Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children — those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own — being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder!Those words may very well have been spoken by Abraham Lincoln who now lives in our collective memory as the president who staunchly championed the cause of anti-slavery. But, in fact, those words were written by none other than Charles Darwin himself.
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same exact date, the 12th of February 1809 - Lincoln in Hardin County KY and Darwin in Shrewsbury Engand. Had they been alive today, both would have celebrated their 202nd birthday. The coincidence of their birth begged some sort of comparison such as the one made over the years between Lincoln and Kennedy and the circumstances surrounding their life and death. Unfortunately, I have very limited knowledge of both men and could not write authoritatively about them. So, I searched on the web for things that they had in common and what I found was entirely unexpected. Lincoln's aversion to slavery is very much known to everyone. Darwin’s was not, at least to me. When I read some of the words he wrote about the subject I was caught entirely unaware.
Scholars now argue that Darwin’s authoring of the “Origins of the Species” which postulates man’s origins by natural selection was encouraged by his position on slavery. They claim that his desire to unify all humanity and categorize slaves as “... a man and a brother” may have caused him to search for evidence of a common link to disprove that the slaves were, as slave masters believed, subhuman and entirely from another subspecies. His extensive travels brought him in contact with situations that aroused very strong emotions that later developed into an abolitionist's obsession. Consider what he wrote in his journal:
To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernamabuco, I heard the most pitiful moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.Following are more articles about Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.
THE SUNDAY TIMES ARTICLE ON DARWIN
EXCERPTS FROM DARWIN’S JOURNAL
THE LINCOLN FAILURES
LINCOLN - KENNEDY COMPARISON
