History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 91-108

Wesleyan University 2013 ISSN: 0018-2656

SPEAKING BODIES, SPEAKING MINDS:

ANIMALS, LANGUAGE, HISTORY
SUSAN PEARSON
ABSTRACT

This essay explores a nineteenth-century debate over the linguistic capacity of animals
in order to consider the links among language, reason, and history. Taking the American
animal-protection movement as a point of departure, I show how protectionists, linguists,
anthropologists, and advocates of deaf education were divided about the origins and
nature of language. Was language a product of the soul and thus unique to humans, or
was it a function of the body, a complex form of the corporeal expressions that humans
and animals shared? Was language divine or natural? The answers that different activists
and intellectuals gave to such questions shaped their view of the relationship of humans to
animals and the inclusion of the latter in the moral and political community. I suggest that
such debates are helpful to historians since the possession of languageand its traces in
the written wordhas traditionally been used to divide prehistory and natural history from
history proper. If we are to include animals in history, we must rethink the relationship
of the discipline to language.
Keywords: language, animals, animal protection, humananimal boundary, reason, mind
body dualism

In February 1869, a magazine called Our Dumb Animals, which was the foremost
journal of the American animal-protection movement, printed an article by the
renowned author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Entitled The Rights of Dumb Animals, Stowes article emphasized animals speechlessness. Stowe wrote that, If
there be any oppressed class that ought to have a convention and pass resolutions
asserting their share in this general forward movement going on in this world,
it is that hapless class that not only can neither speak, read nor write, but who
have no capacity for being taught any of these accomplishments.1 By suggesting that animals were hapless because they could not speak or write, Stowe
linked linguistic to political capacity. Democratic participation of the sort that
Stowe imagined depended on language, for it was in and through language that
citizens could represent themselves and engage in deliberation with their fellows.
In suggesting that animals were bereft of language, Stowe echoed not only the
title of the journalOur Dumb Animalsbut also the slogan of the Societies for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCAs) that had formed across the United
States following the Civil War. The slogan of SPCAs was: We speak for those
1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rights of Dumb Animals, Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 9 (1869), 69.

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who cannot speak for themselves. The claim that animals had no language was,
then, integral to the animal-protection movement. Indeed, as Stowe and other
protectionists would argue, animals silence was a source not just of animals
difference from human beings, but also of humans duty toward animals. For
protectionists, animals inability to speak rendered moral obligation as linguistic
surrogacy.
But not all animal protectionists agreed that animals were congenitally silent.
The very next month, in March 1869, Our Dumb Animals received a letter
protesting the magazines titular designation of animals as dumb. Implicitly
criticizing Stowes emphasis on animal speechlessness, the letter-writer asked
this question: Is there no language but that made up of vowels and consonants,
and uttered by the vocal organs? The problem, for this letter-writer, was that the
magazine and its representatives like Stowe employed too narrow a definition
of language. Language, according to this letter-writers more expansive definition, was comprised not simply by articulate speech, but by communication, and
communication could assume a variety of forms, some of which were nonverbal.
Nonverbal language was often overlooked, the writer contended, because it is
unintelligible to the majority of the human family, many of whom are far beneath
the brutes, in what I must call soul, for that is the only word that fits. In the letter-writers imagination, the language of the soul did not obey the limits of either
words or species. As an example, the writer offered her own dearly departed
cat, Bessie, a faithful companion and attentive listener. I am confident that she
understood everything I said to her. When I spoke, she would look eagerly into
my eyes, with a searching, far-reaching gaze, as if to get at the full extent of my
meaning.2 While not claiming that Bessie could organize the neighborhood cats
into the sort of political convention that Stowe imagined, this letter-writer nonetheless challenged the suggestion that animals had no capacity for language.
By defining language broadly as communication rather than as articulate speech,
she included animals in the linguistic, the moral, and the political community.
Moreover, the letter-writer suggested that nonverbal language, which she called
the language of the soul, was superior to verbal language.
Though the anonymous letter-writer and Stowe offered different opinions
about whether animals had language, both identified linguistic capacity as a
critical means by which animals difference from or similarity to humans could
be measured. The fact that animal protectionists used language as an index of
difference and similarity is not surprising. The stakes of having or not having
language were, by the mid-nineteenth century, well established; linguistic capacity had long been fundamental to the definition of humanity and personhood.
Language was central to centuries of theological, philosophical, and naturalhistorical efforts to draw the boundary between humans and animals. Far from a
technical question, the possession of what nineteenth-century linguists would call
articulate speech was connected, from Aristotle forward, with the possession of
a distinct human character or essence, whether that went by the name soul, mind,
or reason. As one writer remarked in an 1884 issue of the Princeton Review, lan2. R. E. R., Graceful Bessie, Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 10 (1869), 75.

