Charles Darwin and the American Civil War

Description

Join us on Sunday, January 27^th at 2 pm for a discussion of Darwin and the Civil War, led by Jan Wojcik, at the next North Country Civil War Round Table at the SLCHA in Canton. Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. American abolitionists and biologists, Frederick Douglass, and many Politicians in the Northern States immediately found it to provide the first scientific rationale for what had previously been a moral and religious argument: that all human beings had the same ancestry; that differences in body and facial types resulted only from different environments. Within a short time, Southern editorials and reviews condemned Darwin for denying their fundamental belief, based on hundreds of years of observations, that black slaves were an inferior species to Whites. 
 
Clips from the movie Gettysburg featuring conversations among soldiers on both sides of the Civil War on the night before the second day of Battle (2 July 1864) reflect this argument, and introduce a discussion of the merits of each reading of Darwin's seminal book. Speaker Jan Wojcik is a member of the Round Table and President of the Board of Trustees of the Potsdam Public Museum. He has presented programs on the Battles of Spotsylvania and Appomattox, women in the Civil War, and various other topics for the Civil War Round Table.