Digital Evolution and Genocide (part 3)

What is the philosophy behind the history of eugenics?

The basic philosophy of eugenics is: all men are not created equal. This philosophy was basic to the slave trade in which the many-branched Galton family was immersed.

Galton's family sold guns to the slave trade; these guns were exchanged for slaves. Calculations are complex but it quite conservative to say that the family was in the trade from 1725 to 1804 selling 600 guns a month at the rate of three per slave thus participating in 189,000 separate acts of enslavement.

The family also had shares in slave ships - The Unity in 1731 and 1732; the Seaflower in 1733 and 1734, the Palmtree in 1743, the King of Sardinia in 1746 and 1748, the Anson in 1748, the Priscilla in 1748 and 1750, the Emperor in 1752, the Cape Coast in 1757, the Kingston in 1759, the Africa in 1774, disembarking a total of 4504 slaves. I say disembarking, because 825 people died on the way.

The family owned slaves. Joseph Farmer owned slaves as a shareholder in the Principio Company from 1720 to 1725. This Maryland iron making company owned slaves. The Dickinson family owned hundreds of slaves on three Jamaica plantations from 1700 to 1810. William Archibald Douglas owned two slaves when he died in 1799.

The family made up cargoes for slave ships. In 1746 they brought a case in Chancery to recover L54,000 advanced in cargoes for slave ships for which they had not been paid. This is no less than the value of 732 slaves.

This information is based on David Eltis, The Transatlantic Slave Trade, the archives of the Galton family at A2A and the pedigree of the Galton family.

Francis Galton was born in 1822 while the slave trade ended in England in 1805. He is not responsible for what his ancestors did but the evidence is that he accepted their attitude as well as their money.

In 1857 he wrote to the Times:
"Sir, I do not join in the belief that the African is our equal in brain or in herat; I do not think the average negro cares for his liberty as much as an Englishman ... and I believe that if we can in any fair way possess ourselves of his services we have an equal right to utilize them to our best advantage [as the state has to conscript soldiers or parents to apprentice children] ... if we can by any legitimite or even quasi-legitimite means possess ourselves of a right to their services ... and if we can insure that our mastership will elevate them and not degrade them, by all means work them well ...[a section of the letter describes how the slave trade disrupts society]... as to how they are to be got ... by watching the turn of events and taking advantage of great national suffering such as the Caffirs are now laboring under, we may succeeed in deporting vast numbers of Africans to colonies where they will do us good service...

In 1879 he wrote another letter to the Times which the Times headed as "Africa for the Chinese.

"Sir .. My proposal is to make the encouragement of the Chinese settlements at one or more suitable places on the East Coast of Africa a part of our national policy, ... they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race. I should expect the large part of the African seaboard, now sparsely occupied by lazy, palavering savages living under the nominal sovereignty of the Zanzibar, or Portugal, might in a few years be tenanted by industrious, order loving Chinese, ... there are notorious instances of negroes possessing high intelligence and culture, some of whom acquire large fortunes in commerce, and others become considerable men in other walks of life. The truth appears to be that individuals of the mental caliber I have just described are much more exceptional in the negro than in the Anglo-Saxon race, and that average negroes possess too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and support.... The history of the world tells a tale of the continual displacement of populations, each by a worthier successor, and humanity gains thereby. ... The gain would be immense to the whole civilized world if [in Africa, the Chinese] were to out-breed and finally displace the negro, as completely as the latter has displaced the aborigines of the West Indies.
These letters are on the web in facsimile at Galton. org.

Francis Galton absorbed his family's justification for the slave trade and it was as important to him as it was to them. They used it to defend their commercial practices; he used it as basis for a proposed philsophy of social life. But Galton was not a man who would have left a mark on the world. He was a bit of a blockhead as I think comes through even in the abbreviated letters above. Unfortunately for the world, Galton's cousin, Charles Darwin, was "converted" to his philosophy by reading Hereditary Genius in 1870. Darwin used Galton's ideas in the The Descent of Man, his book on the relationship between man and evolution. He used those ideas, crucially, to describe the effects of natural selection in advanced societies.
(to be continued)