John H. Van Evrie facts for kids

John H. Van Evrie (1814–1896) was a Canadian-born American physician and defender of slavery best known as the editor of the Weekly Day Book and the author of several books on race and slavery which reproduced the ideas of scientific racism for a popular audience. He was also the proprietor of the publishing company Van Evrie, Horton & Company. Van Evrie was described by the historian George M. Fredrickson as "perhaps the first professional racist in American history." His thought, which lacked significant scientific evidence even for the time, emphasized the inferiority of black people to white people, defended slavery as practiced in the United States and attacked abolitionism, while opposing class distinctions among white people and the oppression of the white working class. He repeatedly put "slave" and "slavery" in quotation marks, because he did not think these were the right words for enslaved Blacks.

Early life and medical practice

Van Evrie was born in 1814. On January 24, 1842, he married Sophia Elizabeth Colman, the niece and ward of Thomas Hunt Rochester, a son of the founder of Rochester, New York. Sophia Colman Van Evrie was the eldest child of Anson Colman (1795-1837) and Catherine Kimball Rochester. Colman had obtained his medical degree from a Philadelphia Medical College, and studied a year in Paris. During his career, he also studied in Boston, London and Montreal, as well as teaching two years at Geneva Medical College. Colman's personal library contained 148 medical books at his death and with 426 volumes was the largest personal library of the time.

Van Evrie had one daughter, Catherine Rochester Van Evrie (1843-1922). After Van Evrie's wife died in 1845, his daughter went to live with her mother's guardian, Thomas Hunt Rochester. Catherine never married. According to census records, Catherine listed Ohio as her birthplace, and her father's birthplace as either New York or Canada.

In a 1949 article Sidney Kaplan wrote that he "received a medical degree somewhere. Whether he practiced is problematical; most of his time seems to have been spent as a pseudo-scientific, screwball propagandist of Copperheadism in New York."

Views

White superiority

Van Evrie believed black people were of "a separate species" from white people and that the boundaries between races were "absolutely impassable"; he brought this into line with the Bible's account of humanity's origin by proposing "a supernatural imposition at some subsequent period" (see Polygenism). He reinterpreted the Old Testament's account of Adam and Eve as a story of the origins of white people, and suggested that black people had their own separate beginnings. After Josiah C. Nott developed his theory of polygenesis in his Types of Mankind, Van Evrie applied them to the debate over slavery in Negroes and Negro "Slavery". There had been, in his view and that of Nott, not a single creation but rather multiple creations "in different places and of different forms to fit the needs of locality." Similarly, he reinterpreted the Golden Rule through a racial lens, arguing that one need only treat another as one would like to be treated if the other is of the same race as oneself.

Human skin color, in his view, was inevitable and irreversible, the product of a divine plan; he also believed that this meant that black people were permanently incapable of expressing emotion in the same way as white people. From this belief that black people could not express emotion, he concluded that they must also be unable to experience emotion to the same degree; and, as they were considered insufficiently sensitive to attain civilization, he believed that black people needed to remain enslaved. He also argued that black people's perceived inability to express emotions was proof of subhuman status. Van Evrie also believed that all black people shared certain uniform physical features (for example hair color, nose size and lip size), whereas these features were more varied among white people; he interpreted this to be further evidence of white superiority. He used evidence from the new field of ethnology to support his belief in white superiority and found evidence for moral superiority and inferiority in racially defined physiognomical features, including black people's "cranial manifestation" (on which topic he quoted statistics published by Samuel George Morton), brain size and hair. Van Evrie wrote at a time which he believed to be the first instance in history in which racial difference, and racial superiority and inferiority, could be divined from the "minutest particle [or] the single globule of blood".

