Curiously, Agassiz made no further mention of the daguerreotypes in his future writings. Later on, when she met Agassiz at a dinner party held by the wife of a fellow Harvard professor, she was smitten. I He tied every point he made to a larger message: he believed that the careful study of animal specimens could reveal God’s plan for the Earth. When he first settled in Cambridge, he decided to store a portion of his precious items in the basement of Harvard Hall and another in a shack by the Charles River. He toured at least four plantations, inspecting the enslaved people present before selecting seven for study. According to Hanken, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement prompted the staff to realize that the Agassiz name might deter students from engaging with the museum. Agassiz ultimately left the museum in a poor state for his son, Alexander, to inherit. Though the majority of the captives were born in African countries, Delia and Drana were born in the United States. Harvard maintains that several of these buildings honor members of Agassiz’s family, rather than Agassiz himself. Agassiz’s collection kept growing and growing. Within the span of four years, he coaxed the Harvard Corporation to grant him an allowance for the care of his collection, obtained $100,000 in support from the state legislature, and charmed individual philanthropists out of over $70,000. During his stay in Philadelphia, he noticed that all the servants at his hotel were Black men. In most early biographies of Agassiz, they went unacknowledged, too. Cary came from one of Boston’s oldest and wealthiest families; she could trace her family’s origins in the area back to the 1600s with the Puritans. Some, notably Delia, have tears in their eyes. Delia was Renty’s daughter. It is hard to understand how Agassiz could have expected that his arguments could be used otherwise. The selection on display was hard to interpret, arguably incoherent. Naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) became a professor at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School in 1847 and remained at the university in Cambridge for the rest of his life. She had first heard of Agassiz from her mother, who was so impressed with his Lowell lectures that she recommended Elizabeth marry a man like him. Professor of zoology and geology at Harvard University. Towards the end of the 1850s, Agassiz got his first taste of scientific pushback. In 1850, after spending several winters in South Carolina, he decided to throw his full weight behind polygenism, defending the theory to the public in the Christian Examiner. The next time the photographs were made public was after 1976, when a staff member at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology discovered them in an unused, dusty storage cabinet. Von Humboldt was a supporter. He demonstrated with starfish and oysters he pulled out of his back pocket and covered whole whiteboards with his notes and drawings. But the report focuses less on the conclusions he drew from the images than on the blasphemy of his beliefs. Agassiz was educated and spent his early career in Western Europe (Irmscher, 2013, p. 41-84). Most museums at the time aimed to highlight the wide diversity of plants and animals found on the planet. Their names were Alfred, Fassena, Jack, Jem, Renty, Delia, and Drana. Like many scientists in his generation, Agassiz was a devout creationist: He believed that the world was fixed exactly as God had created it and thus merited especially careful observation. In his long, prolific scientific career, Agassiz had scaled the Alps to track the movement of glaciers, dredged up deep sea creatures, and canoed up the length of Lake Superior. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute Harvard University, Courtesy of Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. “With Agassiz In the War the Battle Is Ours”. His son, Alexander E. Agassiz, worked as the director of the MCZ until his death in 1910. By 1850, both locations proved insufficient and Agassiz was forced to transfer the collection to a larger building on the grounds of Harvard Stadium. He may have gestured to the daguerreotypes to complicate — but not refute — his previous ideas about the “African type.” At the end of his essay in the Christian Examiner, he wrote: “We generally consider the Africans as one, because they are chiefly black. At Harvard where he was appointed zoology and geology professor, he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859 and served as the first director until he died in 1873. The 19th-century Swiss-born naturalist Louis Agassiz was a revered figure at Harvard University. A religious believer in the power of observation, he hoped the collection of images would identify the unique phrenological and physiognomic features which distinguished the enslaved people as members of a separate species. This lecture series, titled “The Plan of the Creation, Especially in the Animal Kingdom,” was an immediate hit, and the following fall, Agassiz brought it to New York. Agassiz maintained that Black people could not be descendants of Adam and Eve because the Bible only described one act of creation: that of white people. 