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THESIS

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ESSENTIAL NATURE: BARTRAM’S GARDEN AND
NATURAL HISTORY IN PHILADELPHIA, 1790-1825

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Elizabeth S.C. Fairhead

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Doctoral degree in American Studies

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ESSENTIAL NATURE: BARTRAM’S GARDEN AND NATURAL HISTORY IN
PHILADELPHIA, 1790—1825

By
Elizabeth S.C. Fairhead

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies Program

2005

ABSTRACT

ESSENTIAL NATURE: BARTRAM’S GARDEN AND NATURAL HISTORY IN
PHILADELPHIA, 1 790-1 825

By

Elizabeth S. C. Fairhead

This study tells the story of Bartram’s garden in Philadelphia as the gathering
place of a community with William Bartram at the center and including Benjamin Smith
Barton, Alexander Wilson, James Mease, and Thomas Nuttall. The body of works that
make up the heart of the analysis are their publications on the physical sciences and
medicine—either books or journal articles published in Philadelphia between 1790 and
1823. By examining these documents and placing them in the context of the lives of the
authors and the intellectual environment, this dissertation argues that the projects of the
garden were characterized by the search for the essential: the essential characteristics of
each individual species, the essential relationships between species, and the essential
qualities of life. These explorations, though scientiﬁc in content were fundamentally
“theological in nature.” This study examines the late eighteenth century until the mid-
1820s and the intellectual, institutional, and cultural developments in American science
that the community at the garden participated in. The garden and its ultimate demise
represent the transition from eighteenth century to nineteenth century science and how

“naturalists” developed into “scientists” in America.

Copyright by
ELIZABETH s. c. FAIRHEAD
2005

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Is any scholarly work ever the work of any one person? First I’d like to
acknowledge all of the Bartram scholars who worked on the family before me; I learned
much from you. Research assistance and helpful suggestions came from the staffs at the
American Philosophical Society especially, but also the Academy of Natural Sciences,
College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Thank
you to the Bartram Trail Conference and the Michigan State University American Studies
Program for their support for this project. Joel T. Fry, the curator of Bartram’s Garden,
offered advice and assistance at every stage of this project. He is the real Bartram expert.

My committee, Jenifer Banks, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Arthur Versluis, were
each in his or her own way fabulous mentors and examples of the best of academia.
David Bailey, who stuck by me even when the going was really tough, who always had
more good things to say than I probably deserved, and who will always be a friend,
chaired this dissertation like no one else could. A special thank you to Kitty Geissler
who Opened her home and gave me so much, what would I have done without her?

Could I have ﬁnished without the care of my academic ﬁ'iends? Thank you for
the advice, inspiration, and support: Anne Heutsche, Mary Linklater, Patrick Lee Lucas,
Jennifer Stevens, and Robert Townsend.

Of course there were others, who inspired me along the way as I grew and
developed as a scholar and a historian: Carl Linden, all of my tutors at St. John’s, and
especially Joshua Mitchell. Thank you.

My family, mom and dad and John, whose belief in me was always there, knew I

could do this before I did. My dear, dear keeper of a husband, Steve, who made more

iv

sacriﬁces for this dissertation than he would have liked and never complained about it, I
love you. And ﬁnally, last but deﬁnitely not least, my tiny, yet-to-enter-this-world
inspiration for the last nine months--you don’t have a name yet, but thanks for all of your

help.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................. vii
CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: A GARDEN OF IDEAS ................................................ 1
CHAPTER 2

“IN SEARCH OF NATURE’S SCHEME ................................................... 29
CHAPTER 3

MUTABLE NATURE .......................................................................... 64
CHAPTER 4

“THE IMMORTAL SOUL OF NATURE” ................................................. 100
CHAPTER 5

EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION: SEEDS FROM THE GARDEN. . ..135
WORKS INCLUDED IN STUDY ............................................................ 147
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................. 153

vi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. The Garden today: the paths of the garden lead up to the house, built by John

Bartram. (photo by author) ......................................................................... 4
Figure 2. The rocky ridge that demarcates two regions.

(photo by author) .................................................................................... 7
Figure 3. A meeting place: the shady arbor near the house was a gathering place for
visitors. (photo by author) ......................................................................... 13
Figure 4. Jeﬂersonia Binata by William Bartram.

(American Philosophical Society) ................................................................ 39
Figure 5. Ann Bartram’s illustration to “Description of an American Species of Certhia,
or Creeper.” ........................................................................................... 74
Figure 6. The garden in summer.

