Evolved Emancipation

April 14, 1832. “I may mention one very trifling anecdote, which at the time struck me more forcibly than any story of cruelty. I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavoring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal. “

This is not a quote from Abraham Lincoln or from an observer in America’s antebellum South. It is from Charles Darwin. He was in Brazil when he had this experience. The quote is only one of many expressing Darwin’s life-long outrage at slavery. When I came across it as I was reading The Voyage of the Beagle, it struck me by its personal and vulnerable perspective.

Upon reading it, maybe I should not have been surprised to learn that he and Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, were born on the same day 200 years ago. However, beyond shared views on slavery (and their preference to go unshaven), the similarities between Lincoln and Darwin would seem to be few. Lincoln was melancholy, ambitious, focused and fiercely protective of the American experiment in democracy. Darwin was curious, observant, adventuresome and often euphoric in his love of nature and its wonders; he had circled the globe before he was thirty. And, yet, they each had an incalculable influence on our world and I wonder what they would think of it today.

I often imagine bringing some historical figure forward in time to experience our world with all of its technology. In the case of Lincoln and Darwin I think I would forego bedazzling them with technology and would choose to bring them instead to Yosemite Park, a place I hold in reverence. Standing in grassy meadows surrounded by granite domes that were cut by water and glaciers over millions of years, I think Darwin would be enraptured by the immensity of time and its effects while Lincoln would see a metaphor of the strength of the Union that stretched from where he stood in California to the eastern seaboard. Both would see a country free of the degradation of slavery but I don’t imagine either would be satisfied with the status quo. They would both expect us to evolve.