent work such as Susan Scott Parrish’s American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic Worldhas shown us, the study of natural history constituted a crucial aspect of early American culture. Both a practice and a way of seeing the world, natural history sought to understand flora and fauna (including humankind) in their natural surroundings. In A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic, Bruce Dain tracks ideas of “race” from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, arguing that one cannot draw a clear line between eighteenth-century natural historical and nineteenth-century biological understandings of race. For Dain, the way that Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, Johann Gottfried von Blumenbach, and Samuel Stanhope Smith discussed how the physical and cultural environment affected the body’s racial features informed the later biological racial theories of Georges Cuvier, Samuel Morton, and Josiah Nott. Dain also shows how largely neglected African American historical figures such as Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith drew upon and adapted aspects of environmentalist thinking in their own theorizations of the category of “race.” Building upon the significant work of scholars such as Winthrop Jordan, Dain’s excellent intellectual history of early American race theory reconceptualizes racial thinking during this period by highlighting both the continuing effect of natural historical thought and alternative conceptions of race that challenged mainstream thinking in the nineteenth century.

Dain’s work is important because it shows us how eighteenth-century ways of thinking did not magically disappear at the century’s close. As Robyn Wiegman argues in American Anatomiesabout the problematically clean divide Michel Foucault posits between scientific thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “The intensification of scientific efforts to ascertain the origin and bodily foundation for race in the nineteenth century, alongside the persistence of environmentalism as a key explanation for racial difference in the United States in the antebellum period, indicates a less emphatic break, a more troubled confusion, between classical and modern apprehensions of race. . . . [S]uch an intensification points to the importance of thinking about epistemic organizations as heterogeneous, containing subcultural formations of knowledge that exist in contradiction or tension with each regime’s primary features” (34). Dain clearly articulates these “subcultural formations of knowledge” as they persisted throughout nineteenth-century race science. In addition, Dain excavates from the archive understudied African American notions of race; he makes us aware of ardent responses to scientific racism that took shape in the early 1800s.

Dain’s first two chapters on natural historical understandings of race in the late eighteenth-century give a broad sketch of various and sometimes imbricated ideas. Dain describes environmental beliefs about the pliability of the human body proposed by Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach. He details Americanist versions of these lines of thinking espoused by natural historians such as Benjamin Rush, who conceptualized blackness as a disease that could be cured if blacks were freed from the circumstances of slavery. Dain then resituates Thomas Jefferson without this broader context. Doing so refreshingly refuses to limit all eighteenth-century thinking on race to that of the Virginia statesman. In chapter 2, Dain contrasts Jefferson with Samuel Stanhope Smith, who argued that one’s natural environment and civilization could influence one’s racial identity. Smith’s monogenetic theory was egalitarian in theory, positing that all humankind descended from Adam and Eve. However, because it conceptualized all non-white races as fallen deviations from the norm of whiteness, it too implied a racial hierarchy. Smith’s ideas, “the most important and influential American statement of monogenism of the nineteenth century,” came to be, as Dain claims, “racist ethnology’s foil” (41). Dain juxtaposes Smith with late eighteenth-century black Atlantic writers such as Jupiter Hammon and Olaudah Equiano. In their work, he asserts, “environmental or any other explanations for skin color remained conspicuously...