(photo by author) .................................................................................... 88
Figure 7. Plate one of volume one of the American Ornithology ............................ 96
Figure 8. Plate nine of volume one of the American Ornithology ............................ 97
Figure 9. Plate six of the Elements of Botany .................................................. 113

Figure 10. The Philadelphia skyline from Bartram's garden.
(photo by author) .................................................................................. 121

vii

Chapter 1
Introduction: A Garden of Ideas

On May 18, 1792, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia, Benjamin Smith Barton described a plant that he hoped to establish as a
unique, unidentiﬁed species and therefore be given the privilege of naming. He had
studied “a ﬁne specimen” of the plant at Bartram’s garden, “which ﬂowered in the
beginning of the spring of the year 1791, in the neighbourhood (sic) of Philadelphia. Mr.
Bartram and myself carefully examined the plant, in the various stages of its growth, and,
together, made the drawings which accompany this letter.”1 This plant, Barton argues, is
a species distinct from two similar and previously identiﬁed ones. If the scientiﬁc
community accepts Barton’s argument, he proposes to name the plant after Thomas
Jefferson, Jeﬁ'ersonia Binata. This letter and its accompanying drawing illustrate the
collaborative effort of many naturalists’ hands over many years. Collaborations like this
were not unusual and this dissertation will explore the scientiﬁc efforts and the fruits of
those labors: the dissertations, accounts, descriptions and texts produced to document
those efforts. The scene set by this account—of a garden ﬁlled with exotic and rare
plants, of two men working together to make observations of natural specimens and to
create a document to share their results and conclusions with the scientiﬁc community—
will provide the background for this study. The garden where Barton and Bartram

worked was owned and cultivated by the Bartram family.

 

1. Benjamin Smith Barton, “A Botanical description of the Podophyllum Diphyllum of Linnaeus, in a
Letter to Charles Peter Thunberg, M.D. Kinght of the order of Wasa, Professor of Medicine and botany in
the University of Upsal, etc.,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 3 (1793): 338.

l

Bartram '3 garden and its city

The garden today is a historic landmark and every effort has been made by the
museum staff to return the garden to the way it looked during its heyday. Years of
neglect and misguided attempts at “improvement” have taken much effort to overcome.
Sitting on the Schuylkill River, the garden has three distinct areas. The lowest part of the
garden, where the water meets the land gently in a swampy area, is a shady Bald Cypress
grove. There the air is cool even on the hottest day and the light barely reaches the
ground. The tall, dense Cypress block the sun and their peculiar one-foot tall,
mushroom-like growths jutting out from the roots (these growths are called “knees”) give
this area a kind of fairy-tale feel. The Cypress send up these growths as an adaptation to
living in swampy areas. Farther along down stream, the river is met by a rocky barrier.
One of these ﬂat rocks has a large, circular, approximately six feet in diameter trench
carved into it: a cider press. The river sits below the press, keeping a respectful distance.
The unity of nature—the natural stone—and technology—the man-made trench used for
creating food stuffs—creates a sense of harmony between the human and non-human
elements of the space.

Climbing up to the next level one enters the main part of the garden. With the
river below and the house and upper-garden not visible, this part of the garden seems
even more extensive than it really is. The land slopes upward away from the river. Well-
established trees alternate with open areas of plant beds. Paths perpendicular and parallel
to the river criss-cross the garden at right angles. They are paved now. The beds are not
manicured, some planting areas are so inconspicuous that they appear almost by surprise.

In the shaded areas, ferns and shade plants grow. Birds are everywhere. The trees and

shrubs are ﬁlled with song birds out of sight but within hearing, while ground dwellers
are more obvious to the garden visitor looking down at the plants. In the center of the
middle garden, a small, round pond has been recreated in the spot where a larger,
artiﬁcial water garden once grew. The water seems “dirty” though this is a conscious
effort to maintain the habitat for water plants, insects, and amphibians. Grasses and
ﬂowering water plants crowd the space; the pond is small and the plants compete for
space near the edge.

A man-made stone wall separates the middle garden from the upper garden. A
row of boxwoods, overgrown and ungainly, must have once been a decorative break
between these two sections of the garden. Several stairs give the visitor access to the
smallest and most densely planted part of the garden. The upper garden is divided into
three sections of raised beds: the kitchen garden, the common ﬂower garden, and the new
ﬂower garden. The two ﬂower gardens are in bloom nearly all year, a splash of color
amidst all the green. The upper garden is adjacent to the stone house that John Bartram
originally built and his children and grandchildren made additions to.2 Near the house is
one of several Franklinia trees—the beautiful ﬂowering shrub discovered by the Bartrams
and named for Benjamin Franklin. The plant has not been seen in an uncultivated area
for two hundred years, but lives on in the garden that the Bartrams and their descendents
have maintained. Another namesake plant living close to the house is the Bartram Oak.

These named plants give the visitor insight into the projects of the garden and its history.

 

2. For a close “reading” of the house see Thorms Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

 

Figure l. The Garden today: the paths of the garden lead up to the house, built by John
Bartram. (photo by author)

In 1807, William Bartram said about the gardens that belonged to his family,
“they may with propriety and truth be called the Botanical Academy of Pennsylvania.”3
It had been established ﬁfty years earlier when John Bartram (1699-1777), William’s
father, had purchased 102 acres of land in 1728. Of this he dedicated approximately
twelve to the botanical garden. Because the coastal plain and the piedmont regions
literally come together within the space of the garden—a rocky ridge through the garden
demarks the transition from one region to the other—a great diversity of plants thrived in
a relatively small space in Kingsessing. At its peak, it is estimated that 1400 species were
growing in the garden representing various climates and regions. Including common as

well as rare and exotic plants, the garden was known throughout the scientiﬁc community

 

3. William Bartram, “Preface to a Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, and Herbaceous Plants, Indigenous to the
United States of America, Cultivated and Disposed of by John Bartram and Son, at their Botanical Garden,
Kingsess, near Philadelphia," in William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings, ed. Thomas P. Slaughter,
585-587 (New York: Library of America, 1996).

during much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to be one of the most
important botanical collections in the Americas.

