A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic.

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. By Bruce Dain. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 321. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-00946-0.)

Bruce Dain's A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic is mistitled; the book's coverage actually moves beyond 1820. Yet this is a minor criticism of a welcome addition to an impressive list of books dealing with race in the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods of American history. Monographs by Kirsten Fischer, Joanne Pope Melish, Patrick Rael, and John Wood Sweet have complicated our understanding of the origins of what Gunnar Myrdal called the "American dilemma." Writing about this period and having something new to say is not easy, particularly given the earlier work of scholars such as George M. Fredrickson and Winthrop D. Jordan. Following the lead of all these scholars, however, Dain does say something fresh. Like Fredrickson and Jordan, Dain sees the developing American concern about race as the product of a trans-Atlantic dialogue that included British, French, German, and white American intellectuals. Dain complicates this picture by looking at a number of black thinkers who wrote and thought about race. As Dain notes in his preface, "This book is an integrated intellectual history of the emergence in the United States, from the American Revolution to the Civil War, of these first major rationalizations of race.... I argue that ideas on race did not fall into neat, self-contained, racially determined categories" (p. vii).

Dain accomplishes this goal by looking at a wide range of racial theorists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Readers will be familiar with the thought of Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Samuel G. Morton, and Josiah Nott. But what about the less-well-known Alexander Everett, who argued that blacks had a glorious history that exceeded that of the Roman Empire and the modern history of Europe? According to Everett, Africans "had 'enjoyed a decided predominance throughout the whole ancient western world'" (p. 124). Everett's work, along with that of black thinkers like David Walker and the editors of Freedom's Journal, gave antebellum American blacks a past that they could be proud of. In discussing these boosters of blackness, Dain is careful to show that their ideas shifted through time. This can be seen most clearly in the changing racial politics of Freedom's Journal, which began by criticizing colonization and ended up endorsing the plan before it went out of print. Equally impressive is Dain's discussion of the shifting place of Haiti in antebellum black thought. Haiti, as Dain shows, became an option in the 1820s for black emigrationists who saw emigration to the island as an answer to black economic deprivation in the United States. This project did not succeed for a variety of reasons. American blacks found Haiti's color caste, language, religious, and other differences daunting. Finally, the book shows that black thinkers like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith developed interesting racial formulations to critique the dominant racial thought of their day. Dain counterposes the ideas of these black intellectuals against those of the American School of Ethnology, and the end result is an intellectual least.

University of California, Davis 

CLARENCE E. WALKER