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guage has always been regarded as one of the most important distinctive marks
of man, and many have made it the one essential distinction from which gradually
all others have arisen.3 For those who believed that humans and animals were
separate in the order of creation, language was proof that humans had a distinct,
immutable, and perhaps immortal essence.4 In standard dualistic terms, if animals
were body and humans were mind, then language was the wedge separating the
two. The implications of using language to separate (or join) humans and animals
are not, however, simply moral and political. They are also historical and historiographical: for it is languageand more particularly writingthat is used to
separate the fossil record from the archive, natural history from history proper.5
The tensions expressed in animal-protection propaganda reflected a larger
set of debates about the origins and function of language in nineteenth-century
America. In fact, the source of the disagreement between Stowe and the anonymous letter-writer is that each was operating according to a different definition
of language. For Stowe it is verbal communicationspeech and writingfor
the letter-writer, it is expression more broadly construed. The same debate about
whether language was speech or expression took place among contemporary
scholars in fields such as philology, anthropology, psychology, and biology, and
among reformers such as deaf educators. These larger debates about language
have much in common with the tensions in animal-protection propaganda. For
many nineteenth-century Americans outside of animal-protection circles, the difference between expression and language was the difference between the natural
and the conventional. Expression was natural and corporealit was the facial
expressions, the gestures, the grunts, and the groans that the body gives forth.
Language, on the other hand, was conventional and came not from nature or the
body, but from the mind and human culture. The question of whether animals had
languageand the larger question of how to define languageengaged mid-tolate nineteenth-century Americans in speculation about whether the boundaries
of humanity and, more broadly, the moral community, were defined in terms of
minds or bodies. Following the lineaments of this debate we learn not simply
3. Joseph Leconte, The Psychical Relation of Man to Animals, Princeton Review (JuneJuly
1884), 238.
4. Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the History of Language and Intellectual
History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 278-280; Tim Ingold, The Animal
in the Study of Humanity, in What is an Animal?, ed. Tim Ingold (New York: Routledge, 1994),
84-99; Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology v. 54 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 78-85; Duane
Rumbaugh, Primate Language and Cognition: Common Ground, in Humans and Other Animals,
ed. Arien Mack (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 301-320; Matthew Senior, When
the Beasts Spoke: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine, in Animal
Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 61-84; R. W. Serjeantson, The Passions and Animal Language, 15401700,
Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 425-444; Brian Cummings, Plinys Literate Elephant and
the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought, in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans,
and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 164185; Cary Wolfe, In the Shadow of Wittgensteins Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the
Animal, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animals, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003), 1-57.
5. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, The Consequences of Literacy, in Literacy in Traditional Societies,
ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 27-68.

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about the preoccupations of nineteenth-century Americans, but also about the

terms by which we can recast language, the animal, and the body, in history.
Unsurprisingly, one of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century groups most interested
in elucidating the origins and function of language was professional philologists.
Although language had a prominent place in centuries of philosophical efforts to
distinguish humans from animals, it was also central to mid-nineteenth-centuryscientific efforts to do the same. In Darwinian-inspired debates about whether
humans could have evolved from animals, and about whether humans were
descended from a common ancestor, language served as a key piece of evidence
for advocates on both sides of each issue. In part this reflected the general absorption of previously speculative and metaphysical questions by the burgeoning
natural sciences, but the centrality of language to evolutionary debates was also
due to the development of comparative philology as a separate discipline.
Though it had traditionally been concerned with the exegesis of canonical
texts, during the first half of the nineteenth century, philology began to lay claim
to the status of a science. Grasping the tools of a comparative method that were
then also dominating fields such as psychology and ethnology, comparative
philologiststhe progenitors of modern linguistsredefined their fields scope.
We do not want to know languages, declared the prominent Oxford philologist
Max Muller in 1861, we want to know language . . . its origin, its nature, its
laws.6 Rather than seeking to understand French, German, or Hindi, scientific
philologists were after something bigger. As William Dwight Whitney, one of
nineteenth-century Americas foremost philologists and popularizers, put it, the
new breed of linguist sought, among other things, to trace out the inner life of
language, to discover its origin, to follow its successive steps of growth, and to
deduce the laws that govern its mutations.7 Far from being a narrow pursuit,
linguistic science would, Whitney predicted, yield important insights about a
whole host of crucial questions, from the nature of the difference between man
and animals to the historical and present relationships between the different
divisions of mankind.8 As comparative philologists distinguished themselves
from traditional philology, they claimed that the study of language was the best
empirical tool with which to resolve fundamental questions about both the origins
and the limits of humankind.
These grandiose promises were not unfounded. Indeed, as the historian Stephen Alter has shown, linguistic evidence played an important part in the development of Darwins arguments in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent
of Man (1871). Darwin had to prove not only that humans could have descended
from animals, but more basically that all humans shared a common ancestor.
Linguistic evidence and linguistic models helped him to make both arguments. In
6. Max F. Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner,
1862), I, 33.
7. William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language (New York: Charles Scribner
& Company, 1867), 397.
8. Ibid., 8. See also Stephen G. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999); J. W. Burrow, The Uses of Philology in Victorian England, in Ideas and
Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson (London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1967), 180-204.

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1816, the German linguist Franz Bopp published his seminal work documenting
the existence of the Indo-European family of languages. This was an important
development for philologists since it showed that there might be a fundamental
structural unity of language rather than myriad separate languages. But Bopps
findings also provided linguists with a model of origins and of developmental
change that Darwin would later borrow.9
From his extensive readings in philology, Darwin adopted a historical model
of change: that is, he came to understand that apparently dissimilar entities could
have descended from a common ancestor and undergone gradual evolutionary
change. This was what linguists like Bopp surmised had happened with the languages that comprised the Indo-European family. Moreover, from his study of
linguistics, Darwin came to understand that the pattern of this change could be
envisioned as a branching tree rather than as a chain of being. The formation
of different language and of distinct species, and the proof that both have been
developed through a gradual process, are, Darwin wrote in Descent, curiously
parallel.10 Beyond supplying Darwin with an analogous model for evolutionary
change, contemporary philologists claim that their findings revealed racial as
well as linguistic unities provided Darwin with evidence that he needed to argue
against polygenesist creation narratives.11 In the late 1840s, for example, the German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt was arguing that the comparative study
of languages shows us that races now separated by vast tracts of land are allied
together . . . [and came] from one common point of radiation. Indeed, before
Darwin published either Origin or Descent, American authors were using linguistic evidence to shore up arguments against polygenesis.12 If such apparently
disparate languages as Sanskrit and German might be shown to have a common
origin, why not all humans? And why, Darwin asked, not humans and apes?
Darwin did more, however, than just repeat philological findings. Not wanting his theory of evolution to founder on the objection that language, because
it did not exist in animals, could only be a product of God and not of a chaotic
and undesigned natural process, Darwin argued for continuities between forms
of human and animal expression. In Descent of Man, Darwin claimed that animals, through their grimaces, gestures, and tones, could make the contents of
their minds known to others, including to humans. And he argued not simply
that animal expression had the language-like power to communicate, but also
that man uses, in common with the lower animals, inarticulate cries to express
his meaning, aided by gestures and the movements of the face.13 Like the letterwriter who objected that animals were not dumb, but spoke a language of the
soul, and like those who claimed that animals testified with their faces and their
9. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image, chapter 1.
10. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. [1879] (London: Penguin, 2004), 112-113.
11. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image, chapter 2.
12. Quoted in The Human Family, Southern Quarterly Review (1855), 160. For linguistic evidence used to undermine polygenesis, see ibid.; Language as a Means of Classifying Man, Christian Review (July 1859), 337-67.
13. Darwin, Descent, 107.