It was not a garden designed as a status symbol of its owner, but a working
business started as a labor of love of its creator. In his 1787 journal, Manasseh Cutler,
the author of the 1725 publication, An Account of Some of the Vegetable Productions
Naturally Growing in this part of America, Botanically Arranged, makes note of a visit to
Bartram’s garden; "This is a very ancient garden, and the collection is large indeed, but is
made principally from the Middle and Southern States. It is ﬁnely situated, as it partakes
of every kind of soil, has a ﬁne stream of water, and an artiﬁcial pond, where he has a
good collection of aquatic plants. There is no situation in which plants or trees are found
but that they may be propagated here in one that is similar.”4 Cutler appreciated the
combination of good fortune and hard work that was necessary to build a collection like
that of the Bartrams.

With no formal education, but self-taught in Latin, John Bartram was
knowledgeable in the Linnaean classiﬁcation system and built the collection mostly with
his own efforts. For example, during the period of 1753-55 he made several trips to
Catskill Mountains collecting. His knowledge and successes brought him recognition
and in 1765 he was named Botanist to the King and received a commission to travel and
collect. Through his long-time correspondent, Peter Collinson, British merchant and
gardener, Bartram established connections to the British gardening community. The
established trade infrastructure in Philadelphia, and those connections to the plant

collectors in Britain and Europe allowed John to develop an established collection and

 

4. Manasseh Cutler. Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1987), 272-274.

business of plants. John Bartram had established the garden as a home and as a business
but it became a meeting point during his life-time. He was the center of his own circle of
scientists including Benjamin Franklin and David Rittenhouse; he was an original
member of the American Philosophical Society.

John’s land holdings not dedicated to the botanical garden were working farms
and provided income for the Bartram family and their tenants. John had eleven children
(two sons by ﬁrst marriage, nine children by second wife) not all of whom survived
infancy. A number of his children went on to establish themselves in business associated
with botany and medicine—his sons, Isaac and Moses, were apothecaries in Philadelphia
proper. John, Jr. and William followed most closely in their father’s footsteps
maintaining the family garden and business. The dual purpose of the garden, both as a
passion and as a business, worked to increase the reputation of the Bartram family as well
as provide income to the family. During the period of this study, the 17903 through
1820s, that income went to support John Bartram Jr. and his family. John Jr. had
inherited the garden, house, and family business upon John’s death in 1777.

The garden, during this time, was of use not only to gardeners, ﬂower traders,
hobbyists but also to scientists. The hobbyists and the scientists sustained the garden as a
viable business by working in conjunction, not in conﬂict. The namers of plants and
those who proﬁted from their production and sale had been working together for most of
the eighteenth century in England.’ The Bartrams discovered, collected, raised and made

available to the public plants that were unknown to plant enthusiasts in Europe, the

 

5. Mary Fissell and Roger Cooter, “Exploring Natural Knowledge: Science and the Popular,” in ed Roy
Porter, The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 4: Eighteenth Century Science (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003 ), 154.

colonies and then the new nation. The people who gardened for show provided an outlet

to which new discoveries could be marketed.

 

Figure 2. The rocky ridge that demarcates two regions. (photo by author)

It was in the tradition of the physic garden or the botanic garden. Cutler
observed, “every thing is very badly arranged, for they are neither placed omarnentally
nor botanically, but seem to be jumbled together in heaps.”6 Plants were arranged in
areas deﬁned by “natural growing conditions” rather than any formal classiﬁcation
system.7 There were no statues or fountains, no long grand staircases. It was, which was
not then as obvious as it would seem today, a collection of plants. The expectations for a
garden were not exclusively related to plants. Based on contemporary descriptions of the

garden, like Cutler’s, geometry was not the guiding principle of design. Historically,

 

6. Manasseh Cutler. Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler. (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1987), 273.

7. Joel T. Fry, “An international catalogue of North American trees and shrubs: the Bartram broadside,
1783" Journal of Garden History 16, no. 1 (January-March 1996): 14.

7

botanical gardens were level spaces with geometrically delineated spaces for the plants.
Though there was a straight line of boxwoods that acted as a break between a majority of
the garden space and the upper-garden and house, the overall impression of the space was
not one of right angles and level ground. For 200 years gardens all over Europe had been
designed with geometric precision. The early colonial gardens in North America
followed that pattern for the most part. Beds and paths were laid out at right angles in
rows and columns. Gardens were not just for plants, but incorporated statues, terraces,
water features (large and small) and small buildings.

