Race and Slavery

The theoretical view of race that prevailed in revolutionary and early national America was that of the Enlightenment. It emphasized the unity of mankind. All human beings were of one species, descended from Adam and Eve. Races differed because of environment, but all were capable of indefinite improvement. Samuel Stanhope Smith, in An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787), which was the most important work on race of its generation, argued that all the differ ences between the races could be accounted for by environmental factors. Color was a temporary not a permanent phenomenon. Although some European writers were already using the increasing interest in scientific classification to begin the process of separating human beings into superior and inferior races, environmentalism dominated American scientific think ing on race in the first years of the new nation. In 1810, when Samuel Stanhope Smith issued his influential book in enlarged form, he had not modified his environmental views. ¹