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eyes, Darwin included corporeal signs such as gesture and grimace under the
rubric of language.
For Darwin, corporeal expression was linked to articulate speech both contemporaneously and historically. The signs of the body were both the companion and
the antecedent to speech. Indeed, Darwin went so far as to claim that human language had its origins in the imitation and modification of various natural sounds,
the voices of other animals, and mans own instinctive cries, aided by signs and
gestures. The chief difference between human and animal communication lay,
Darwin claimed, not so much in its nature as in humans infinitely larger power
of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.14 Just as Darwin
argued for morphological similarities in human and animal bodies to establish the
possibility of their descent from a common origin, through language he likewise
drew links between the human and animal mind, arguing that the differences
were of degree rather than kind. Human speech was not separate from corporeal
expression, but rather emerged from it. In order to combat philosophical traditions that privileged the mind as the seat of mans distinctive, nonanimal, and
divinely bestowed capacities, Darwin had to displace what many took to be the
chief index of mans mind: his language.
In addition to the arguments he forwarded in Descent, Darwins 1872 book,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, developed a larger argument for the continuity between human and animal communication. In this
volume, Darwin subordinated language to expression. As he explained in Expression, actions of all kinds, if regularly accompanying any state of the mind, are
at once recognized as expressive. These may consist of movements of any part
of the body, as the wagging of a dogs tail, the shrugging of a mans shoulders,
the erection of the hair . . . and the use of the vocal or other sound-producing
instruments. Here Darwin defined expression broadly to encompass any bodily
action that expressed a mental state, and he listed oral language as but one form of
expression that could link an outward sign with an inward mental state. Language
was merely one among many forms of expression that had continuities with the
obviously corporeal and emotive idiom of grunts, groans, and grimaces. For
Darwin, expression was natural and instinctive, and therefore corporeal in origin.
Expressionwhether it be the bristling of fur, the lowering of ears, the howling
of wolves, or the laughter of an infantdeveloped to convey basic emotions such
as anger, terror, love, and joy. The chief expressive actions, exhibited by man
and the lower animals, are . . . innate and inheritedthat is, have not been learnt
by the individual.15 Imagined as natural rather than conventional, as an artifact of
the body rather than of the soul, and as continuous with expression more broadly,
language posed no barrier to Darwins theory of evolution.
And though Darwin drew heavily on the historical models and empirical evidence of nineteenth-century comparative philology, its findings were also used
against him to reassert the primacy of human superiority and the claims of natu14. Darwin, Descent, 108.
15. Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals [1872] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 347-348.

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ral theology.16 Among philologists, no one more fiercely equated language with
reason than Max Muller. The German-born Muller was the eras most popular
and widely known philologist, broadcasting his ideas from his seat at Oxford
through a series of widely popular lectures, books, and regular magazine contributions. Unlike Darwin, who saw a sort of language as common to both man
and animals and differentiated their linguistic abilities according to degree rather
than kind, Muller steadfastly denied language to animals. The one great barrier
between the brute and man, Muller told an audience at Britains Royal Institution in 1861, is Language. Muller allowed that animals had five senses, just
like ourselves, experiences of pleasure and pain, a memory, a will, and even a
rudimentary intellect, which he defined as the comparing or interlacing of single
perceptions. He also admitted that animals communicated through their bodies
and vocalizations. Dogs, for instance, could signal shame with their lowered tail,
pride with their sparkling eyes. But language, he nonetheless insisted, is our
Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it. Language, Muller elaborated, was
thought incarnate, the outward sign of mans ability to abstract from particular
sensations and objects to general states and categories.17 Rather than functioning
chiefly to express feelings and thoughts or to communicate with other beings,
language was, for Muller, a tool the mind employed to order to sort the raw data
of perception. The animal perceived, whereas man conceived. Not surprisingly,
Muller rejected Darwins account of mans evolutionaryand animalisticheritage and was hailed by Victorians in search of the grounds to refute the heretical
materialism that evolution seemed to herald.18 By making language into thought
incarnate, and denying the same to animals, Muller had given man back his
unique soul in the form of articulate speech. Mullers position was one that Stowe
would have recognized, for it denied animals language and reinforced the notion
that one of the chief differences between humans and animals was linguistic.
The American philologist William Dwight Whitney disagreed sharply with
Muller. An American defender of Darwin, Whitney saw no shame in admitting
the animal origins of mans language. Unlike Muller, who was steeped in Kantian idealism, and who therefore tended to locate the meaning of words in innate
and immutable concepts, Whitney was a product of the Scottish common-sense
philosophy that dominated early nineteenth-century American universities. Like
his intellectual forbears, Whitney defined humans as essentially social creatures
and argued that language was chiefly an instrumentality designed to facilitate
communication. It is, he wrote in 1875, expression for the sake of communication. Like Darwin, Whitney agreed that communication could assume many
formsgesture and grimace, pictorial or written signs, and uttered or spoken
signsbut unlike Darwin, he sharply distinguished human speech from animal
communication.19 Because he believed that speech was the product of human
16. Burrow, The Uses of Philology, 193-196.
17. Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, I, 354, 384.
18. Burrow, The Uses of Philology; Susan Jeffords, The Knowledge of Words: The Evolution
of Language and Biology in Nineteenth-Century Thought, Centennial Review 31 (1987), 66-83.
19. William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language [1875] (New York: Dover, 1979),
1-2.

