Politics & Power Quote by Samuel George Morton

Morton’s sentence wears the lab coat of neutrality while smuggling in a hierarchy. By framing “moral and intellectual character” as a measurable trait and attaching it to “Africans” as a category, he converts culture, circumstance, and power into biology. The seemingly modest claim - “widely different in different nations” - does double work: it nods to variation (which sounds empirical, even fair-minded) while keeping the larger racial premise intact, as if African peoples are specimens in a comparative cabinet rather than political communities shaped by trade, warfare, and colonization.

The intent sits squarely in the early 19th-century project of racial science, where classification was never just about knowledge; it was about governance. Morton is best known for craniometry, the skull-measuring enterprise later marshaled to argue fixed racial differences. In that milieu, “character” is a slippery bridge term: part ethics, part intelligence, conveniently vague enough to absorb any stereotype, then return it as “data.” It’s also a pre-emptive move against abolitionist arguments. If differences are “widely” distributed among African “nations,” the implication is that uplift is inconsistent, that equality is not a political right but a conditional outcome of innate endowment.

Context sharpens the cynicism. This was the age when the U.S. was expanding, slavery was entrenched, and scientific institutions were professionalizing. Morton’s phrasing participates in that institutional alchemy: turning racial prejudice into a taxonomy, then using taxonomy to launder prejudice back into policy. The line’s power is its calmness. It doesn’t rant; it catalogs. That’s exactly how bad ideas gain the authority to outlive their evidence.