It is the argument of Darwin’s Sacred Cause that the issue of slavery and the issue of race, reverberating through Darwin’s consciousness from his very earliest years, played an under-appreciated role in forming his views on evolution. The reason this has been missed is that Darwin chose (very late on) to leave human beings out of The Origin of Species altogether, hoping perhaps to win the battle first on less controversial ground. Darwin was brought up by Wedgwood women, passionate in their rage at slavery; he was educated in Edinburgh at a time when phrenology was all the rage and was starting to transmute into racial ethnography; he was in Brazil when it was still a slave state and he never forgot the cries of a beaten slave; he was in Argentina when General Rosas was completing a genocide of natives; he was writing his theory when America and much of the world was in thrall to Louis Aggasiz and his convenient theory that species (including races of mankind) had been created in separate places. Even Darwin’s enthusiastic diversion into pigeon fancying was all about proving to the ‘pluralist’ consensus that races could be bred from a common ancestor.

While others in his circle, such as Robert Fitzroy, Charles Lyell and Thomas Carlyle, would apologise for slavery, Darwin never compromised in his hatred of the institution. He is remarkable for a 19th-century gentleman in his utter lack of prejudice. At the age of 17 he paid a freed Guyana slave in Edinburgh, John Edmonstone, to teach him taxidermy. ‘I used to sit with him often, for he was a very pleasant, intelligent man.’

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP