Lewis Henry Morgan

Ethnologist

  • Born: November 21, 1818
  • Birthplace: Aurora, New York
  • Died: December 17, 1881
  • Place of death: Rochester, New York

American anthropologist

Extending kinship studies, first among the Iroquois, then to cultures around the world, Morgan devised a theory of social and cultural evolution that provided both a theoretical model for late nineteenth century anthropology and a theory of early family evolution that Karl Marx would use in his interpretation of history.

Area of achievement Scholarship

Early Life

Lewis Henry Morgan was the son of Harriet Steele and Jedediah Morgan. His father, a wealthy landholder, died when he was eight, and the farm’s operation was placed in the hands of young Morgan’s older brothers. After receiving an education at the Cayuga Academy in Aurora and being graduated from Union College in 1840, Morgan decided to pursue a career in law. In Aurora, while reading for his bar exams, Morgan joined a secret men’s organization called the Grand Order of the Iroquois. Morgan’s participation and leadership in this organization proved to be the beginning of his ethnological career. In order to model the order after the political organization of the six Indian nations of New York, known as the Iroquois Confederacy, Morgan and other members of the club made trips to several Iroquois reservations to study their history and culture.

Later, Morgan took an active role in protesting the loss of Iroquois land, specifically reservations of the Seneca—one of the six Iroquois nations—to a land company, and he even traveled to Washington to present a petition to the president and the Senate on behalf of the Seneca. For his support of the Seneca Indians in this matter and his continuing interest in their culture, the Seneca adopted Morgan as a member of the Hawk clan.

In 1844, Morgan moved to Rochester, New York, and opened a law office. This career move did not deflect Morgan from his preoccupation with Indian studies. Not only did he supply Indian artifacts to the Regents of the University of New York, for what would later become a collection of the New York State Museum, but he also wrote a series of articles that appeared under the title “Letters on the Iroquois Addressed to Albert Gallatin,” published in the American Whig Review (1847-1848).

Morgan later revised and expanded these letters into League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), now considered the first full ethnography of an American Indian group. Morgan dedicated the book to Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian whom Morgan met in an Albany bookstore and who was instrumental in helping Morgan collect Seneca data. If Morgan never lived among the Indians, as some writers have claimed, neither was he an armchair ethnologist. He read what books he could find on the Iroquois and then complemented this reading with extensive fieldwork. Indeed, Morgan proved to be one of the first ethnologists to rely heavily on data collected in the field for the construction of ethnological theories.

The publication of Morgan’s work on Iroquois history and culture drew the attention of others in the new science of ethnology, including the Indian agent, historian, and ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and archaeologist Ephraim George Squier. After the publication of his book on the Iroquois, Morgan hoped to put aside his study of Indians and devote himself to his career in law. His marriage to his cousin Mary Elisabeth Steele, in 1851, strengthened his desire to succeed in his law career.

Life’s Work

Morgan’s early law career in Rochester proved unspectacular. Unknown and without influential friends, Morgan supported himself on local collection cases and occasional criminal cases. In time, he became known more for his public lectures at the Mechanic’s Institute and at the Rochester Athenaeum than as a trial lawyer. These lectures, as well as his book on the Iroquois, eventually introduced Morgan to the elite society of Rochester. Through these contacts, he invested in railroad and mining companies in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. By the late 1850’s, through wise investments, he had acquired a modest fortune that allowed him to retire from legal practice during the early 1860’s. Except for brief stints in the New York assembly in 1861 and the New York senate from 1868 to 1869, Morgan devoted the remainder of his life to ethnology.

Morgan’s return to anthropological studies really began in 1857. In 1856, Morgan attended the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Impressed with the papers he heard, Morgan decided to return the following year and deliver a paper on Iroquois kinship. This paper grew out of Morgan’s earlier research and his discovery that the Iroquois determined kinship differently from the way of Anglo-Americans. Morgan suspected that other Indian tribes exhibited similar kinship patterns, but he had no opportunity to test this theory until the summer of 1858, while traveling in Upper Michigan.

In Upper Michigan, Morgan met some Ojibwe Indians and was excited to discover that their system of kinship was essentially the same as that of the Iroquois. It occurred to Morgan that kinship systems might be linked to a people’s economy. Morgan noted that North American Indian kinship systems, which he termed classificatory, seemed to be associated with a hunting-gathering horticultural economy. Assuming that kinship systems changed slowly and then only when a people’s economy changed, Morgan believed such systems to be quite old. If they were ancient and if similar systems could be found in other parts of the world, Morgan believed that this would constitute proof of the migration of American Indians from the Old World.

Because the origin of the American Indian remained an important question throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Morgan believed that discovering an Old World connection would be a major contribution to the young science of ethnology. Seeking an answer to these questions, Morgan made four trips, between 1859 and 1862, to Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River to collect kinship information.