He claimed that God had adapted the "physical and mental structures" of black people so as to ensure they could only live in the tropics, that black people reached full mental development by the age of 15, and that a black person's "strongest affection" was "love for [their] master". Because of these "capricious affections" and their "feeble moral nature", Van Evrie thought that marriage between slaves would be "obviously unnatural, monstrous, and wicked." Van Evrie also thought that black people were by their nature unsuited to marriage and incapable of political participation. Though he saw black people as unsuited to social or political equality, he felt that under competent guardianship they could be socially useful.

Van Evrie praised the "blush of maiden modesty" found in the white woman, and asked "Can anyone suppose such a thing possible to a black face?" Black mothers, Van Evrie claimed, tended to leave their children at a younger age than white mothers, and, unlike white mothers, were unable to kill their children in order to save them from imminent disasters, because the black woman's "maternal instincts are more imperative, more closely approximate to the animal". He also claimed that black mothers were liable to become indifferent to their children by the age of 15, and no longer recognize them by age 40.

His theory of black inferiority was also applied to all people of color, which led him to the conclusion that Confucius and other Ancient Chinese figures had in fact been white.

Slavery

Van Evrie argued that the presence of black people and Native Americans in the United States provided the basis for American democracy; it "led directly to the establishment of a new system based on foundations of everlasting truth—the legal and political equality of the race, or of all those whom the Almighty Creator has Himself made equal." In Negroes and Negro "Slavery" Van Evrie argued that slavery was a necessary condition for white freedom because it allows the elite to be free of manual labor and so to pursue education, which for Van Evrie was the foundation of freedom. "[T]he existence of an inferior race" in the United States, he wrote,

...resulted in the creation of a new political and social order, and relieved the producing class from that abject dependence on capital which in Europe, and especially in England, renders them mere beasts of burden to a fraction of their brethren.

Citing the examples of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome as evidence, Van Evrie also contended that slavery in the United States was preferable to its antecedents in the classical world, as slavery in the U.S. was only imposed on those for whom it was a "natural" condition. In "Free Negroism" he argued that the benefits of slavery for the Northern white working class included lower commodity prices and less labor competition; he wrote that the "'slave' negro is the poor man's friend" while "the 'freed' negro is his bitter and unrelenting enemy".

He felt that "slavery" was an unsuitable descriptor for the position of black people in the antebellum South, as the word implied an unnatural relationship, whereas the institution of slavery, for Van Evrie, was "the most desirable thing in human affairs". "The simple truth is," he wrote, that "there is no slavery in this country; there are no slaves in the Southern States." Van Evrie believed that slavery was divinely ordained as a part of nature: God had designed the races of humans for specific purposes, according to which slavery was the natural condition of black people; and white people, defined by certain physical features, were naturally fit to be masters. He saw the relationship between a slave and their master as resembling the relationship between a father and a child, and the law in the southern states as effectively preventing mistreatment. Black people, he argued, were useless "when isolated or separated from the white man", and free black people were in his view "destined to extinction"; slavery, in his view, was beneficial to the "civilization, progress, and general welfare of both races." To abolish slavery would, in his view, be cruel to black people who were the equivalent of "children forever" and "incapable of comprehending the wants of the future".

Nonetheless, Van Evrie did not believe that slavery would expand into Kansas, Nebraska, or the region north of the Ohio River, as these areas possessed climates "utterly uncongenial to the Negro constitution." He also believed that slavery would not survive in the northernmost slave states because white workers would emigrate to them. As a result, he argued that the South required an "outlet" for its excess black population, which would be produced through the expansion of slavery into the American tropics. He envisioned a slave society in the Caribbean, in which white people would live in the highlands and black people on the coast, and emphasized the importance of Cuba, which he demanded be seized by the U.S. before its slaves were emancipated by the Spanish colonial authorities.

