author
Ariel
1799–1883
Best known under the pseudonym Ariel, this 19th-century American pamphleteer is remembered today mainly for a notorious work of racist pseudoscience rather than for lasting literary achievement.
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About the author
Born in 1799, Buckner H. Payne was an American clergyman, publisher, and pamphleteer who sometimes wrote under the name Ariel. He is chiefly associated with The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status?, first published in 1867, a polemical tract that tried to defend white supremacist ideas with biblical and pseudo-scientific arguments.
Modern reference works describe Payne's pamphlet as racist, and that context is important to understanding his place in history. Rather than being remembered as a major literary figure, he is mainly noted because his writing reflects some of the most harmful and extreme arguments used in the United States during and after the Civil War era.
Payne died in 1883. For contemporary readers, his work is most useful as a historical document showing how prejudice was dressed up as scholarship in the 19th century.