After the Civil War and all blacks were free from slavery, but many whites tried

to argue that it
was better for blacks to be slaves. Whites were raised with the mindset that they were the superior race
and that the blacks were the inferior race, therefore if the blacks were to do anything impressive, they
would doubt it and try to prove that a black did not do it. For example, Phillis Wheatly was considered a
genius because of her writing, but since she was black, people at first “regarded her as a freak, if not a
fraud” (Farrow 180). Race scientists then began to emerge and argued the fact that there was a clear
difference between whites and blacks and that the whites were far superior.

The person who started most of the heat on the topic of the difference between the whites and
blacks was Samuel George Morton, who began to collect skulls from all over America to prove his
theories. He stated that whites were far superior and proved it by measuring the cranial capacity from
each skull and concluded, “Caucasian skulls yielded the biggest average cranial capacity, 87 cubic
inches”, while the “Ethiopians finished at the bottom” with “an average capacity of 78 cubic inches”
(Farrow 185-186). Morton published his findings in a book called Crania Americana that gained major
popularity all over the seas.

Morton later on died from a lung disease, which left Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz to work
together alongside Morton’s unpublished papers to publish a book later known to be Types of Mankind.
Nott along with Morton challenged the biblical words and said that blacks could not have descended
from Adam and Eve and “that God must have intervened at the time of the Flood to reshape mankind”
(Farrow 186). Morton also mentioned in his sequel “that God did make the Garden of Eden – for whites
only” (Farrow 188). Nott went deeper and challenged that “God must have made separate races of men,
just as He had made separate species of animals” (Farrow 187). He not only challenged the bible, but
also brought statistics into account by stating that slaves lived longer than free men did. Another
statistic was that “Northern blacks were 10 times more prone to lunacy or idiocy than Southern Blacks”
and that “the overall rate for slave states was 1 in 1,558” slaves were lunatics or an idiot (Farrow 186-
187).

Dr. Benjamin Rush believed that blacks were sick, which “caused their lips to swell, their noses
to flatten, and their hair to become woolly” (Farrow 183). This sickness was thought to be “a mild strain
of leprosy that turned their skin black” and “made blacks less sensitive to pain – a purported trait slave
holders used to justify beatings” (Farrow 183-184). This sickness was deemed more believable when
Henry Moss declared that he was recovering because his “skin had suddenly started to lighten, and…
hair had started to grow straight” (Farrow 184). Rush took this opportunity and came up with a random
so-called cure to brainwash the whites and said that “the juice of unripe peaches, tight-fitting clothing,
the all-purpose trio of bleeding” was the cure from the leprosy that the blacks suffered from (Farrow
184).

Most of the white scientists truly felt there was a distinct difference between the whites and the
blacks, but I feel like they were biased against the blacks and wanted to do everything they could to
discredit them as an equal to whites. The white scientists created an illusion that they were stuck in that
accepted any arguments that went against the blacks. For example, the scientists tried hard to prove
that the blacks could not be descendants of Adam and Eve and even tried hard to convince others of
that fact too. Some of the evidence used included Morton’s skulls, Nott’s statistics and biblical
challenges, and Rush’s diagnoses of leprosy. These scientists were highly against the blacks and worked
hard to convince themselves and others that the blacks were a separate being from whites and even
considered blacks to be subhuman.