AMERICAN POLYGENY AND CRANIOMETRY IOI- Miscalculations and convenient omissions: All miscalcula-
tions and omissions that I have detected are in Morton's favor. He
rounded the negroid Egyptian average down to 79, rather than up
to 80. He cited averages of 90 for Germans and Anglo-Saxons, but
the correct values are 88 and 89. He excluded a large Chinese skull
and an Eskimo subsample from his final tabulation for mongoloids,
thus depressing their average below the Caucasian value.
Yet through all this juggling, I detect no sign of fraud or con-
scious manipulation. Morton made no attempt to cover his tracks
and I must presume that he was unaware he had left them. He
explained all his procedures and published all his raw data. All I
can discern is an a priori conviction about racial ranking so pow-
erful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines. Yet
Morton was widely hailed as the objectivist of his age, the man who
would rescue American science from the mire of unsupported
speculation.
The American school and slavery
The leading American polygenists differed in their attitude
toward slavery. Most were Northerners, and most favored some
version of Squier's quip: "[I have a] precious poor opinion of nig-
gers ... a still poorer one of slavery" (in Stanton, i960, p. 193).
But the identification of blacks as a separate and unequal spe-
cies had obvious appeal as an argument for slavery. Josiah Nott, a
leading polygenist, encountered particularly receptive audiences in
the South for his "lectures on niggerology" (as he called them).
Morton's Crania Aegyptiaca received a warm welcome in the South
(in Stanton, i960, pp. 52-53). One supporter of slavery wrote that
the South need no longer be "so much frightened" by "voices of
Europe or of Northern America" in defending its "peculiar insti-
tutions." When Morton died, the South's leading medical journal
proclaimed (R. W. Gibbs, Charleston Medical Journal, 1851, quoted
in Stanton, i960, p. 144): "We of the South should consider him as
our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro
his true position as an inferior race."
Nonetheless, the polygenist argument did not occupy a primary
place in the ideology of slavery in mid-nineteenth-century Amer-
ica—and for a good reason. For most Southerners, this excellent
argument entailed too high a price. The polygenists had railed