Agassiz commissioned slave daguerreotypes in 1850 to prove whites were a separate superior species.

Evidence

The next paragraph sickened me: “The daguerreotypes, which were taken for Agassiz in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850, had two purposes, one nominally scientific, the other frankly political. They were designed to analyze the physical differences between European whites and African blacks, but at the same time they were meant to prove the superiority of the white race. Agassiz hoped to use the photographs as evidence to prove his theory of ‘separate creation,’ the idea that the various races of mankind were in fact separate species.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 152

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in property law as the afterlife of slavery - this is the origin of the images that later become contested property.
• QUESTION: Agassiz’s ‘separate creation’ theory - worth verifying how figures like Morton’s skull collections fed Agassiz’s polygenism directly.

Related

• The 1850 daguerreotypes were produced to prove white racial superiority. (similarity 0.94)
• Agassiz commissioned the photos of enslaved people as evidence of racial inferiority (similarity 0.88)
• Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes of seven enslaved people in 1850 (similarity 0.86)
• The 1850 slave daguerreotypes were photography’s first racial-profiling documents (similarity 0.86)
• Agassiz commissioned the Renty and Delia daguerreotypes in 1850 to support polygenism (similarity 0.85)
• Agassiz commissioned Zealy’s nude photographs of enslaved people for Harvard. (similarity 0.83)
• Agassiz cataloged enslaved people like zoological specimens for polygenesis research (similarity 0.83)
• Agassiz’s polygenist views came from anatomists like Samuel Morton using skull measurements. (similarity 0.83)
• Polygenesis held that each race was created separately as a distinct species (similarity 0.82)
• Agassiz’s polygenist theory grew from Morton’s skull-based racial science. (similarity 0.82)
• Providing enslaved people to Agassiz promoted slavery rather than proving racial inferiority. (similarity 0.81)
• Supplying enslaved people to Agassiz promoted slavery, not racial theory. (similarity 0.81)
• Polygenesis denied common human ancestry and posited distinct unequal races (similarity 0.81)
• Agassiz’s daguerreotypes illustrated polygenesis, the separate-creation theory (similarity 0.81)
• Agassiz cataloged enslaved people’s photos the same way he cataloged animal species (similarity 0.81)