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efforts to communicate, Whitney located the meaning of words in social conventionwords meant what people agreed that they meant, and agreement was generated by the reciprocal exchanges of everyday usage. Every word handed down
in every human language, he boldly wrote, is an arbitrary and conventional
sign.20 Indeed, far from denigrating human speech, its conventional nature was
precisely what Whitney believed differentiated human from animal communication. No man can become possessed of any existing language without learning
it, he wrote. On the other hand, no animal (that we know of) has any expression
which he learns, which is not the direct gift of nature to him. Although Whitney agreed with Darwin that some forms of expression were innate rather than
learned, he departed from Darwin in cordoning off language from such innate,
or natural, forms of expression. Thus, although Whitney defended Darwin and
sharply disagreed with Mullers account of linguistic origins, he shared with
Muller a desire to retain language as a special property of humankind. Where
Darwin argued that language was a form of expression, Whitney differentiated
language from expression, granting the latter but not the former to animals.
Natural expressionthe grunts and gestures of Darwins argumentfunctioned only, Whitney believed, to express emotions. He wrote that, It is where
expression quits its emotional natural basis, and turns to intellectual uses, that
the history of language begins.21 Expression was instinctual and natural, but
language was learned and conventional. It could thus only exist culturallythat
is, within human societies. Because Whitney linked language to culture, he also
regarded it as the foundation of history. Language alone makes history possible, he contended, because through language each generation can hand over to
its successors, its own collected wisdom, its stores of experience, deduction, and
invention, so that each starts from the point which its predecessor had reached.22
In Whitneys vision, history was cumulative and progressive, language the engine
of its movements.
Linking language to human progress and positioning it as the agent of human
history was not unique to Whitney. The way that Whitney both defended and
defanged Darwins view of language origins is typical of how the theory of
evolution was in general received in the United States. One of the ways in which
evolutionary theory was adapted and even perverted was through its application
to the study of human societies in fields such as anthropology. Ethnologists took
older ideas about the stages of human civilizationthe notion that mankind
progressed in linear fashion from hunting to herding to agricultureand infused
them with new life in the post-Darwinian era. Evolution might explain not only
the descent of humans from animals, but also the progress of humankind through
its developmental stages. Civilization, and not just humanity, could be understood as the product of evolution through natural selection. Here too, the issue of
language was an important means of marking boundaries.
Language served ethnologists not primarily as a means of distinguishing
humans from animals, but instead as a means of placing humans on the evolu20. Ibid., 19.
21. Ibid., 283.
22. Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, 441.

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tionary scale. Anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan, for example, proposed in

his famous 1877 work Ancient Society, that mankind progressed from savagery
through barbarism to civilization. Among the indices that Morgan used to trace
these changes in social organization was the development of language, for Morgan maintained that the stages of development were not simply social, but also
mental. Picking up on ideas expressed by Darwin and ratified by Whitney, he
claimed that gesture or sign language seems to have been primitive, the elder
sister of articulate speech. Morgan went on: It is still the universal language of
barbarians, if not savages. Morgan noted that in the progress of mankind, gesture and articulate speech seemed to exist in an inverse ratio: as man ascended
toward civilization, he relied less on gesture and facial expression to convey
meaning and more on precisely rendered words.23 Just as some philologists and
natural scientists believed that humans were separated from animals by the possession of articulate speech, so too anthropologists believed that the civilized
could be distinguished from the savage by the relative importance of gesture versus speech in communication. And like Muller and earlier philosophers, Morgan
and others continued to link language to mind: if mental and social development
were linked, a peoples language would reflect their stage of development. If animals and humans alike shared the corporeal language of gesture, then the further
humanity ascended away from the animal, the less defined by the body, and the
more civilized, he became.
The link ethnologists drew between social evolution and linguistic development helps explain the sudden upsurge in popular and scholarly interest in
American Indian sign language during the last third of the nineteenth century.
The use of sign language was, observers noted, particularly prevalent among
the Plains Indians of the Far West. Though some antebellum explorers had
noted the use of sign language by Indian tribes, developments in philology and
anthropology, combined with the US Armys post-Civil War campaigns against
the Plains Indians, sharpened many Americans interest in the subject. Under the
auspices of the Smithsonians Bureau of Ethnology and the US Army, Garrick
Mallery and William Clarkboth Army men who had come to know Indian sign
language while on duty in the Westpublished comprehensive treatises on the
system of hand signs used by Native Americans to communicate intertribally.24
For anthropologists, modern primitive people were in an important sense not
coeval with modern civilized people.25 In studying contemporary primitives, one
could peer through the present and back in time to the early history of the human
race. The study of American Indian sign language, the British philologist A.
H. Sayce remarked in 1880, will make it possible to reconstruct that primitive
speech of mankind which preceded articulate utterance, which formed the bridge
23. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society [1877] (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985),
5, 36.
24. Garrick Mallery, Sign Language among North American Indians, Compared with That among
Other Peoples and Deaf Mutes [1881] (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign
Language [1885] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
25. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983).

