Although antebellum physicians were frustrated in getting a scientific grip on the slippery question of racial origins, their postbellum successors suffered no such disability. Just prior to the opening shots at Fort Sumter the work of Charles Darwin appeared, and scarcely had the guns fallen silent at Appomattox before Josiah Nott synthesized much of the new theory with previous work on race done by the American School. Darwin's theory of evolution might create difficulties for fundamentalists for decades to come, but it proved a godsend to racists willing to interpret the Bible a bit more liberally. For Darwin made it possible to bypass the inherently heretical question of a “recent creation” to account for the black man's lack of development and return to the biblical concept of an original creation. All men had been created as one but following that creation peoples had diverged considerably in their respective evolutionary journeys-whites emerging from that journey forged and tempered-a dynamic, intellectually blessed race, while blacks were still stumbling along a trail that had led to near hopeless retardation as a member of the genus Homo, rungs behind on the evolutionary ladder.

The peculiar institution had provided a snug paternal, noncompetitive world for the black in which he thrived. But emancipation had changed all of that. Now the races were thrown together in a competitive situation, and the race least fit was, as Darwin was interpreted, inevitably doomed.