The Adamic Race

This book was written during the American Reconstruction era as a direct response to a popular pamphlet by "Ariel" (Buckner Payne). While Payne claimed that Black people were soulless "beasts" who sneaked onto Noah's Ark, and other scholars like Drs. Young and Blackie offered counter-replies, Stephenson used his book to establish a specific racial hierarchy using both the Bible and geology. The Adamic Race is an 1868 historical book authored under the initials "M.S." by North Georgia geologist and mining engineer Matthew Fleming Stephenson. The book acts as a pseudoscientific and theological text that uses biblical interpretations and geological theories to argue for the "pre-Adamite theory"-the concept that multiple distinct species of humans were created before Adam.