The Company He Kept: John Muir’s Slave-Owning Soul Friend, Part 2
By the time Joseph C. LeConte became friends with Muir, he no longer owned slaves. But that background shaped his thinking, and his "science" of race, throughout his life.
Part 1 told how John Muir and Joseph C. LeConte became lifelong friends on a starlit night alongside Lake Tenaya, and it described LeConte’s childhood and adolescence growing up on an anterbellum South Carolina plantation with 200 slaves. A physician by training, LeConte left medicine to study biology at Harvard, absorb his mentor’s “scientific” racism, and prepare to become a university professor. Here LeConte’s story resumes.
Slavery was heating up as a polarizing political issue when LeConte left Harvard in 1851 and began teaching at South Carolina College, now the University of South Carolina, in Columbia. At first wary of secession, LeConte signed on to the Confederate cause soon after the April 1861 shelling of Fort Sumter. He had decided that the war was “an honest difference of opinion as to the nature of our government”; slavery, he was saying, was beside the point. LeConte served the Confederacy as the chemist for a medicine-manufacturing operation and later in an explosives factory.
As the tide of war turned against the South and Sherman’s Union army bore down, LeConte rescued his relations from their plantation on the Georgia coast and, in a harrowing journey through an embattled land, delivered them to the temporary safety of Columbia. When Sherman’s invading soldiers sacked and burned much of the city, LeConte and his family hid out, seeking a new refuge every day:
For it was our policy never to use the same place twice, as we might be observed and betrayed by some prowling negro [sic].
As bad as the war was, Union occupation after Appomattox proved worse. In LeConte’s eyes, Reconstruction came down to “the intolerable insolence of the negroes [sic] suddenly set free with all their passions not only uncontrolled but often even encouraged” by Union agents. LeConte himself was relieved to be free of the burden of managing slaves on the 2,000 acres of land he still owned. Still, the utter unreliability and total laziness of free Blacks made profitable farming impossible, he argued:
They have no ambition to improve, and live almost like animals. I bore the iniquities of the government as long as I could, but when the negro [sic] legislature began to talk about what they were going to do to the University, I thought it time to quit
Joseph and his physicist brother John headed for the spanking new University of California, then but a single campus, first in Oakland and later in Berkeley. In 1868 the university came off the drawing board with a Morrill Act grant of 150,000-plus acres of what had been Indigenous land that the university turned into an endowment of more than $740,000. Eager to tie their futures to this flush academic enterprise, the LeConte brothers moved to the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay and took up professorships. The LeContes were in only their second academic year when Joseph enlisted nine students for an expedition to explore the Sierra Nevada’s geology and biology firsthand. On that trip he and Muir shared Tenaya Lake in the moonlight and began their lifelong friendship.
At first glance, the two appeared an unlikely pair. LeConte had been born to an upper crust of land, wealth, and slave-supported gentility, while Muir came from people who accumulated little from their own hard labor. LeConte was highly educated and an accomplished academic, while college-dropout Muir was largely self-taught. Yet, as that hour of moonlit awe along Tenaya Lake showed, they shared intellectual and spiritual ground.
Both had experienced mystical conversions that convinced them of the divinity at the cosmos’s core. Both saw Darwin’s evolution as cogent scientific theory, but they insisted that God’s intelligent design, not the clawed and toothed fight for fitness, drove the creation of species, humankind among them. This agreement on the basics gave them a great deal to discuss when they got together to talk, as they did often. Muir spent many evenings with the LeConte brothers and their families in the “queer old house in Oakland” they shared. The three kicked around everything from Muir’s explorations of the Yosemite backcountry to the arcana of physics. Almost certainly those many hours of conversation turned now and again to race, for the issue was top of mind for Joseph LeConte.
Besides his many scientific papers, LeConte wrote about racial issues for the general public. Always framing his work in ostensibly scientific rhetoric, he unfurled an argument for why Euro-Americans were on top and Blacks and Native Americans on the bottom. No burning crosses and white hoods for LeConte; it all turned on science and data. Or so he assured his readers.
