1850 SOUTHERN RACIAL SCIENCE. Lone South Carolina Naturalist Argues for Shared Humanity of Africans.

This is a very scarce and complex work on the unity of the human race, written with a direct bearing on the issue of slavery from the heart of the slave trade: Charleston, South Carolina.

John Bachman (1790–1874) was a prominent Charleston Lutheran minister and an influential naturalist. In this work, he employs scientific, zoological, and theological evidence to argue that all human races belong to a single species (monogenism). This directly opposed the polygenist views of Louis Agassiz and others who claimed separate origins for different races. Bachman’s stance countered Southern rationalizations that categorized Black people as "beasts" rather than lineal descendants of Adam—specifically targeting the "types of mankind" theory championed by Samuel Morton.

Bachman’s legacy is multifaceted; as a Southern slaveholder, he advocated for the intellectual and spiritual equality of African Americans while simultaneously maintaining racist views regarding their cultural, though not biological, status. Despite these contradictions, his work served as a significant—and nearly singular—scientific defense against racial hierarchies. It influenced the development of American scientific thought on race and, in some respects, early evolutionary theory.

This specific copy belonged to John Ball, a member of the now-infamous Ball family of enslavers. Originally from England, the Balls were prominent rice planters in the Lowcountry near Charleston, operating over 25 plantations between 1698 and 1865. Over five generations, they enslaved nearly 4,000 African Americans, making them one of the largest slave-holding families in the South. The John Ball in question (1802–1895) was the owner of the Hyde Park plantation, which released its enslaved population only at the conclusion of the Civil War.

[Slavery, Genetics, Evolution]. Bachman, John. Professor of Natural History at the College of Charleston. The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science. Charleston, South Carolina. C. Canning. 1850. First Edition. 312pp + Errata. 

A good + copy in rubbed half calf, bold signature of John Ball in sepia ink on the flyleaf, else solid and textually clean with some occasional moderate foxing.