In a farmhouse a few miles
south of Aurora, New York, Lewis Henry Morgan was born on November 21, 1818. He
attended Cayuga Academy in Aurora and then attended
Union College and graduated in 1840. He
then returned to Aurora where he read law and studied the Classics of Ancient
Greece and Rome. Morgan joined a young men's literary and social club and
renamed it Grand Order of Iroquois. He even
wrote a constitution to encourage a kinder feeling towards the Indians.
He admired the Seneca and went to Congress to help them fight off the Ogden Land Company. The Seneca's adopted him into one of their clans and called him Tayadaowuhkuh or "one lying across" or "bridging the gap" (a bridge between the Indians and white man). Morgan discovered that the Indians in North America had some kinship patterns in common with each other. He was the first person to classify the kinship system of relationship.
Morgan's work was the foundation for the new world view of genetic explanation, cultural evolution or social Darwinism. He also brought to the people's attention the organization of the ancient Greeks and Romans were the same as the clan organization of the American Indian tribes. Before the 1870's the people did not understand the nature of them. They thought that they were ceremonial or religious institution or derived from mythology. They didn't recognize them as fundamental units of social organization. Morgan cast a new light in this area of human society and history.
Cultural evolution, as developed by Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward B. Tylor, and others was based on a comparison among societies. Data from any source including archeological and ethnographic were accepted in assessing a society's evolutionary status. The cultures were compared in order to determine their relative positions on a single scale of development or success. The assumption that all human cultures develop along a single or unilinear path is perhaps best expressed by Morgan's evolutionary stages savagery, barbarism and civilization. The inflexibility of this stands out as the greatest weakness of the 19th century cultural evolutionary theory; "The errors of the unilinear evolutionists are apparent to us, with more than 100 years of observation. So it might be thought that they were ethnocentric, with their assessment of the developmental stages of other societies was heavily biased by their assumption that contemporary Western culture represents the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement, "(Discovering Our Past, Ashmore and Sharer).
Morgan frequently corresponded with people such as: John Wesley Powell, first Director of the Bureau of American Ethnology Adolph Bandelier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Charles Darwin.
Morgan was elected to membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856 and in 1875 was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. These are the two highest honors that American science can give to any anthropologist.
Near the end of the 19th century, Morgan said that human societies "progressed’ through 3 stages: savage, barbaric and civilized.
Morgan, Lewis H. The Indian Journals, 1859-62. The University of Michigan Press: 1959 pp. 2,3,4.
Morgan, Lewis H. Ancient Society. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 1965.
Morgan, Lewis H. Microsoft, Encarta, 96 Encyclopedia. 1993-95
Written by Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007