The Science of Abolition

In The Science of Abolition, Eric Herschthal makes a nuanced and responsible course-correction argument. He does not challenge scholarship that traces the ways race-based slavery is deeply modern and was woven into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific thought. And he acknowledges that antislavery technological and scientific arguments often sidestepped questions of Black equality and citizenship, functioning as a “kind of anti-politics” (p. 248). But he wants to recover the role of prominent men of science in casting slavery as antimodern and antiprogress, a view, he notes, that was also common among historians, including Eugene Genovese, until recently. In the first two chapters, he reads closely the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Joseph Priestly, Josiah Wedgewood, Erasmus Darwin, and Benjamin Banneker. The first five, Herschthal argues, were moderate reformers. Although sometimes motivated by ambition or avoidance of controversy, and consistently unwilling to argue for Black citizenship, they were more committed to antislavery than is recognized by current scholarship's focus on science's complicity with racism. Banneker, by contrast, Herschthal argues, was less an activist than some have suggested, and primarily dedicated to his scientific work, a correction less persuasive than others he makes. Three middle chapters meticulously describe the role of scientists such as British physician John Fothergill, Swedish botanist Adam Afzelius, and the British naturalist and abolitionist Carl Wadström—to name only a few of those who appear in this study—in arguing that advances in science and technology would ensure the success of slave-free African colonies and provide alternative labor models for Caribbean planters. Herschthal is attentive to the entanglements of procolonization scientists with slaveholders, even as they argued against slavery and the idea of innate Black inferiority. Their ties to slavery have led historians to question the depth of their antislavery convictions, but Herschthal offers a different reading. He suggests that these relationships allowed the antislavery positions of men such as British naturalist Henry Smeathman, Yale College chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman, and geologist and cartographer William Maclure to avoid being dismissed as too radical. Herschthal concludes his history with a long chapter on moderate antislavery scientists whose views and significance have been eclipsed by the greater attention historians have given to radical abolitionists, even as the moderate position was more common and more influential at the time. Jonathan Baldwin Turner, James McCune Smith, and John Pitkin Norton are his primary examples, and he adds much to our understanding of them and their connections

Argument (complex analysis · Art history · Citizenship · Complicity · Erasmus · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

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