Abstract: Historians of eugenics typically overlook the role of the Civil War in shaping eugenic ideas about race. Meanwhile, historians of the Civil War era have tended to focus on how emancipation and the Union victory advanced ideals of racial egalitarianism, albeit incompletely, rather than the factors that led to the entrenchment of race science. Few scholars from either of these disciplines have considered how the entrenched anti-Black sentiments of the Civil War era fueled the future of eugenic race science. To bring these disciplines in conversation with each other, this essay calls for forging a new genealogy of eugenics—one that situates the history of race science within the anti-Black ideologies that constituted biological science in the slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. Under this approach, eugenics emerges as a part of a larger process of scientific race-making that had been in motion for centuries, rather than a reactionary science. Within this essay I offer brief critical assessments of eugenics’ more traditional historiography and then a brief overview of more recent scholarship on eugenics that complicate its origins stories and invite further research on the ways the Civil War left its mark on twentieth-century race science.
Rana A. Hogarth (Wed,) studied this question.