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to spoken language, and expressed the earliest thought of the human race.26 For
ethnologists and linguists, the use of sign language by American Indians seemed
to confirm both that Indians were more primitive than white Americans and that
gesture preceded speech in the evolution of language.
Because students of Indian sign language believed that gesture speech, as
they sometimes referred to sign language, was a clue to human mental and social
evolution, they frequently employed a comparative method. By putting the signs
of Indians alongside those used by deaf-mutes, Italians, and even animals, scholars hoped they would discover which signs were universal and therefore natural.
Scholars of sign language frequently claimed that Indians and American deafmutes could easily and immediately converse with one another. This fact seemed
to prove that signs were a routinized form of innate gestures whose meanings
were fixed by nature rather than man. The recurrence of signs among different
primitive peoples, over wide geographical areas, and across vast spans of time,
was evidence that, as a review of Mallerys treatise on Indian sign language
concluded, sign language is the mother language of Nature.27 Like animal
protectionists who asserted that animals communicated coherently with their
bodies, students of gesture speech also believed that corporeal expression was
a kind of language. They separated the signs of the body from articulate speech
hierarchically, but saw the difference between the two as a matter of degree rather
than kind.
Indians, savage though they may be, were not mute or dumb, but used signs
only when speech failed them. As Mallery and Clark both acknowledged, sign
language was for Native Americans what Clark called a court language; they
signed only to communicate with those outside their own tribe or to avoid being
overheard.28 Thus, although ethnologists agreed that the signing of Indians
marked them as closer to nature, the body, and to the primitive origins of mankind, they also distinguished between natural and conventional signs. Where
philologists differentiated speech from gesture by arguing that the former was
conventional, the latter natural, ethnologists went further and broke down the
category of gesture into its natural and conventional components. Some signs
were natural, or instinctual, and these were also universal. But other signs were
arbitrary, conventional, and thus culturally specific.
This same tension between, on the one hand, regarding gestures as natural and
primitive and, on the other hand, distinguishing between natural and conventional
gestures, also characterized the thinking of deaf educators. Unlike Indians who
could move between speech and gesture, the deaf were the original dumb
creatures. Though they were not considered categorically savage, their lack of
language did trouble their relationship to humanity. If language was, even in the
post-Darwinian era, still widely regarded as essentially human, what was the sta26. A. H. Sayce, Sign Language among the American Indians, Littells Living Age 146 (July
24, 1880), 256.
27. Ethnologic Studies among the North American Indians, The Catholic World 33 (May 1881),
257.
28. W. P. Clark, The Sign-Language of the North American Indians, United Service: A Quarterly Review of Military and Naval Affairs 3 (July 1880), 24.

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tus of humans who could not speak? Did they have souls? Could they reason?29
Europeans and Americans persistent fascination with so-called wolf-children
such as the Wild Boy of Avignon was in part an attempt to answer this question:
what is the human mind without language? Like feral children, and like Native
Americans, the deaf were also an object of fascination because they seemed to
provide a living laboratory in which to test the relationship between mind and
language.
During the nineteenth century, language instruction for the deaf gained institutional traction, but the method of best educating the deaf was also the subject of
considerable debate from the antebellum period through the turn of the century.
The debate, as described by historian Douglas Baynton, pitted manualists against
oralists. Manualists dominated deaf education before the 1860s, whereas after
the Civil War oralists came to prominence. Manualists believed that the deaf
should be taught sign language in order to communicate; oralists, on the other
hand, believed that the deaf should be taught to vocalize and to speak the same
language as their fellow countrymen. Manualists believed that sign language was
a form of natural language, but oralists believed that signing was primitive and
animalistic. Oralists agreed that sign language was natural, but they believed that
natural language was inferior to arbitrary, or conventional, language, which they
identified with speech rather than gesture.30
In 1817, Thomas H. Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc founded the American
Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Gallaudet was a Congregational
minister, and his primary concern was to teach the deaf language so that he might
tend to their souls. Like many before him, Gallaudet believed that language
was an expression of the soul that God had given to humans alone in the order
of creation. Without language, the deaf were cut off from knowledge of their
own souls and from knowledge of God. But for Gallaudet and other manualists
of the antebellum period, bodily gestures, facial expressions, and manual signs
were sufficient to reconnect the deaf with language and with God. In fact, many
manualists believed that gesture, or sign, language might actually be superior
to spoken language. In the antebellum period, the historical primacy of gestures
marked signing as a natural language, but not necessarily as one more primitive
or animalistic. In the pre-Darwinian era, the language of Nature was understood
as the language of God rather than the material body. Antebellum deaf educators
argued that natural language was the true language of the heart and that it was,
therefore, closer to divinity.
That this language seemed to come from the body rather than the mind did not
upset manualists. In the pre-Darwinian era, it was still possible to believe that the
human body as well as the human soul had been specially formed by God. When
British physician Sir Charles Bell wrote the first treatise on human expression
29. Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign
Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Baynton, Savages and Deaf-Mutes:
Evolutionary Theory and the Campaign against Sign Language in the Nineteenth Century, in Deaf
History Unveiled, ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993),
92-112.
30. Baynton, Forbidden Signs; Baynton, Savages and Deaf-Mutes.

