But, Gould explains, a German scientist building on Linnaeus' work, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), who first gave the name "Caucasian" to what Linnaeus had called the Europaeus group. Blumenbach assumed that people from the Caucaian mountain area, i.e., Georgia, represented the original and ideal form of Homo sapiens, and that other "races" were part of, as Gould says, "a successive departure from the Caucasian ideal."
Ironically, Blumenbach based this notion on his own subjective perception of Georgians as being a physical ideal of human beauty. He did not believe that this made other races inferior intellectually or physically (except for aesthetically). Ironically, "Blumenbach strongly upheld the unity of the human species against an alternative view, then growing in popularity (and surely more conducive to conventional forms of racism), that each major race had been separately created."
Blumenbach, writing 80 years before Darwin, believed that Homo sapiens had been created in a single region and had then spread over the globe. Our racial diversity, he then argued, arose as a result of this spread to other climates and topographies, and to our adoption of different modes of life in these various regions. Following the terminology of his time. Blumenbach referred to these changes as "degenerations" - not intending the modern sense of deterioration, but the literal meaning of departure from an initial form of humanity at the creation (de means "from," and genus refers to our original stock).
All this may seem far removed from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But it provides a background of how the concept of race came to be viewed in 19th century slaveholding America.
Early defenders of North American slavery argued that it was a temporary institution. They justified it as bringing civilization to a "backward" people, the Africans. This justification was cynical enough, and was employed to justify a brutal system of traffic in human property and exploitation of that property.
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