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Albert Bushnell Hart, who succeeded Lowell as Harvard’s Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and was a contemporary of many of the University’s prominent eugenicists, illustrates the ideological legacies of race science at Harvard in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even among some of the University’s most progressive professors—of which he was one.

A faculty member in American history beginning in , Hart held the Eaton Professorship from to &#;Go to footnote detail He was a prolific historian whose publications—including textbooks—shaped the teaching of American history at the high school and university level.

He served as an early officer and president of the American Historical Association and was also president of the American Political Science Association, both during the time of the professionalization of academic disciplines in the United States.&#;Go to footnote detail

Hart’s scholarship often focused on issues of race and class. Like many white scholars in this period, he depicted slavery as a generally benign institution that was more problematic in principle than in its execution.

Presenting himself as “a son and grandson of abolitionists,”&#;Go to footnote detail he argued that “How far slavery, as a system, was inhuman and barbarous is difficult to decide.”&#;Go to footnote detail He reasoned that “the evidence is overwhelming that many slaves were as well fed and housed as the poor whites of the neighborhood and were unconscious of serious injustice.”&#;Go to footnote detail

Hart routinely elided or minimized racial violence in his work, in one case noting that “none but an extraordinarily stupid or cruel master would keep his slaves down to a point where they could not do full work.”&#;Go to footnote detail In a history textbook written for use in American secondary schools he explained:

It is not strange that slaves were sometimes cruelly treated.

In those days prisoners and paupers were often ill treated. The object of a master was to make his slaves work and obey, whether they felt like it or not.

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If they refused, the master or overseer had to flog them or let them be idle. Sensible masters would not injure the value of a slave by too severe punishment.&#;Go to footnote detail

Hart cast such violence as understandable, if not wholly acceptable, given that “two negro slaves might do less work in a day than one hired white laborer in the North.”&#;Go to footnote detail The slaves’ “indolence was the despair of every slave-owner,” he wrote; their “shiftlessness, waste of their master’s property, neglect of his animals, were almost proverbial; and the looseness of the marriage-tie and immorality of even the best of the negroes were subjects of sorrow to those who felt the responsibility for them.”&#;Go to footnote detail

Further, although vocally opposed to lynching—which he called “an opportunity for the most furious and brutal passion of which humanity is capable, under cover of moral duty, and without the slightest danger of a later accountability”&#;Go to footnote detail—Hart asserted that:

One of the few advantages of slavery was that every slaveholder was police officer and judge and jury on his own plantation; petty offenses were punished by the overseer without further ceremony, serious crimes were easily dealt with, and the escape of the criminal was nearly impossible.

Freedom … has combined with the influence of the press in popularizing crime, and perhaps with an innate African savagery, to make the black criminal a terrible scourge in the South.&#;Go to footnote detail

Despite such views, Hart strongly supported W. E. B. Du Bois during his time as a student at Harvard.&#;Go to footnote detail Citing his “distinct ability,” Hart recommended Du Bois for a scholarship that enabled him to continue his graduate studies.&#;Go to footnote detail He also facilitated Du Bois’s participation in the American Historical Association’s meeting—making Du Bois the first Black scholar to present to that organization.&#;Go to footnote detail Du Bois’s paper, “Enforcement of the Slave Trade Laws,” was published the following year in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association.&#;Go to footnote detail But Hart’s support of Black students was qualified: he believed that only a racially mixed few could succeed.

The achievements of Du Bois or of Booker T. Washington, he wrote in an extended discussion of race in his book The Southern South, “prove nothing as to the genius of the races because they are mulattoes.” He concluded that “few men of genius among the Negroes are pure blacks.”&#;Go to footnote detail

While Hart was not an advocate for racial equality, neither was he a racist in the mold of the many eugenicists at Harvard.

He certainly believed that whites were the superior race:

There are a million or two exceptions, but they do not break the force of the eight or nine million of average Negroes. … Race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and race achievement.&#;Go to footnote detail

Yet in a direct rebuke of his eugenicist colleagues, he declared “the Negro is entitled to be measured, not by brain calipers, not by two-meter rods, but by what he can do in the world.”&#;Go to footnote detail Education was, for Hart, the consistent answer to “the vast and absorbing problem,” namely “the presence of a non-European race, formerly servile, and permanently inferior to the white race.”&#;Go to footnote detail He argued that educating all Blacks, regardless of aptitude, was worth the effort to reach those who—like Du Bois—were exceptional: “It is a favorite Southern delusion that education and Christian teaching have no effect on the animal propensities of Negroes; there are thousands of examples to the contrary.”&#;Go to footnote detail Hart, also a Howard University trustee, concluded that the “most hopeful thing” is the “work of institutions like Fisk, Atlanta, and Talladega.”&#;Go to footnote detail “Education does not necessarily make virtue, but it is a safeguard.”&#;Go to footnote detail