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in 1806, entitled The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, he compared the

expression of humans and animals, acknowledging that both used their faces and
bodies to convey meaning. He distinguished between the physical expression of
man and beast, however, arguing that animal expression was purely instinctual
and narrowly circumscribed. Animals could express only the basic needs of the
body. Humans, on the other hand, had been created by God to give expression
to a wider range of emotions than simply those of the body.31 For antebellum
deaf educators, who shared Bells view of humans special creation, the fact that
gesture was both more corporeal and more natural than speech did not mean that
it was less human.
Deaf educators such as Gallaudet made links between the language of nature,
the body, and God in the context of the religious revivals of the Second Great
Awakening. Compared to the religion of their Puritan forbears, the religion of
men like Gallaudet was much more affective than intellectualemphasis was
on feeling more than reason. So although the soul had long been identified as
the distinctive feature of humanity, and language as its index, the content of the
soul could shift historically. Where many early modern and Enlightenment-era
thinkers might have identified the soul with reason, antebellum evangelists were
likely to equate heart and soul. In this context, deaf educators believed that sign
language could effectively convey the feelings of the human heart; this natural
language was, in short, equipped to rescue the deaf from their prelinguistic spiritual darkness.
For oralists, however, the embodied nature of sign language was a problem.
Although manualists dominated antebellum institutions for the deaf, proponents
of teaching the deaf to read lips and speak rose to prominence in the years after
the Civil War. They were the children of Darwin, and were heavily influenced
not only by the connections Darwin made between humans and animals, but
especially by the kind of anthropological application of evolutionary theories to
human social organization that weve just been discussing. Though their faith in
Darwin should have prepared them to believe that human language was a product
of nature, the association of sign language with the body and with primitive man
made oralists wary. Oralists picked up on the ideas promoted by philologists
and anthropologists, that gesture speech was characteristic of an earlier stage of
human history and of primitive man, and they argued that the deaf deserved better than to be stuck at an earlier stage of civilization. An advocate of teaching the
deaf to read lips and vocalize, J. D. Kirkhuff, of the Pennsylvania Institution for
the Deaf, reiterated the notion that man emerged from savagery [and] he discarded gestures for the expression of ideas; Kirkhuff concluded that the duty of deaf
educators was therefore to emancipate the deaf from their dependence upon gesture language.32 For oralists, the problem was not, as it had been for antebellum
manualists, that those bereft of language were trapped in a spiritual wasteland,
but rather that without oral language, the deaf were trapped in a lower stage of
human social and mental development. Rather than seeing the body as an expres31. Sir Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 2nd ed. (London: John
Murray, 1824), 16.
32. Quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 43.

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sive resource, oralists saw it as a cage that imprisoned the mind; they believed
that only articulate speech could liberate the deaf from its confines. The irony, of
course, is that oralists were Darwinians who, in theory, should have abandoned
this sort of mindbody dualism but who instead found the bodys evolutionary
association with animality and savagery threatening to the humanity of the deaf.
They therefore believed it necessary to sharply distinguish, as Max Muller and
even William Dwight Whitney had, between expression and language, nature and
convention, body and mind. By contrast, it was the pre-Darwinian manualists
who felt comfortable locating language in nature and the body.
As the lively debates about the origin, function, and true nature of language
in fields such as philology, anthropology, and deaf education demonstrate, the
tension I identified in animal-protection propaganda was not peculiar to this
circle of late-nineteenth-century reformers. Rather, the dual claims in protectionist literaturethat animals did and did not have language, that language was
speech and that it was communicationreflected the major positions held by
contemporaries whose work led them to speculate about language. The notion
that languagedefined as both articulate speech and as conventionalseparated
man from animal had a remarkable staying power even in the wake of Darwins
explicit efforts to undermine such ideas. Only those anthropologists and reformers interested in sign language conceded Darwins point that articulate speech
was the evolutionary heir of natural, corporeal expression. Even then, the anthropologists and postbellum deaf educators who adopted this idea used it to reinforce
other hierarchies, not only between man and animal, but also between savage and
civilized human beings. Language, in other words, remained an important means
of marking boundaries, in no small part because it still functioned as an index of
the mind. And whether the mind was seen as proof of the soul or of civilization,
it remained critical to the definition of humanity.
The stakes of how one defined language and allocated linguistic capacity were
not, in the mid and late nineteenth century, simply academic. Rather, the definition and allocation of language had social, political, and moral consequences
as well. This is no surprise given the link between language and the mind/body
distinction. In a century that saw the expansion of white male suffrage, a war over
slavery, the emergence of a womens rights movement, an upsurge in politically
organized nativism, the explosion of evolutionary theory, and the rise of racebased segregation, the relationship among the body, personhood, and citizenship
was highly vexed. Philologists, for example, used linguistic evidence to argue
against the theory of polygenesis and for the unity of the human race; such arguments, which equated race and language, found their way to the pages of antebellum American magazines in the midst of fierce debates over slavery. Antebellum
deaf educators, the proponents of manual sign language, adopted the notion that
language was natural and corporeal to rehabilitate the deaf from not only spiritual
but also social isolation. In the postbellum era, anthropologists use of articulate
speech as an index of civilization was absorbed by men like Mallery and Clark
who served the United States Army at a moment when it was engaging in a long
series of wars to claim yet more land from Native Americans in the West. And for