35-5-10/53037. More than 40 descendants of Louis Agassiz have signed an open letter to Harvard’s president and trustees urging them to relinquish slave images … He had just traveled to Charleston to attend a scientific meeting on the polygenism debate when he received an invitation to examine African-born enslaved people in Columbia. He was hooked. Introduction Jean Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. Agassiz never accomplished his broader goal of overturning evolution — in fact, his focus on comparative anatomy unwittingly made the case for the theory stronger — nor his local one of creating a “synoptic room” as his first exhibit. He became convinced of the validity of the theory of polygenism--that there was a plurality of origins of the human races. In 1808, Congress had banned the further importation of enslaved people to the United States, making it a rare opportunity to observe a “pure” African person. Agassiz not only supported efforts to rank and segregate people of different races, but propagated the unfounded theory that different races were different species altogether. Another answer may lie in Agassiz’s vision of science. Others stare straight ahead, seemingly unemotional or resigned. To help keep their family out of poverty, she even opened a private school for girls in their home which inspired the precursor to Radcliffe College, the Harvard Annex. In 1847, the crowd for a lecture given by the famous Louis R. Agassiz would have been extensive — in Charleston, South Carolina, it was feverish. The following is Scudder's account of one such exercise. Agassiz wanted to make the most of his time at Harvard. “Here we only have to do with the question of the origin of men; let the politicians, let those who feel themselves called upon to regulate society, see what they can do with the results,” he implored. Last spring, the museum published a brief statement rejecting Agassiz’s role in “fostering ideas of racial disparity and inequality” and removed most traces of the scientist from its website, letterhead, and exhibits. In 1846, he received an invitation to deliver a set of 12 paid lectures for the Lowell Institute in Boston on the different orders of animals. “And that was a mistake.”. Introduction Jean Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. Yet it was clear from his provocative scientific claims and poetic analogies that he set out to charm his audience. In addition to publishing a well-received book on the anatomy of Brazilian freshwater fish, he was one of the first scientists to provide compelling evidence for a theory that was highly controversial at the time: the premise of periodic ice ages. Advocates of slavery often pointed to the Bible to argue that as the descendants of Noah’s cursed son, Ham, Black people were inherently inferior to white people. His works on the evolution of the Ice Age were widely heralded as the creation of scientific genius. That winter, when Agassiz delivered his very first lecture in America, he hinted at his belief in polygenism: he suggested that Black people may have descended from different ancestors as white people. Before he relocated to the United States, Agassiz had accepted the scientific consensus of the time, that all men belonged to the same species. He came from a long line of Protestant ministers and was expected to become one himself, but decided to honor God in a different way: by examining His creations. CURWOOD: Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History was founded by the great 19th century naturalist, Louis Agassiz. Once he secured the adequate funding, Agassiz turned his eye to the collection he wished to build. But while Agassiz failed to convince the public of polygenism, his support for the theory had a long-lasting impact on one group of people: the enslaved people he examined to test his hypotheses and their descendants. “If our failing to publicly and prominently depict Louis Agassiz’s scientific racism was making [students] feel that they didn't belong, we didn't realize it,” he explains. Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1869, c1867. Defenders of slavery used polygenism to maintain that the different races were completely and genetically distinct and that slavery was a natural condition for an inferior race. During his life, however, the public generally overlooked Agassiz’s views on race for other aspects of his larger-than-life persona — a persona he actively sought to construct. He implied that he embraced polygenism for its scientific rigor. The University argues that it is only fair to treat his family members as distinct individuals, untainted by their association with him. Naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) became a professor at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School in 1847 and remained at the university in Cambridge for the rest of his life. To Agassiz, the natural world was a window into the mind of God. Hanken says more substantial initiatives like formal statements and educational exhibits will come soon, as staff members return to campus. In 1854, Agassiz began working furiously to raise funds for a museum of comparative zoology. He neither studied the photographs nor published them; he may not have even displayed them after that initial year. He succeeded at mythologizing himself, if only for the time being. By the end of the winter, he built up so much support among the Boston elite that the president of Harvard created a new professorship solely for him. In March of 1850, Agassiz commissioned J.T. Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Swiss biologist, geologist, physician, and a prominent innovator in the study of Earth’s natural history. He studied at the universities of Zürich, Erlangen (Ph.D., 1829), … Transcript. They were contained in small, red velvet-lined leather cases and framed with gold borders, just like most daguerreotypes from that period. In 1850, Harvard professor Louis Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes of an enslaved man named Renty and his daughter Delia, also enslaved. A founding father of the modern American scientific establishment, Agassiz was also a lifelong opponent of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Drana was Jack’s. In April of 1850, Agassiz married a woman he had courted for years: Elizabeth C. Cary. One of the most vocal, a doctor by the name of Josiah C. Nott, penned racist pamphlets like “Types of Mankind” and “Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races.” He wrote to Morton: “With Agassiz in the war the battle is ours.”. Though some historians argue it is difficult to reconcile these two visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle and reverential, the other rigid and bigoted —, they may simply be two sides of the same coin. Photograph from the Archives of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard University He declared that Black people were, in profound ways, anatomically distinct from white people. "This Abominable Traffic" : Physicians on Slavery. Ultimately, polygenists like Agassiz and Nott lost the battle of ideas. But the letter reveals he had another reason to support Morton, one that was less logical, less objective. He was so focused on the philosophical and the divine that he often overlooked the material implications of his research. Due to several staff vacancies as well as the effects of the pandemic, the organization the MCZ typically relies on to develop its programs — the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture — has been especially short-staffed, delaying progress on the MCZ’s potential projects. A portrait of Louis Agassiz, with photographs courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. In his very first year in Boston, Agassiz met someone else who would transform the trajectory of his career: a sickly physician named Samuel G. Morton. We have more than one reason to be inter­ ested in the form of instruction employed by so eminent a scientist as Agassiz. Then they were commanded to strip naked and stand before the camera, likely for long stretches at a time. At the start of his lectures, Agassiz often apologized for his poor English and quipped that natural history was, thankfully, fascinating enough all on its own. Agassiz had managed to make zoology accessible and thrilling to the public. Louis Agassiz, Under a Microscope Though some historians argue it is difficult to reconcile these two visions of Louis Agassiz — one gentle … Descendants of Louis Agassiz, the 19th-century Harvard professor who commissioned photos of Renty, Delia and other U.S. slaves, decry his legacy. Despite today’s controversy regarding several aspects of his legacy, Swiss-born Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) was one of the most eminent scientists of his time. In the haunting images, the enslaved people look directly at the camera as they undress. She regularly joined her husband on scientific expeditions, even donning men’s trousers and boots to explore the terrains with the rest of the crew. Despite this, Cary continuously downplayed her own skills and contributions to science. Instead, the majority of the specimens he collected piled up in boxes at the museum. Her fight with Harvard has brought attention to the school’s additional ties to the controversial scientist, which include numerous on-campus buildings that bear the Agassiz name as well as the origins of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (often called the MCZ), an institution Agassiz founded in 1859. "Permanence of characteristics in different human species" from Louis Agassiz's A journey in Brazil by Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz. He ended up spending the majority of it in Philadelphia, keeping the company of one man: Morton. These are believed to be the earliest known photographs of enslaved peoples to date. In a letter to his mother, Agassiz expressed his astonishment at the vastness of Morton’s collection and at what it represented: an attempt to empirically study the differences between men. He was also a racist who commissioned humiliating photographs of … In the process she gained her own scientific expertise. When he looked at them, he saw a “degraded and degenerate race.” Entrenched in the Western ideals of his home country, he experienced great horror and disgust. He presented racist speculation after racist speculation, saying even that “the brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven month’s infant in the womb of a White.”. Hanken surmises that were Louis Agassiz to see the museum today, he would be “spinning in his grave.” Although Agassiz intended for the museum to disprove Darwin, it has since become one of the most preeminent centers for the study of evolutionary biology. The relationship opened up new possibilities for the both of them.