Andrew Cunningham, in his essay, “the Culture of Gardens” explains that
collections of plants, like the Bartrams’, belonged to a different tradition than sculptured,
ornamental gardens, “Medicine (‘physic’) was the occasion for the making of these
gardens, but their ﬂourishing stemmed from the fact that they came to be run by people
passionate about plants: ‘botanists’ in the root meaning of the Greek term, plant
enthusiasts.”8 Yet, the great botanical gardens of Europe had origins and mandates very
different than Bartram’s. Bartram’s garden was privately owned and not associated with
a university or organization like the gardens at Leiden in Holland and Kew in London.
Although the garden was the only mid-Atlantic home to some plants, the garden was not
a systematic project of empire like Kew and the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

A botanical garden was more than just a collection of plants, it was a place of
learning, a living encyclopedia of natural information. Without printed botanical
references, botanical gardens allowed for the study of plants and nature more generally

from many regions and multiple continents. Botanical gardens in Europe, including the

 

8. Andrew Cunningham, “the culture of gardens” in Cultures of Natural History. ed. N. Jardine, F. A.
Secord and B.C. Spary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48.

8

one at Padua, attempted to incorporate animals, rocks and stones, as well as plants. This
effort was an attempt to capture the whole “great chain of being” in a single space.
Bartram’s garden participated in the effort to document the great chain of being but was
arranged and grown by practical gardeners.

There was a movement in the mid-eighteenth century, led by Lancelot
“Capability” Brown, the English landscape designer, that rejected the artiﬁcial priorities
of geometry and scale. Brown argued that an outdoor space should be designed in such a
way that the landscape’s inherent “capabilities” are highlighted. (The origin of the nick-
name.) He rejected the terraces and geometric patterns for more open, more ‘natural’
designs. John Bartram had established the garden during the period when Brown was
working in England and his garden lacked many of the traditional, “tmnatural” elements.9

But there was also another important inﬂuence on the shape and feel of the space.
The Bartrams were Quakers. Although John was disowned by his meeting, he continued
to incorporate many Quaker ideals into his life and life-style. (When it came time to
educate his son William, he expressed a concern that William’s education be practical
and not too much of a ‘gentleman.’) The Bartram estate remained unnamed. The “plain
style,” so important to the Quakers is evident in the garden that John Bartram established.

Bartram’s garden outside Philadelphia attracted many visitors, like Cutler during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centm'ies, including presidents and leading scientists. The
garden was a family business, but it was also a resource to the community. The plants

were the primary attraction, but they do not explain the whole reason for the visits.

 

9. For general garden history see: James and Louise Bush-Brown, America ’s Garden Book (New York:
Charles Scn’bner’s Sons, 1979); John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-
Creation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Christopher Thacker, The History of
Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

9

Other botanical resources in the area were known as either nurseries for the sale
of plants or the living trophies of individual collectors. David Landreth established a
seed business for vegetables and ﬂowers in 1784. Selling mostly to the Philadelphia area
at ﬁrst, Landreth’s business expanded to include customers in many states. From their
urban warehouse, the Landreths sold seeds for and introduced new ﬂowers, greenhouse
plants, and vegetables to the American market. William Hamilton’s estate and gardens,
the Woodlands, neighbored the Bartrams. A description of the garden published in 1809
said that “[t]he grounds, which occupy an extent of nearly ten acres, are laid out with
uncommon taste; and in the construction of the ediﬁce solidity and elegance are
combined.” The gardens contained “[fJoreign trees from China, Italy, and Turkey,
chosen for their rich foliage, or balmy odours, are diffusely scattered, or mingled with
sweet shrubs and plants, bordering the walk and. . .fragrant path winds round, openings,
judiciously exposed, such as the situation of the lands and rivers best admits, diversify the
scene.” 1° During this time, Hamilton’s collection included many “exotics” with a hot
house containing 10,000 plants, including bread-ﬁ'uit tree, coffee from Bengal, Arabia,
and the West—Indies, tea, cherimolia ﬁom Mexico, Indian god tree, iron tree of China.11
It was only the Bartrams’ collection that included all of the resources that attracted the
visitors: the collection of plants, the availability for sale of those plants, and the
horticultural and botanical knowledge that allowed for learning not only about how to
grow the plants, but also how they lived.

Set in a commercial and intellectual crossroads, the garden owes some of its

success to its location: Philadelphia. One of the largest cities in the British Empire before

 

10. Anonymous, “The Woodlands” The Port-Folio 2, no. 6 (Dec 1809): 505 APS Online.
11. Anonymous “The Woodlands” The Port-Folio 2, no. 6 (Dee 1809): 507 APS Online.

10

independence and, at the beginning of this period, the largest city in the new nation,
Philadelphia provided fertile ground for the growth of a garden like Bartram’s and the
community who gathered there. A successful trading center and the seat of the new
federal government until 1800, the port combined with proﬁtable mid-Atlantic
agriculture meant that Philadelphia was a ﬂourishing urban center. A trade economy
meant that exchange, travel, and diversity in all their forms characterized life in the city
and its environs. For Philadelphia, the “sea-born commerce played as vital a cultural as
an economic role; it enriched not only the pockets but the minds of its citizens.”12 The
lively cultural environment manifested in many forms—for example, in 1791, a new
1800 person theater was being built on Chestnut Street. It was the sciences that beneﬁted
as much as any other cultural area, though.