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animal protectionists, whose aims were the most explicitly political and moral of
all the groups considered here, claims about language played a critical, if contradictory role. Let me return briefly here to animal protectionists to flesh out more
fully the ways in which linguistic claims served their cause.
First, as we have seen, animal protectionists claimed that animals had no language. Formed in the wake of the Civil War, American animal-protection organizations borrowed this trope of speechlessness from antebellum abolitionists. As I
mentioned earlier, the slogan of most SPCAs was we speak for those who cannot
speak for themselves, and the most popular protectionist magazine was called
Our Dumb Animals. This emphasis on animals inability to speak was clearly
borrowed from abolitionists. Both British and American abolitionists connected
speech to power. They described themselves acting as mouth and utterance for
the enslaved and asserted that we open our mouth for the dumb and plead for
our brethren who cannot plead for themselves.33 Though abolitionists claimed
that slaves could not speak for themselves, they often specified that slaves were
dumb because of social, not natural, conditions. The Lynn, Massachusetts Womens Anti-Slavery Society, for example, praised Frederick Douglasss ability to
plead for those, who, by American laws, cannot plead for themselves. Slaves
were forbidden from making legal testimony against whites, and this rule served
abolitionists as a metaphor for their larger condition.34 The difference between
speech and silence was, abolitionists imagined, the difference between freedom
and slavery; voicelessness was a trope of powerlessness. Abolitionists identified
reform as a process of giving voice, either through surrogates or, in the case of
abolitionists who published slave narratives, directly. Indeed, William Andrews
has remarked that most antebellum slave narratives not only trace a slaves
journey toward freedom, but crucially, most identify the pivotal moment in the
slaves journey as an awakening of their awareness of their fundamental identity
with and rightful participation in logos . . . understood as reason and its expression in speech.35 Defying the ban on slave testimony in a different register, the
slave narrative was the logical culmination of the awakening Andrews describes,
as it symbolizes the former slaves entry into the community of free, literate, and,
not coincidentally, speaking, persons.
Animal protectionists claim that animals were dumb and their slogan that we
speak for those who cannot speak for themselves thus resonated not just with
centuries of philosophical argument distinguishing animals from humans on the
basis of capacity for language, but also with abolitionists attempts to link moral
obligation with linguistic surrogacy. Abolitionists had suggested that their duty
to open our mouth for the dumb was based on common humanity, on the fact

33. Thomas Clarkson, To His Excellency, William Pennington, Governor of New Jersey,
The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal (December 19 1840), 96; A Subscriber, Society of
FriendsSlavery, and the Slave Trade, The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal (June 3,1837).
34. Lynn Womens A. S. Society, Liberator (August 11, 1843); Thomas D. Morris, Southern
Slavery and the Law, 16191860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 229.
35. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiography, 17601865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 7.

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that, as one put it, the Lord Jesus Christ died upon the cross for them equally
as for us.36
But, unlike abolitionists, animal protectionists often figured animals speechlessness as intrinsic rather than as socially, legally, or politically imposed. When
Stowe, for example, asserted that animals ought to have a convention and pass
resolutions, she was quick to point out that, much as they deserved to assert
their share and much as they would benefit from so doing, animals also had no
capacity to learn to speak, read, or write. Unlike slaves who had been artificially
silenced, animals were, in Stowes formulation, congenitally silent. Their silence
compounded their oppression to create moral obligation in humans. And because
animals silence was innate, the moral obligation of linguistic surrogacy was
based onand reinforceddifference rather than commonality. This introduced
a significant wrinkle into the formulation that animal protectionists had borrowed
from abolitionists. The claim that humans should speak for animals reinforced
traditional definitions of the species boundary even as it sought to create a moral
code that would traverse that same boundary.
Perhaps because emphasizing animals silence reinscribed their difference
from humans, protectionists also asserted that animals possessed linguistic
capacity. In so doing, they created the ground of commonality upon which acts
of cross-species moral obligation could rest. In the context of philosophical traditions that privileged language as the seat of personhood and speech as an exercise
of power and privilege, animal protectionists forwarded two central arguments
in favor of animal language. First, they claimed that animals had a language of
their own; second, they claimed that animals communicated through a corporeal
language of physical signs.
Most simply, protectionists echoed a claim that animals had a language of
their own. Animals were speaking to each other, but theirs was a foreign tongue.
Nineteenth-century animal-protection publications were filled with anecdotes
illustrating animals ability to communicate with one another. One author
claimed to know two horses that seemed to instruct each other in how to behave
toward humans. This authors cat had also convinced her dog to mother the cats
children when she was too frail to do so. If animals have no language by which
they can express their ideas of one another, how did the cat make known to the
dog that her kittens required food and care? the author queried.37 An article in
the Illinois Humane Societys monthly publication, Humane Journal, related how
the howler monkeys of South America were given to assemble in groups in the
morning and evening in order to sit and listen to one of their members speechify.
When he has done howling he motions to the rest, and then they all begin to
shout. Then, by order, they all cease, the orator begins again, and after having
been listened to with due attention they all depart. Now, dont tell me, the report
concluded, that such a proceeding is not exactly like an assemblage of human
beings listening to a speech.38 That human beings might not understand such
36. England. A Synopsis of the Proceedings of the London Anti-Slavery Convention, Liberator
(February 12, 1841).
37. Beatrice, Do Animals Talk to One Another? Our Dumb Animals 6, no. 3 (1873), 23.
38. Can Monkeys Talk? Humane Journal 10, no. 3 (1882), 42.

