Edward Fontaine
Doctor of Laws 1880
The Reverend Fontaine had been a colonel in the Confederate Army and received his honorary degree in 1880. He was the son of plantation owner Patrick Henry Fontaine.
Fontaine was the author of How the World Was Peopled, an 1872 text in which Fontaine examines the origins of humankind in relation to Christian teachings. Among other subjects, Fontaine discusses his theories on the origins of different races, the results of miscegenation (reproductive relationships between races of people) and Fontaine’s reasoning for the skin color of African people.
"If [Black people] presume to grasp the reins of power and to govern the white people of America, who have been steadily advancing in all the arts and sciences, and improving in all the wisdom and refinement of Christian civilization for eighteen centuries, it requires no inspired prophet to tell them that, in less than fifty years from this date, a group of them in any of the cities of the United States will be as great a curiosity to the white people of that day as a gang of wild Indians are now to the children of a New-England village; and in the next century the whole black[sic] race will have faded from our shores like the shadow of a dark cloud which will be seen no more." p. 184
"In the admixture between the negros and whites the process of the extirpation of the negro type is slower, and slight traces of it may be sometimes detected in the mixed offspring of the fifth generation. These are well known facts which apply to the general rule, to which there may possibly be some exceptions.” p. 191
"Aridity of the atmosphere, combined with intense solar heat, will intensify the carbonizing and blackening process. Such an effect would necessarily be produced upon the skin by the hot and dry atmosphere of Africa..." p. 191