Science had been going on in the city for years. Obviously, Benjamin Franklin
had been experimenting with electricity. Additionally, James Logan, in the 17308, had
conducted experiments in plant reproduction. And David Rittenhouse had built his
famous orrery (a model of the heavens). The American Philosophical Society had been
established for several decades and had been promoting and documenting the latest
scientiﬁc developments, including signiﬁcant observations of the transit of Venus in
1769. Science in Philadelphia was not the pursuit of only the few, however.

Popular educational opportunities abounded. A lively print culture, with many
printers working in the city along with bookshops and libraries, made domestic and

international literature available. More diverse collections like the one at the Library

 

12. Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Pliladelphia in the Age of Franklin (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 6.

ll

Company established by Benjamin Franklin, along with specialized collections like in the
medical library at the Pennsylvania Hospital, were resources to many.

Museums provided access to specimens and visual materials. Opened in the 17805
and expanded in 1794, Charles Willson Peale’s museum exchanged, collected, and
displayed natural specimens from around the country and all over the world. The
inﬁ'astructure of trade already in place fueling the economy expanded the public
collection at the museum. In addition, the people of Philadelphia could attend lectures
and musical concerts at the museum. For those interested in the medical sciences, the
Pennsylvania Hospital included the ﬁrst medical museum.

University of Pennsylvania and its Medical School formed by merging the
College of Philadelphia with the University of the State of Pennsylvania. This
institutional backing of medicine and scientiﬁc interests brought the sciences into a
formal setting. By supporting the work of the faculty, the university and medical school
fostered the growth and development of scientiﬁc pursuits. With the creation of this
institution an increasing number of medical degrees were given in the United States
(formerly, travel to Europe was necessary for a medical education). The medical school
contributed to the diversity of Philadelphia’s population by attracting students ﬁ'om other
areas of the country.

The people of Philadelphia took advantage of all of these resources and Whitﬁeld
Bell argues that Philadelphians saw themselves as a scientiﬁc people. They were a

consciously scientiﬁc culture.l3 Public demand for and interest in technological

 

13. Whitﬁeld J.Bell, Jr., "Ihe Scientiﬁc Environment of Philadelphia, 1775-1790,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 92, no. 1. (Mar. 8, 1948): 6-14.

12

improvements encouraged the pursuit of the applied sciences.14 It was not only that the
people of Philadelphia were interested in the sciences, but also that they were a city of
“meeters.” Informal and named groups met all over the city—some with social and
political purposes and some just to socialize. This culture of sharing and exchanging
information created networks of knowledge throughout the cultural environment.
Because of the many resources and the infrastructure in place, “there was no better place
in America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century for the serious pursuit of science
than Philadelphia?” Bartram’s garden was just one of many meeting places for the

discussion of and contributions to the international scientiﬁc scene.

 

(photo by author)

 

14. Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Pliladelpht'a in the Age of Franklin (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

15. Whitﬁeld J.Bell, Jr., “The Scientiﬁc Environment of Philadelphia, 1775-1790,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 92, no. 1. (Mar. 8, 1948): 9.

13

The people and their works

This study tells the story of Bartram’s garden as a gathering point and the
community who studied there, but also examines the garden as a representation of the
intellectual, cultural and social forces at work at the end of the eighteenth and beginning
of the nineteenth centuries. It seems worth clarifying that I focus on those who had a
physical presence at the garden. The deﬁnition of community, of course, is much
broader. The connections extend far beyond those discussed here. For example, the
plant mentioned in Barton’s letter discussed above was given to Bartram by the French
naturalist Andrea Michaux. Although there were many who contributed to the process of
learning that went on at the garden, by contributing from afar via letter and package, this
study focuses on the men and women who worked, lived and studied together. This
community, who produced a number of the most signiﬁcant scientiﬁc works of the
period, explored many of the critical issues of the period. Rather than attempt to be
exhaustive, I will offer a more intensive analysis by focusing on this single group of
people who worked together in a common location during a relatively brief period of
time.

Bartram’s garden represents the strategies and techniques of scientiﬁc inquiry that
was conducted during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This dissertation
traces the utility of the garden to the scientiﬁc community and argues that with the
movement away from eighteenth century methods and projects, with the progression of
science in America, institutions like Bartram’s garden became less central to the
accomplishments of the scientiﬁc community. Intellectual forces and social

developments undermined the utility of the garden and the methods and projects it

14

represented. The practices of science, as well as the content of the studies, led to shifts in
the projects and the fragmentation of what had been a single community. Thus the
movement from eighteenth century science to nineteenth century science can be
understood as a splitting apart--a “fracturing” of interests. This dissertation explores the
causes of that split, especially the intellectual forces.

