Steven Conn
is a history professor at Ohio State University
Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, has been much on our minds recently. Today, exactly 200 years after Lincoln's birth, Barack Obama's presidency is one fulfillment of the work Lincoln started.
Lincoln shares his birthday with Charles Darwin, the other Great Emancipator of the 19th century. In different ways, each liberated us from tradition.
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were exact contemporaries. Both were born on Feb. 12, 1809 - Darwin into a comfortable family in Shropshire, England; Lincoln into humble circumstances on the American frontier.
They also came to international attention at virtually the same moment. Darwin published his epochal book, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. The following year, Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States. Also in 1860, Harvard botanist Asa Gray wrote the first review of Darwin's book to appear in this country.
Lincoln and Darwin initiated twin revolutions. One brought the Civil War and the emancipation of roughly four million slaves; the other, a new explanation of the natural world. Lincoln's war transformed the social, political and racial landscape in ways that continue to play out. Darwin transformed our understanding of biology, paving the way for countless advances in science, especially medicine.
With his powerful scientific explanation of the origins of species, Darwin dispensed with the pseudoscientific assertions of African American inferiority. In this way, Darwin provided the scientific legitimacy for Lincoln's political and moral actions.
The two revolutions shared a commitment to one proposition: that all human beings are fundamentally equal. In this sense, both Lincoln and Darwin deserve credit for emancipating us from the political and intellectual rationales for slavery.
For Lincoln, this was a political principle and a moral imperative. He was deeply ambivalent about the institution of slavery. As the war began, he believed that saving the Union, not abolishing slavery, was the cause worth fighting for. But as the war ground gruesomely on, he began to see that ending slavery was the only way to save the Union without making a mockery of the nation's founding ideals.
This is what Lincoln meant when he promised, in the 1863 Gettysburg Address, that the war would bring "a new birth of freedom." He was even more emphatic about it in his second inaugural address, in 1865. Slavery could not be permitted to exist in a nation founded on the belief that we are all created equal.
Darwin, for his part, was a deeply committed abolitionist from a family of deeply committed abolitionists. Exposed to slavery during his travels in South America, Darwin wrote, "It makes one's blood boil." He called abolishing slavery his "sacred cause." In some of his first notes about evolution, he railed against the idea that slaves were somehow less than human.
For Darwin, our shared humanity was a simple biological fact. Whatever variations exist among the human species - what we call races - are simply the natural variations that occur within all species. Like it or not, in a Darwinian world we are all members of one human family. This truth lay at the center of Darwin's science and his abolitionism.
That understanding of human equality - arrived at from different directions and for different reasons - helps explain the opposition to the revolutions unleashed by Lincoln and Darwin. It's also why many Americans - virtually alone in the developed world - continue to deny Darwinian science.
Many white Southerners never accepted Lincoln's basic proposition about the political equality of black Americans. In the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction, they set up the brutal structures and rituals of segregation. All of the elaborate laws, customs and violence of the segregated South served to deny the basic truth that all Americans are created equal. Most Northerners, meanwhile, didn't care much about the "Southern problem."
No wonder, then, that many Americans simply rejected Darwin's insights out of hand. Slavery and segregation rested on the assumption that black Americans were not fully human. Darwinian science put the lie to all that.
Lincoln insisted on equality as a political fact. Darwin demonstrated it as a biological fact. In their shared commitment to human equality, each in his own realm, these two Great Emancipators helped us break free from the shackles of the past.