Language

Van Evrie dedicated chapters in both Negroes and Negro "Slavery" and White Supremacy and Negro Subordination to establishing linguistic differences between white and black people; in the words of Amy Dunham Strand his arguments in this area "unambiguously [associated] language with racial essence." He claimed that black people possessed distinctive "vocal organs", leading to a "difference in language"; and that "the voice of the negro, both in its [physical] tones and its [grammatical] structure, varies just as widely from that of the white man as any other feature or faculty of the negro being." This difference, in Van Evrie's view, was so pronounced as to ensure that no black person could ever "speak the language of the white man with absolute correctness." He likened the difference between black and white speech to that between the calls of different animals, and argued that black people could only speak English at all because of an extraordinary "imitative instinct". Van Evrie saw this capacity to imitate white people as black people's "most essential feature". Van Evrie believed that in the absence of white people, black people would regress to their "native Africanism". Because all black language was for Van Evrie an imitation of white people's speech, he also believed black people to be incapable of producing music: "Music is to the Negro an impossible art, and therefore such a thing as a Negro singer is unknown."

Abolitionism and abolition

Van Evrie called abolitionism "free negroism". He wrote that abolitionists believed "that the negro is...a creature like ourselves except in color", which he rejected as a "foolish assumption". He considered anti-slavery sentiment to be a delusion derived from "European aristocrats who by holding up the imaginary wrongs to American slaves diverted attention from their own mistreatment of the white working class." He thought that abolition of slavery would result in black people being forced into unfair competition with whites, and that such an experiment would lead to the collapse of American democracy. He expected that after emancipation black people would live off white people's labor, increase taxes by becoming dependent on social programs, and push up commodity prices by refusing to work. He also believed that abolition would result in miscegenation on a larger scale, and accused abolitionists of promoting miscegenation. Shortly after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln he denounced an alleged abolitionist plot to disenfranchise white people in the South while enfranchising the black population.

White people

Van Evrie believed that the greatness of the United States could be attributed to the fact that its white peoples had mixed with one another while refusing to mix with black or Native people. He believed that the English settlers of the Colony of Virginia had valued class distinctions and believed some white men to be superior to others, but their contact with black people had led them to realize how alike and naturally superior they collectively were. This consciousness, Van Evrie argued, had given rise to the egalitarian ideas of the Revolutionary era.

His belief in the necessity of slavery was set against a critique of class privilege and social stratification in homogeneous white societies, including the perceived oppression of the working class and peasantry by the aristocracy in the United Kingdom, on grounds that the subordination of white people to other white people was unjust and "artificial". "The subordination of whites to whites," he wrote in the Day Book (then published as the Caucasian) in 1863, "is unjust and artificial. The English are ruled by those who are not naturally superior, while American democracy assures self-government of, by, and for naturally equal whites." He predicted that American ideas of equality would topple European despotisms, and condemned the oppression of the white working class by capitalists and their political allies in the northern United States. He feared that American civilization, which was defined by its adherence to the "natural" distinctions of race and not an artificial class hierarchy, was under threat not only from northern capitalists but also abolitionism, which he believed to be a monarchist plot originating in England. Fredrickson interpreted Van Evrie's Jacksonian rhetoric as being "calculated to appeal to socially insecure whites in search of a compensatory foundation for personal pride and status ... He appealed to the psychological needs of such whites by asserting that all Caucasians had natural capacities that were literally identical—as did all Negroes, on a much lower level."

He believed that white immigrants to the United States had distinctive physiognomical features (for example "The coarse skin, big hands and feet, the broad teeth, pug nose etc. of the Irish and German laborer") but that these characteristics would fade over time as immigrants became indistinguishable from other Americans. Black people, though, were bound in Van Evrie's view to remain "as absolutely and specifically unlike the American as when the race first touched the soil and first breathed the air of the New World." By the 1860s he also came to view Irish immigrants as an important part of a pro-slavery coalition in the North.

Multiracial people and miscegenation

Van Evrie viewed white attitudes towards multiracial people as a central issue in the debate over slavery; his Negroes and Negro "Slavery" repeatedly warns of the dangers of "mongrelism". Because he viewed racial distinctions as "impassable" and racial categories as having immutable essences, he viewed miscegenation as a violation of nature.