With the historical setting of the garden in the background, the study will analyze
the works of the men and women who worked most closely with William Bartram,
especially Benjamin Smith Barton, James Mease, Alexander Wilson, and Thomas
Nuttall. In addition, the study discusses the importance of Ann Bartram Carr, Robert
Carr, William Hamilton, and Frederick Pursh to the community working at the garden.
This study begins in 1791, the year of the publication of Bartram’s Travels, and ends
with Bartram’s death in 1823. By framing the study this way, I am not arguing that the
later life and death of William Bartram somehow fundamentally altered the state of
American science. I am arguing that during the period of the late eighteenth century until
the mid-18203 intellectual, institutional, and cultural developments in American science
were taking place. Bartram’s later life and career coincide with the intellectual shifts that
this study will clarify. The story of the garden has signiﬁcance beyond that of the
Bartram family. Bartram’s later life makes an interesting story, but also contributes to our
understanding of the period.

This period will be examined through the prism of works published in
Philadelphia by the people who worked around William during this period—either books

or journal articles published in Philadelphia between 1790 and 1823.16 These mostly

 

16. A model for this study can be seen in Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard
Moral Philosophy, [805-186] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

15

short, speciﬁc pieces seem on the sm'face to be evidence of an obsolete science. But
taken as a body, important issues and debates become apparent. I focus on the works of
physical science and medicine and consciously leave out works that would today be
called ethnography, linguistics, or anthropology.” Both Benjamin Smith Barton and
William Bartram wrote well-respected materials about native American peoples, but
these will not be examined here. Because we do not consider the study of human cultures
as part of the same science as the study of plants, because the issues of signiﬁcance,
questions and paradigms are not lumped together in today’s studies, I have applied this
bit of presentism to my study here. The analyses of works of Natural History concerning
humans are important, but differ so ﬁmdamentally from the analysis of works about ﬂora
and fauna, that this study will take on only the latter.

In their introductory essay to the collection of essays, Cultures of Natural History,
Nicholas Jardine and Emma Spary discuss different categories of practices of Natural
History: material, social, literary, bodily, reproductive. Addressing this distinction, this
work focuses on “literary and reproductive” which are the “conventions of genre,
representation and persuasion; in natural history and other disciplines these include, along
with rational argumentation, the gamut of rhetorical and aesthetic forms of persuasion. . .”

and includes the “. . .reproductive practices, that is, the means by which skills and

 

l7. Barton himself deﬁnes Natural History as ‘“‘Unquestionably, a large portion of what relates to the
fabric and functions of animals; of what relates to the general analysis of natural objects, whether they be
derived from the animal, vegetable, or the mineral kingdoms, or elsewhere; as well as what relates to the
uses of those objects in medicine, or the arts; and many other questions of a like nature are all, in strict
propriety, subjects of Natural History.” Benjamin Smith Barton, “A discourse on some of the Principal
Desiderata in Natural History and the best means of promoting the study of Science in the United States”
Read before the Linnaean Society, 10 June 1807. (Philadelphia: Denham and Town, 1807), 13.

16

knowledge are handed on from generation to generation.”18 The work of Natural History
is multi-faceted, but this study focuses primarily on the intellection production.

Many of the works examined here remain unknown to the scholarly community.
They will be placed into the context of the author’s life, into the context of the work
going on at the garden, and most signiﬁcantly into the scientiﬁc, literary, artistic, and
religious traditions and discussions they ﬁt into. Rather than attempt to make
generalizations about the group who worked at the garden, I will demonstrate whether,
and in what ways, they were participating in the on-going scientiﬁc discussions and
debates of their time.

Those discussions and debates were going on on both sides of the Atlantic. The
period can be seen as a one of transition. In his 1976 study, Enlightenment in America,
Henry May, after dividing the Enlightenment into four categories, calls this period the
“Didactic Enlightenment.”19 The Didactic Enlightenment was characterized by Scottish,
particularly the Common Sense philosophy: belief in scientiﬁc progress, intellectual
Mom, and republicanism. In the 1790s, May notes, Scottish Enlightenment
philosophers were readily available in the United States tln'ough booksellers and
universities.20 This dissertation will connect the works of the men and women who
worked with Bartram with the major themes and conﬂicts of this late brand of the
Enlightenment. The effort will be made to discuss particular philosophers and care taken
not to give in to the temptation to reduce all Scottish thinkers into a single way of

thinking.

 

18. N. Jardine, F. A. Secord, E.C. Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 8.

19. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

20. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 346.

17

The transition of what can be referred to in short-hand as eighteenth century to
nineteenth-century thought will be examined, here, primarily through the concerns of the
sciences. Peter Bowler, in Evolution: The History of an Idea, lays out ﬁve essential
elements that differentiate nineteenth from eighteenth century science: the expansion of
the time scale, the concept of a changing universe, the elimination of design and the
removal of “teleology,” the elimination of miracles, and the inclusion of man within
Nature.2| Though the works completed by the circle of scientists working with William
Barnum do not seem to explicitly struggle with all of these issues, I see and therefore will
focus on several: the concept of a changing universe, the elimination of design, and the
inclusion of man within Nature. Each of these elements will be deﬁned and discussed
more fully in the context of the works completed by Bartram’s circle.

