422 THREE CENTURIES' PERSPECTIVES
But the strongest argument for admiring Darwin lies not in the
relatively beneficent character of his belief, but in his chosen form
of action upon these convictions. We cannot use a modern political
classification as termini of an old spectrum. The egalitarian end did
not exist for the policymakers of Darwin's day. All were racists by
modern standards. On that spectrum, those we now judge most
harshly urged that inferiority be used as an excuse for dispossession
and slavery, while those we most admire in retrospect urged a moral
principle of equal rights and nonexploitation, whatever the biologi-
cal status of people.
Darwin held this second position along with the two Americans
best regarded by later history: Thomas Jefferson and Darwin's soul-
mate (for they shared the same birthdate) Abraham Lincoln. Jeffer-
son, though expressing himself tentatively, wrote: "I advance it,
therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks... are inferior to the
whites in the endowment both of body and of mind." But he wished
no policy of forced social inequality to flow from this suspicion:
"Whatever be their degree of talents, it is no measure of their
rights." As for Lincoln, many sources have collected his chilling (and
frequent) statements about black inferiority. Yet he is national hero
numero uno for his separation of biological assessment from judg-
ments about moral issues and social policies.
Darwin, too, was a fervent and active abolitionist. Some of the
most moving passages ever written against the slave trade occur in
the last chapter of the Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin's ship, after calling
at Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa (where FitzRoy
and Darwin submitted their bit of juvenilia to a local paper), stopped
for a last visit in Brazil, before setting a straight course to England.
Darwin wrote:
On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God I shall
never again visit a slave-country.... Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to
an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have
stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was
reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest
animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a
horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed
me a glass of water not quite clean. ... I was present when a kind-hearted
man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little
children of a large number of families who had long lived together.