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animal talk did not, protectionists often claimed, mean that it was not a bona
fide language. It only meant that, like any foreign language, it would have to
be learned to be understood.39 Here protectionists clearly ratified the notion that
animal vocalizations were a form of communication that was at least continuous
with, if not identical to, language.
Though animals might both issue and comprehend vocalizations, protectionists also insisted that verbal language was not the only relevant means of communication that animals had at their disposal. Although many freely admitted
that animals could not articulate in human language, other SPCA activists argued
that animal bodies spoke a corporeal language. This corporeal language was particularly adept at communicating animals sentient experiences. Because animals
were, as one SPCA activist put it, doomed to suffer in silence, unless some such
pitying heart looked for the signs of suffering that could not make themselves
heard in forms of speech, it was the task of SPCAs to detect and translate such
corporeal signs.40 The corporeal language of signs was a particularly important
feature of animal-protection propaganda because, as James Turners work has
shown, the ability of animals and humans alike to experience pain and suffering
was a critical feature of protectionists anticruelty arguments.41 In claiming that
sentience, or the ability to experience pain, made one into what philosophers
would call a moral patient, protectionists suggested that the body rather than
the mind was the morally relevant boundary marker.
And, just as they equated the human and animal experience of pain, protectionists also equated their nonverbal expression of pain, insisting that bodily signs
were as unambiguous as any conventional forms of speech. As the founder of the
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Henry Bergh, put it,
animals give forth the very indications of agony that we do and, he went on,
theirs is the unequivocal physiognomy of pain.42 In addition to claiming that
animals suffered pain, anticruelty activists tried to create a visual vocabulary of
pain that stood in for animals own articulation of their suffering.
A good example of the effort to create this nonlinguistic vocabulary can
be found in the widespread campaign against the check-rein, a device used to
force a horses head to remain upright by preventing it from lowering its head.
SPCA publications pointed out that most people preferred to use the check-rein
for aesthetic reasons: they liked to see a horse with its head held high. To such
people, the high head signified a lively, game horse, the very picture of a noble
steed. Protectionists insisted that those trained in the detection of animal suffering would begin to interpret the same scene entirely differently. Humane men
39. Henry Bergh, An Address by Henry Bergh, Esq., President of the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Delivered in the Great Hall of the Putnam County Agricultural
Society; on the Occasion of the Late Fair, Held at Carmel, on the 19th of September, 1867 (New
York: Lange, Hillman & Lange, Printers, 1868), 6.
40. PSPCA, Third Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals (Philadelphia: PSPCA, 1871), 10.
41. James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). See also Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the
Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chapter 3.
42. Extracts from Address of President Bergh, of New York, Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 1 (1868), 6.

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and women could see the expressions of pain emitted by the horse in check, what
one SPCA publication called the most unequivocal evidences of distress and
agony. Anticruelty publications showed adjacent pictures of horses in and out of
check-rein, and instructed viewers to note that while in check the corners of [the
horses] mouth become raw, inflame, fester, and eventually the mouth becomes
enlarged on each side, in some cases to the extent of two inches. And, as if to
answer the traditional charge that animals had no consciousness and no language,
the anti-check-rein publication went on to assert that
Could these speechless sufferers answer the inquiriesWhy do you continually toss your
heads while standing in harness? Why do you stretch open your mouths, shake your heads,
and gnash your teeth? Why do you turn your heads back towards your sides, as if you were
looking at the carriage? they would answer: All this is done to get relief from the agony
we are enduring by having our heads kept erect and our necks bent by tight check-reins.43

Here the SPCAs posited evidence of suffering, straight from not just the horses
mouth, but also from the horses body. In the face of animal silence, anticruelty
activists efforts to train the public in the arts of detection insured that animal
bodies, if not their voices, still spoke.
Unlike the suggestion that animals spoke a foreign language, humane activists
assumed that the corporeal language of suffering was universal and required no
special decoding skills. Here they assumed, with antebellum deaf educators, and
with post-Darwinians who agreed that language was natural and corporeal, that
the body was capable of producing meaning. But in contrast to the other thinkers
Ive discussed, protectionists tended not to position the bodys signs as inferior
to articulate speech. In this, they were more like antebellum advocates of sign
language for the deaf than they were like their postbellum contemporaries in philology and anthropology. Indeed, one of my earliest examplesthe letter-writer
who protested that animals were not dumbasserted that corporeal language was
superior to speech because it was the language of the soul; as such, the language
of the body might be a surer source of truth than the conventional language of
the mind. In any event, protectionists believed that the natural language of signs
provided all the information that was morally relevant to them: animals shared
pain, pleasure, and affective experiences with humans.
It is tempting to see the debate between a view of language as expression, and
hence as natural, and a view of language as speech, and hence as convention, as
little more than a function of the broader debate about evolution that took place
after the Civil War. That is, if you are a nineteenth-century philologist or anthropologist who accepts Darwin, you can accept that human language is a product of
the body that evolved from forms of expression that humans share with animals.
You argue that both mind and language are products of the body. But if you dont
accept Darwin, you categorically separate expression from language and define
the latter as purely conventional and as bearing no relation to natural forms of
expression such as gesture, grimace, and grunt. You continue to argue for the
identity of language and mind, and you insist that they are distinct from the body.
43. The Check-Rein, Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 6 (1868), 44.

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The evidence from the history of antebellum deaf education and from postbellum animal protection, however, suggests that a broad definition of language as
natural and embodied communication is not simply the product of Darwinian
ideas. Rather it also had religious and sentimental roots that both predated the
publication of Darwins ideas and existed alongside them. For in claiming the
body and its language as morally relevant, animal protectionists did not rely
much on Darwin. Indeed, the paucity of discussion of evolutionary theory in
animal-protection propaganda is striking given how readily Darwinian ideas
could have been put to use by protectionists.
The body, moreover, was not simply an awkward fact to be denied on the road
to personhood. As scholars of liberal political theory and the history of liberal
societies like the United States have suggested, the body has often been seen as
the source of difference and hence of inequality. Liberal theory defines humans
as rational and demands that the particularities and the passions of the body be
denied in the quest for equality and inclusion. The debate Ive been describing
supports this view: for many philologists, anthropologists, and advocates of oral
education for the deaf, the possession of language was tied to the triumph of mind
over body, and the possession of language was used as a way of drawing morally
and politically relevant boundaries. But the fact that theres another side to the
debate complicates the story. For the broader definition of language as natural
and communicative is also linked to a definition of persons as not simply rational but as affective and embodied. In this alternative definition, exemplified by
manualists, by Darwin, and by animal protectionists, the body is a resource rather
than an embarrassment; it is the grounds for inclusion rather than exclusion. It
is the source of language, not its antecedent or antithesis. As historians, we too,
might locate not simply language but also history in the bodies of our subjects,
animals among them.
Northwestern University