Lincoln's Autochthon

Lincoln's Autochthons

1863

The Civil War is generated by the cultural contradiction of slavery and the "American creed" presented in the Declaration of Independence. Before the war it is assumed that all states are united by the same political vision for colonizing North America. The assumption is wrong. The South's vision is not based in the Declaration; the North's more-or-less is.

To determine the future governance of 'westward ho' colonialism—if slavery will be legal on the "frontier"—the war is waged. It gives the USA's Blood and Soil myth another fundamental plotline.

To the antagonism of colonizer and native is added the antagonism of North and South. Other antagonisms came to the fore, complicating the Blood and Soil narrative: liberal versus conservative, rich versus poor, whites versus all others, urban versus rural. These plotlines intersect and include more characters and voices; Whitman's Song of Myself (composed from 1855-1892) expresses this opening, expansive, kaleidoscoping. > The Blood and Soil myth of the Civil War is told from the perspective of Lincoln who leads the Union Armies. In this telling the North are the Athenians and the South are the Spartans. The South starts the war. Lincoln's autochthons end it.

The Gettysburg Address is the premier articulation of the USA's blood and soil myth. It harkens back to the figure of Athenian autochthon, ie the soil-born democrat, and to the immortalizing fusion of colonizer and earth depicted in Bryant's Thanatopsis. It also contains themes of death and resurrection deriving from Classical Greece and Christianity. In the same way Emerson stands on a battleground/birthplace of American character, marking the conclusion and restarting of history, so does Lincoln envision Gettysburg and the Union soldiers who fought there.

Dedicating "a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live," he summons the national religion of Nature's God. Recalling the plant metaphor of Crevecoeur and Christian rite of Communion, he says Union soldiers "have consecrated" the ground with their bodies, and from that seeding "a new birth of freedom" emerges, so "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth". > The Address lives on. The "Athenian" North won and wrote the history, which gets repeated every time the USA takes (control over) land outside of its borders, claiming it is spreading Jeffersonian democracy. The North never stopped fighting the Civil War because the natural rights of freedom and equality are universal, and—by some form of logic—that means every nation should be democratic.

5

Queen Victoria's Autochthon: Charles Darwin of HMS Beagle

1870

Darwin's publishes The Descent of Man, which argues that "man is descended from some less highly organised form”. His earlier publication, On the Origin of the Species (1859), stimulated the beginning of what is now called Biology, but largely steered clear of placing humanity into this frame of reference; the Descent's main subject is that humans are biological, subject to the law of evolution by natural selection like all other beings. Evolutionary biology presumes humans are autochthonous and genetically related to non-human beings. In these ways, it evokes the construct of the Platonic autochthon.

Darwin did not intend to advance a democratic ethos through his biological autochthon construct. After he concludes that "man is descended from some less highly organized form", he assures his audience that they are not animalistic. He compares them to the indigenous peoples of southernmost South America, who he travelled on the Beagle, and experienced cultural-shock, with:

"The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind - such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled , their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe ....

I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs - as from a savage".

In these words we spy the outlines of the Victorian autochthon. Darwin imagines history as a serial process of improvement, of "progress", where "highly organized forms" evolve out of lower ones, and humans evolve from savage to civilized character. Over time, through competition, a hierarchy of creatures is developed. The Fuegians are a lower form of human being than the English, according to Darwin. When he places them on a lower level than monkeys and baboons, he de-humanizes them.

Darwin imagines the past is savage and his/the present is civilized. The future will be more, not less civilized. This perspective is colonialist. It is "liberal". It is "progressivist". It is imperialist.

The lands the English colonize globally are mostly unindustrialized and, therefore, look like "the past". The people who inhabit those uncolonized lands are, by Darwin's reckoning, "lower forms" of himself; they are artless, naked, primitive, savage. Darwin's readers—Victorian liberals—encourage and congratulate imperial efforts to civilize them. Civilizing the world, Kipling later trumpets, is the white man's burden. > The character of Queen Victoria's autochthon is, in Darwin's telling, biologically based. It is grown not out of a particular piece of ground, but instead from "nature" itself: something that includes all land, everywhere.

Like Whitman's and Emerson's, this autochthon inhabits anywhere, everywhere, this place, that place, all places. Unlike theirs, it is placed in an existential hierarchy constructed by "natural laws" that are enforced by its knowers (Western universities, scientists, politicians, bankers, justices, industrialists, military personnel) and used to regulate the lives of the "lower", "less evolved" mass populations.

Race- and eugenic- science emerge from the Descent, because Darwin suggests that the apotheosis of evolution is white and male: himself. His book is an autobiography.

His suggestion he and his are the most evolved humans is very popular in the West. Scientists find funding and support to make it a "science". Since evolutionary biology provides "proof" that white men should rule the earth, and the laws of nature are the same as the laws of the God, it is immoral not to do so.

1883 Inspired by the Descent, Darwin's half-cousin Francis Galton invents the term and "science" of eugenics, which provides the epistemological basis for social Darwinism and scientific racism. 1912

The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations is founded.

"In 1912, Leonard Darwin presided over an International Eugenics Congress at the University of London which was sponsored by the Eugenics Education Society (now the Galton Institute) in Britain. Over 800 attendees and an equal number of visitors gathered each day of the Congress to discuss the political, social and cultural context of eugenics and its practical applications. By its end, the Congress had established a Permanent International Eugenics Committee, of which Darwin was named president."