Editing Arthur de Gobineau (section)

===Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze===
[[File:Josiah Clarke Nott.jpg|thumb|226x226px|alt=Sepia photograph of Josiah C. Nott looking to his left | Josiah C. Nott]]
[[File:Henry Hotze.jpg|thumb|226x226px|alt=Photograph of Henry Hotzel looking at the casmera | Henry Hotze]]

In 1856, two American "race scientists", [[Josiah C. Nott]] and [[Henry Hotze]], both ardent [[White supremacy|white supremacists]], translated ''Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines'' into English. Champions of slavery, they found in Gobineau's anti-black writings a convenient justification for the "peculiar institution".{{sfn|Wright|1999|p=833}} Nott and Hotze found much to approve of in the ''Essai'' such as: "The Negro is the most humble and lags at the bottom of the scale. The animal character imprinted upon his brow marks his destiny from the moment of his conception".{{sfn|Wright|1999|p=833}} Much to Gobineau's intense annoyance, Nott and Hotze abridged the first volume of the ''Essai'' from 1,600 pages in the French original down to 400 in English.{{sfn|Wright|1999|p=837}} At least part of the reason for this was because of Gobineau's hostile picture of Americans. About American white people, Gobineau declared: {{blockquote|They are a very mixed assortment of the most degenerate races in olden-day Europe. They are the human flotsam of all ages: Irish, crossbreed Germans and French and Italians of even more doubtful stock. The intermixture of all these decadent ethnic varieties will inevitably give birth to further ethnic chaos. This chaos is no way unexpected or new: it will produce no further ethnic mixture which has not already been, or cannot be realized on our own continent. Absolutely nothing productive will result from it, and even when ethnic combinations resulting from infinite unions between Germans, Irish, Italians, French and Anglo-Saxons join us in the south with racial elements composed of Indian, Negro, Spanish and Portuguese essence, it is quite unimaginable that anything could result from such horrible confusions, but an incoherent juxtaposition of the most decadent kinds of people.{{sfn|Wright|1999|pp=837–838}}}} Highly critical passages like this were removed from ''The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races'', as the ''Essai'' was titled in English. Nott and Hotze retained only the parts relating to the alleged inherent inferiority of blacks.{{sfn|Wright|1999|p=838}} Likewise, they used Gobineau as a way of attempting to establish that white America was in mortal peril despite the fact that most American blacks were slaves in 1856. The two "race scientists" argued on the basis of the ''Essai'' that blacks were essentially a type of vicious animal, rather than human beings, and would always pose a danger to whites.{{sfn|Wright|1999|pp=839–845}} The passages of the ''Essai'' where Gobineau declared that, though of low intelligence, blacks had certain artistic talents and that a few "exceptional" African tribal chiefs probably had a higher IQ than those of the stupidest whites were not included in the American edition. Nott and Hotze wanted nothing that might give blacks admirable human qualities.{{sfn|Wright|1999|pp=838–39}} Beyond that, they argued that nation and race were the same, and that to be American was to be white.{{sfn|Wright|1999|p=846}} As such, the American translators argued in their introduction that just as various European nations were torn apart by nationality conflicts caused by different "races" living together, likewise ending slavery and granting American citizenship to blacks would cause the same sort of conflicts, but only on a much vaster scale in the United States.{{sfn|Wright|1999|p=847}}