This dissertation differs from many of the scholarly works about Natural History
because it is a look at Natural History not from the perspective of the journey, but from
the perspective of the preparation and return.22 By looking at the environment in which
the publications were composed rather than at the environments in which the natural
observations were made, new insight is gained into how scientiﬁc documents came into
being. The group of friends and colleagues who gathered at Bartram’s garden created a
kind of scientiﬁc infrastructure that allowed for explorers to learn how to collect and
document the natural phenomena they encountered. My study looks at those documents.
This is a story not of heroes or great adventures but the overlooked story of the men and

the society that made those heroes and great adventures possible. It is about the

 

21. Peter J .Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).
22. For example, along with the copious scholarship on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, others include:
Joseph Ewan, Rocky Moutoin Naturalists (Denver; University of Denver Press, 1950); Tony Rice, Voyages
of Discovery: Three Centuries of Natural History Exploration (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999); Henry
Savage, Jr., Discovering America 1 7001875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

18

preparation for the journeys and the recording and publication of the adventurers’
accomplishments.

Few of the publications that resulted from these explorations were simple
reproductions of travel journals. What is known of any journey was ﬁltered through an
editing process once the explorers were home and safe. The environment in which the
publications were compiled and edited is essential to understanding the ﬁnal products.
Without the constraints of ﬁnding food and shelter and maintaining the well being of
oneself and a team of explorers, the naturalist is able to really examine the data collected.
The personal, professional, and cultural priorities that are reﬂected in scientiﬁc
documents are especially manifest not in the ﬁeld, but where the data was organized and
the conclusions were drawn. Though not as dramatic, much of the work of science in the
early nineteenth century took place at desks, in studies, and in gardens.

Natural History during the late eighteenth century focused on a number of major
projects and questions. First was the effort to locate “type specimens,” or an individual
that exhibited the characteristics that identiﬁed a species. Explorations and botanical
gardens assisted naturalists in their efforts to locate type specimens. These specimens
were the backbone of the effort to identify and then classify species. Though interrelated,
the process of classiﬁcation differs from identiﬁcation. Identiﬁcation involves
determining where the lines between species are drawn, naming and recording unique
species. Classiﬁcation is the system of categories into which individual species are
assigned. Bartram and the others worked on both steps of this process. The period is
described as amateur generalists looking for new species and the type specimens to

illustrate them. Many scholarly studies of Natural History of this period stop at this

19

point. This study starts at this point and will discuss the signiﬁcance of the hierarchies
and formulas used to make sense out of the seemingly overwhehning number of
organisms found in nature.

These two interrelated but separate processes allowed the naturalists to explore
larger questions about nature. The process of classiﬁcation focused not only on the lines
between similar species, but took on broader questions such as the difference between
plants and animals. By answering questions about classiﬁcation and identiﬁcation these
scientists were struggling to make sense of the whole of nature. By examining the
processes of classifying and identifying organisms, we gain insight into the rules these
scientists imagined that nature was playing by.

The effort to identify species ﬁt into the larger process of mapping the ﬂora and
fauna of North America (i.e. not only what the species were but also where they grew and
thrived). Biogeography was essential to the later nineteenth century projects as part of
the struggle to understand the relationship between environment and generation.23
Biogeography contributed to the struggle to understand the disappearance of species,
whether because of extinction or transformation. This troubling phenomenon required
reirnagining nature and nature’s rules. This dissertation will help connect the dots
between the end of the eighteenth century project, biogeography, and the developments
that would occupy natural scientists throughout the nineteenth century, evolutionary

theory.

 

23. For a more expanded discussion of biogeography see Susan Delano McKelvey, Botanical Exploration
of the Dans-Mississippi West, [790-1850 (Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts: Arnold Arboretum of Harvard
University, 1955).

20

A number of the works included in this study focus on botanical processes,
especially respiration, reproduction, and movement. These studies were tied to the
debates on vitalism or the effort to understand the basis for life. Materialist philosophies
brought into question the source of the “life force.” Did that force exist within matter
itself or was it separate and in some way connected to God? These debates related to
where the lines can be drawn in the hierarchy of life, if all living creatures possessed
certain qualities of life, were they all equally valuable?

Each of these projects, identiﬁcation, biogeography, classiﬁcation, etc,
contributed to the effort to make sense of nature. That effort was characterized by the
search for the essential: the essential characteristics of each individual species, the
essential relationships between species, and the essential qualities of life. These
explorations, though scientiﬁc in content, I argue, were fundamentally “theological in
nature.”

Science, scientist, Natural History, and naturalist have to this point been used
interchangeably, which leads to a second assertion of this dissertation. The OED deﬁnes
scientist as “a person with expert knowledge of science; a person using scientiﬁc
methods.” Although the word was not available to the people studied here to describe
themselves—the OED dates the origins of the word itself to the l830s—the term scientist
will be used here.“ The assertion that the people working with William Bartram were
scientists is as much a conclusion as a starting point for the arguments that make up this
study. The word “science” is even more problematic. Science is understood both as a
method and as a subject of study. Science today is not just the study of nature but the

study of nature that employs the scientiﬁc method. Modern science has come to mean the

 

24. Oxford English Dictionary, third edition. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)

21

highly specialized, institutionally-backed practice of experimentation and data collection
with formal peer reviewed publications. Even more strictly conceived, scientiﬁc study is
the execution of controlled experiments to verify testable hypotheses. One of the
challenges of this study is the exploration of these expressions and the assertions they
carry for the specialist and the non-specialist. The circle of scientists who worked with
William Bartram illustrate a crucial point in not only what scientists studied but how

those studies were conducted.

