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A proponent of “polygenism,” he sought to prove that Black people had no common origins with other races and were thus inherently inferior.

From the 1830s to 1840s, Morton, a physician and anatomist often referred to as the founder of the “American school of ethnology,” collected the skulls from around the world, compiling his craniometric research into a racial hierarchy that argued for “polygenism”—the idea that different races constituted different species and had different origins.

The images were made at the behest of Louis Agassiz, the famous Swiss American scientist and Harvard professor, who was studying what was called “polygenism.”

Instead, they contended that black and white people were created separately and that black people were inferior, a theory called polygenism.

As Northerners, Agassiz and Morton went out of their way to say that polygenism in no way justified slavery.