LeConte forum

Joseph LeConte was a geologist, a naturalist, and a Darwinist. He was also energetically, unabashedly racist. So the Department of History is holding a forum for its students and faculty to discuss what we should do about his portrait — which until recently faced the main entrance of LeConte Hall.

LeConte Hall is named after Joseph LeConte, a man emblematic of his times in his support for science, evolution, and Darwin — as well as his unmitigated support for slavery, segregation, and racism.

LeConte was born in 1823. He grew up on a plantation in Savannah, and his upbringing would influence his later nostalgia for the “glory days” of the antebellum South. LeConte attended the University of Georgia (and was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society) and completed his degree in 1841. He later attended Harvard and studied under Louis Agassiz, a natural historian and geologist whose commitment to Darwinism and scientific justification of racism would influence LeConte’s later views. During the Civil War, LeConte championed the cause of the Confederacy and used his scientific knowledge to assist armament production in the South.

After the war, like many southerners who yearned for the days of slavery and mythologized the pre-1865 era, LeConte left the South entirely. He moved to California, where he continued to research in the field of geology and called for more attempts to preserve nature. He adopted a rigorous style of life which fitted his Darwinian outlook, and he died in 1901 before undertaking a hike.

LeConte is a remarkable figure for embracing evolution and the arguments put forward by Darwin and Spencer, in an age where such beliefs could lead to dismissal from a university chair. However, it is important to remember that progressivism, evolution, and science went hand in hand with racism in the nineteenth century. LeConte was at heart a Confederate who longed for the days of his youth, before slavery was ended — a time before “chaos ensued,” as he put it.

To further these aims, he coated his racism in the language of science. He wrote a work entitled The Race Problem in the South that was aimed at justifying the inferiority of African-Americans and calling for their disenfranchisement. In that text, LeConte used scientific arguments to underscore his points. In his eyes, slavery was a natural condition representing the “inequality of the races,” and as such, African-Americans were undeserving of rights and should have them confiscated, or should be intimidated from exercising them. At one point he remarks in this work that “the sudden enfranchisement of the negro was the greatest political crime ever committed.” As part of his attacks on African Americans he called for anti-miscegenation laws and poll tests to exclude them from the electorate.

This and other works that LeConte had written were well received by the legislature of Georgia, and they were used to support laws excluding African-Americans from society and their rights. LeConte would also promote the works of figures like Arthur de Gobineau who were unequivocal in their belief in the fundamental inequality of African-Americans, and the corollary that they deserved unequal rights.

LeConte is in many ways an interesting and a reprehensible figure, and until recently, a large portrait of him could be seen on the main floor of LeConte Hall. What to make of his legacy still remains a question.

Thanks to Tayjas Rajaraman for researching and writing the bulk of this text, on the basis of materials in the university archives.