John H. Van Evrie
John H. Van Evrie was an 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. 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". 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, 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", 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 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, that a black person's "strongest affection" was "love for master", and that they possessed a "sudden, capricious, superficial and temporary" sex drive. 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?" He also specifically argued that black women were naturally promiscuous and unscrupulous with regard to sex and relationships, and commented on black people's familial relations. 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. "he existence of an inferior race" in the United States, he wrote, 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.