Christian monogenism played an important role in the development of an African-American literature on race, linked to theology rather than science, up to the time of Martin Delany and his Principia of Ethnology (1879).
[1] Scriptural ethnology is a term applied to debate and research on the biblical accounts, both of the early patriarchs and migration after Noah's Flood, to explain the diverse peoples of the world.
The debates also saw the participation of Delany, and George Washington Williams defended monogenesis as the starting point of his pioneer history of African-Americans.
[7] In The Effect of Circumstances upon the Physical Man (1854) Frederick Douglass argued for an environmentalist monogenism, following Prichard, Bachman, and Robert Gordon Latham, but also in the tradition of Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith.
Polygenism was supported by physicians, anthropologists, taxonomists and zoologists; and the biblical associations of monogenism held against it in scientific circles.
The Ethnological Society of London had the monogenist tradition of Thomas Hodgkin and James Cowles Prichard, continuing in Robert Gordon Latham.
[11] The direction of the Ethnological Society was challenged by James Hunt, a polygenist who became a secretary in 1859,[12] and John Crawfurd, who was president two years later, who believed in a large number of separately created racial groups.
[13] In the face of advocates of polygenism, monogenism received a second wind after the recognition of the antiquity of man, and the almost simultaneous publication of Darwin's theory of evolution.
[20] On the other hand, Darwin's theory admitted the idea of "varieties of man": it was neither purely monogenist (in the sense of the term previously used), nor polygenist.