Charles Darwin, LeConte implied, had it wrong. Ever since the publication of On the Origin of Species, conservative Christians saw evolution by natural selection as little more than competitive chaos and an argument against the existence of God. LeConte took the opposite tack. Evolution proved there was a God, he held, and the creation of species demonstrated the deity’s ongoing pursuit of perfection:
The law of gravitation is naught else than the mode of operation of the divine energy in sustaining the cosmos — the divine method of sustentation; the law of evolution naught else than the mode of operation of the same divine energy in originating and developing the cosmos — the divine method of creation.
Race evidenced inherited differences among human groups that played a role in God’s long-range plan:
On account of the extreme slowness of the process, the divine patience of nature, varieties pass into races, races into species, species into genera. Primary races correspond to races or permanent varieties, and race-aversion is an evidence that the tendency to mix is much weakened though not destroyed. They are commencing species, though not true species — they interbreed, but not freely.
Interbreeding countered evolution’s upward movement. Indeed, mixed-race people suffered far more from hereditary diseases than either parent race, LeConte declared:
It seems certain that the mulatto has not the physical health and endurance of either the white or the negro race…. I regard the light-haired blue-eyed Teutonic and the negro as the extreme types, and their mixture as producing the worst effects.
Evolutionary creation, LeConte made clear, achieved its climax in humankind then changed focus. No longer was evolution merely physical; now it entered an advanced, social phase:
But more and more, as civilization advances, this higher and distinctively human factor becomes more and more dominant, until now, in civilized communities, it takes control of evolution. Reason, instead of Nature, now assumes control, though still using the methods and factors of Nature. This free, self-determined evolution of the race, in order to distinguish from the necessary evolution of the organic kingdom, we call progress.
Society became a matter of Divine concern, and leaders who wished to align with the will of God had to shape their societies to the form he intended.
Since the races differed in moral status, and since God guided evolution, the Divine dictated that the superior race rule the inferior. Whenever races came into contact, the outcome depended on their evolutionary status. If the lower race is
… in the early stages of race-evolution, and therefore plastic, docile, imitative, some form of subordination will be the result; if, on the other hand, it be highly specialized and rigid, extermination is unavoidable. The Negro is probably the best type of the former and the American Indian of the latter.
Indeed, Euro-Americans owed it to Blacks and Indigenous people to rule them:
The most sacred of all rights, because the right most apt to be violated, is the right of the weak and the ignorant to the control and guidance of the strong and wise.
With that, LeConte blessed the Jim Crow oppression of the post-Reconstruction South and California’s effort to obliterate its Indigenous peoples — a campaign just beginning to wind down when he arrived in the state — as both scientifically inevitable and conforming to God’s will.
In his own time LeConte enjoyed a stellar reputation. His Principles of Geology became a widely used textbook, and his status as scientist and scholar lifted him to the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. LeConte’s presence on the faculty attracted other ambitious scholars to the young, brash, and well-funded University of California. Still “his modesty and simplicity survived, unscathed, the applause and laudations bestowed upon him,” said an academic contemporary.
Muir joined in that praise: “As a teacher he stood alone on this side of the continent, and his influence no man can measure. He carried his students in his heart, and was the idol of the University.”
More important, Muir considered LeConte a man of admirable gentleness:
Anything like a quarrel or hot controversy he instinctively avoided, went serenely on his way, steeping everything in philosophy, overcoming evil with good. His friends were all who knew him, and he had besides the respect of the whole community, hopefully showing that however bad the world may be, it is good enough to recognize a good man,
To Muir, as to all LeConte’s colleagues, family, and friends, the racism he advocated counted for nothing against him. They, too, went along with the idea that the oppressed had only themselves to blame for the American system of racial oppression.
The once-enslaved and ever-insightful Frederick Douglass knew this white-supremacist playbook for what it was:
Pride and selfishness, combined with mental power, never want for a theory to justify them — and when men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.
Next up: The Company He Kept: The Aristocrat Scientist Who Named T. rex and Liked Nordics Best of All.
Thinking gifts? Think books.
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