In Black Scare, his history of American racism in the late 20th century, Forrest G. Wood noted a central contradiction in Van Evrie's ideas about race: he believed simultaneously that mixing would lead to a race of people carrying characteristics of each race, and that it would lead to the decline of black characteristics in favor of white characteristics. Wood notes that Van Evrie was among a number of critics who did not think "it important to explain how race mixing reduced the offspring to the lowest common denominator on the one hand and raised the mulatto to a level approaching the white man's on the other."

Wood attributed Van Evrie and his contemporaries' opposition to miscegenation to two factors: concern for the perceived purity of white women, and fear that the white race would be diminished. Van Evrie believed that the "delicate" nature of white women in the South was the result of traditional southern attitudes toward race relations, that love across the racial divide was "eternally impossible," and that southern white women believed their "degradation and debauchment" to be the objective of the Union in the American Civil War. In 1983, literary critic Eric Sundquist wrote that Van Evrie had "anticipated ... the hysterical defense of southern womanhood that would become and remain the touchstone of white racism".

Indigenous people

Van Evrie believed the brains of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to be larger than those of black people but smaller than whites'. He argued that the past civilizations in Central and South America could not have been the work of Native people who lacked the brain size to be capable of migration, and were instead evidence that white people had inhabited the Americas earlier than previously thought, and had later migrated elsewhere.

The Democratic Party

Though Van Evrie was closely allied with the Democratic Party, during the Civil War he criticized his fellow Copperheads for their perceived failure to offer alternative political principles. In 1865 Van Evrie in the Weekly Day Book accused the New York World, a Democratic paper, of being secretly run by Republicans, and of claiming to be a Copperhead paper in order to embarrass Democrats. He also claimed that the World's editor Manton Marble was an abolitionist. After the war he called for the formation of a Democratic equivalent to the Republican Party's Union League.

Influence

Van Evrie's thought influenced the work of the writer Edward A. Pollard. After abolition Pollard had ceased to support slavery on grounds of tradition or paternalism, and turned instead to Van Evrie's theories of black biological inferiority, and endorsed Van Evrie's assertion that white democracy required total black subordination. He was also cited as an authority by Hinton Rowan Helper in his The Negroes in Negroland; the Negroes in America; and Negroes Generally. In 2010 the historian James Lander wrote that Van Evrie "may have achieved his stated desire to influence politicians rather than scientists." Van Evrie claimed that Stephen A. Douglas had distributed copies of Negroes and Negro "Slavery" among his constituents, and described Douglas as one politician who had "assented to the new doctrine in private, but declined the responsibility of standing by the truth in public". He also claimed to have converted Alexander H. Stephens to "the new doctrine" by presenting him with a copy of Negroes and Negro "Slavery".

In a 1934 article H. G. Duncan and Winnie Leach Duncan noted that Van Evrie aided the development of sociology "by becoming a source and inspiration for [George] Fitzhugh." Fitzhugh wrote a ten-page review of Negroes and Negro "Slavery" in which he argued that Van Evrie had provided "demonstrative reasoning, demonstrative proof, that the negro is of a different species, physically, from the white man ... he has demonstrated that the negro is physically, morally, and intellectually a different being (from necessity) from the white man, and must ever so remain". He also wrote that Van Evrie's thesis that "The negro is not a black-white-man" constituted "a new discovery and a new and important theory in physiological and sociological science."

In The Leopard's Spots, his 1960 book on 19th-century scientific racism, the historian William Stanton described Van Evrie as one "whom appeared only on the periphery of the controversy to comment, cheer, or make impolite noises of disapproval" and wrote that he "did not influence the tide of [the] battle" over polygenism and monogenism. In 1998, historian Matthew Frye Jacobson wrote that Van Evrie's "contribution to the scientific discourse of race involved not substance but simply volume."

See also

• Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), Swiss-born theorist of polygenism who worked in the United States
• Thomas Dixon, Jr. (1864–1946), America's second professional racist