On these trips, Morgan interviewed missionaries, schoolteachers, merchants, government agents, Indian traders, and steamboat captains, checking and rechecking the data he received from his talks with Indians from various reservations. He also sent questionnaires to missionaries and government agents around the world to learn how other non-European cultures determined kinship. Out of these travels and research came his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). Discovering that the method of designating kinship that he first found among the Iroquois Indians also existed in Asia, Morgan became convinced of the Old World origin of the American Indians.

Morgan’s trips to the West and his examination of conditions in various Indian communities made him sharply critical of the federal government’s handling of Indian affairs. His shock and frustration over educational and health facilities available to Indians poured out in a series of articles triggered by the public outcry at the deaths of General George A. Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn. In “Factory Systems for Indian Reservations,” “The Hue and Cry Against the Indians,” and “The Indian Question,” all published in the Nation, Morgan castigated the government for its treatment of Indians and blamed Custer’s death on the government’s long-standing mismanagement and indifference to reservation administration. Morgan claimed that Indians could not be civilized quickly and that teaching them farming might not be the best approach to changing their behavior. Change would take time, and American society would have to be patient in their expectations for the Indian.

Along with many others, Morgan sharply criticized government Indian policy. His reputation, however, rests not on these attacks but on his study of Indian kinship, which led him to theorize about the history and nature of the family. His evidence convinced him that the family had evolved through gradual stages from promiscuity to monogamy. This idea contributed to the development of Morgan’s theory of human social and cultural evolution through stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. He developed these ideas in his next and best-known work, Ancient Society: Or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). After the publication of Ancient Society, Morgan published little. A section on the evolution of house architecture and home life originally intended for Ancient Society and deleted by the publishers because of its length was published separately as Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines in 1881.

Although Morgan’s primary contribution to American scholarship came through his work in anthropology, he also made contributions to natural history. Intrigued by the question of whether animals operated through instinct or reason, Morgan set out to investigate this question through an extensive study of the American beaver. Through his thorough examination of beaver behavior, Morgan concluded that beavers, in particular, and animals, in general, did indeed use reason. With the publication of The American Beaver and His Works (1868), Morgan became the foremost authority on the beaver. The study impressed both famed Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz and English evolutionist Charles Darwin.

Significance

Morgan began writing at a time when American ethnology still stressed collection and classification, with little emphasis on the interpretation of these accumulating data. His evolutionary theory moved American ethnology beyond mere classification to a larger consideration of humankind and their place in space and time. By placing American Indian ethnology into the larger context of human social evolution or human history, Morgan proved a pioneer in the development of the science of anthropology.

Morgan’s legacy to anthropology is considerable. His studies of kinship and theories of social evolution became the model for anthropological study in the second half of the nineteenth century and influenced, in both Europe and the United States, the development of social anthropology into the twentieth century. His accomplishments were recognized by Charles Darwin, Henry Adams, Francis Parkman, and Karl Marx. Morgan’s election to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he served as president, indicates the esteem in which he and his ideas were held by the scientific community.

The work of Lewis Henry Morgan embodied much of the optimistic spirit that prevailed in nineteenth century America, a spirit that enthusiastically emphasized laws of progress for both the individual and society. Morgan’s theory of social evolution—the evolution of society through levels of savagery and barbarism to civilization—well expressed this fundamental belief in progress.

Bibliography

Bieder, Robert E. Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Contains a chapter on Morgan discussing his views on Indians and considering his influence on American anthropology.

Eggan, Fred. The American Indian: Perspectives for the Study of Culture Change. Chicago: Aldine, 1966. A series of lectures given by Eggan at the University of Rochester’s Morgan Lectures, which focused on Morgan’s contributions to the study of American Indian social organization.

Fortes, Meyer. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. Also lectures in the University of Rochester’s Morgan Lecture series. Fortes explores the larger scope of Morgan’s ideas on kinship and social order in contemporary anthropology.

Morgan, Lewis Henry. Lewis Henry Morgan: The Indian Journals, 1859-1862. Edited by Leslie A. White. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1993. Morgan’s journals of his four trips, relating experiences among the Western Indians.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pioneers in American Anthropology: The Bandelier-Morgan Letters, 1873-1883. Edited by Leslie A. White. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940. A collection of letters between Morgan and his foremost American disciple.

Resek, Carl. Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. A brief but well-written biography of Morgan.

Stern, Bernhard Joseph. Lewis Henry Morgan: Social Evolutionist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931. A dated but still useful biography of Morgan, written by a sociologist and social theorist.

Stocking, George W. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1968. Contains a chapter in which Morgan’s anthropological theories are considered, along with those of his English contemporaries E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer.

Tooker, Elisabeth. Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois Material Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994. As part of his study of Iroquois culture, Morgan collected five hundred objects, almost all of which were destroyed in a 1911 fire. The book contains illustrations of the objects; it also reprints Morgan’s field note descriptions of the objects and his reports to the New York State officials who sponsored his research. Also includes a brief overview of Morgan’s life and career.

1871: Darwin Publishes The Descent of Man; February 8, 1887: General Allotment Act Erodes Indian Tribal Unity.