Scholarship

Scholarship on Natural History has stressed the division between natural
philosophy and natural history. Natural philosophy is deﬁned as the exploration of
theory while natural history is the record of the observable. With its origins in Francis
Bacon’s divisions of knowledge, natural history belongs to the realm of memory and
natural philosophy is driven by reason.” The practical companion to this is the
difference between a ﬁeld and a closet naturalist—with the former practicing natural
history and the latter natural philosophy. Because this distinction does not apply to the
people who worked at Bartram’s garden—each of the people studied here gathered and
made observations as well as wrote up the results and offered hypotheses for
understanding them—these divisions will not be adopted in this study.

Another distinction is offered by Pamela Regis, in her study, Describing Early
America: Bartram, Jeﬁ'erson, Crevecoeur and the Inﬂuence of Natural History. She

employs the categories: “collectors” and “hunters.” She deﬁnes hunters as those who

 

25. Richard Yeo, “Classifying the Sciences,” in ed Roy Porter, The Cambridge History of Science. Volume
4: Eighteenth Century Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 253.

22

work in the ﬁeld and collectors as those who sponsor the repositories for the organisms
found in the ﬁeld. This distinction, however, neglects to take into account the role played
by Bartram and his garden which acted as a sort of middle step: hunting and collecting,
then distributing to the more formal “collectors.” The process of bringing examples of
nature to the collector was often more complicated than a simple bi-partate categorization
can convey.26

Natural History and science in early America have been studied from a number of
angles and those studies ﬁt within separate bodies of scholarship. This study attempts to
bridge the gap between histories of science and the histories of Natural History. Cultural
histories attempt to deﬁne Natural History, to document the people and works as cultural
processes.27 The distinction between these approaches can be made at the point when the
scholar selects which works will be incorporated in the analysis. Natural History is more
literary than hard science. Scholars analyze texts based on the authors’ use of symbolism
or word choice, for example. For these analyses, much scholarship on Natural History has
neglected the more scientiﬁc works since travel narratives make for more compelling
reading, and give a literary scholar much more material to work with. Much non-literary
scholarship about Natural History is often like reading Natural History itself: long lists
and descriptions of subjects, in this case people and their works of interest, catalogues of

people and their works that read just like the catalogues of birds, plants or bugs. A work

 

26. Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jeﬁ'erson, Crevecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural
History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

27. See Joseph Kastner, A World of Naturalists (London: John Mm'ray, 1978); Andrew Lewis, “The
Curious and the Learned: natural history in the Early American Republic” (dissertation, Yale, 2001);
William Martin Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1941).

23

that examines the scientiﬁc publications and the intellectual environment in which they
were written is still needed.

Histories of science, which examine the naturalists as they contribute to modern
interpretations and assertions about nature, examine Natural History as a scientiﬁc
process. These focus on progression of hypotheses, follow the stepping stones to the
“truth” as it is understood at the time of the writing. Much of this body of literature treats
early science with a kind of contempt, what I have come to call the “snicker-into-one’s-
sleeve” scholarship as though to say, “look at how silly these people were.” In this study
I hope to avoid the tendency to consider any theories or ideas that most closely resemble
what is held to be true today as “right” or “smart” and anything contrary to them as not
worthy of respect. The accepted concepts and the data available may have led scientists
to draw conclusions that are different than those commonly held today. It may be that
based on the evidence available and the accepted paradigms, the theories put forth were
the most reasonable and or creative then imaginable. In this way, histories of science are
lacking. On a related note, this study also touches on the development of scientiﬁc
institutions in nineties.28

This study explores the scientiﬁc hypotheses in the context of the dominant,

Western intellectual paradigms, or put another way, the scientiﬁc works will be examined

 

28. The institutionalization and professionalization of science in America is covered in Stanley M.
Guralnick, Science and the Ante-Bellum American College. Memoirs of the American Philosophical
Society, Vol. 109 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975) and George H. Daniels, “The
Process of Professionalization in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820-1860,” Isis 58, no. 2
(Summer 1967): 150-166. Alexandra Oleson and Sanbom C. Brown, eds. The Pursuit of knowledge in
Early American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Histories of individual
institutions such as the American Philosophical Society, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia
Society for Promoting Agriculture are available.

24

within the context of Enlightenment thought.29 The signiﬁcance of Enlightenment
thought to the course and success of the American Revolution has been studied
extensively.30 But the political aspects of the Enlightenment do not exhaust the inﬂuence
those schools of thought had on the inhabitants of the North American colonies. A
discussion of the bridge between eighteenth and nineteenth century thought in the context
of science is still needed.3 '

This study will attempt to ﬁll two gaps in the scholarly literature. The ﬁrst is in
timing. This study falls between John C. Greene’s American Science in the Age of
Jeﬂemon which touches on the beginning of the period discussed here and George
Daniels’s American Science in the Age of Jackson, which brieﬂy discusses the end.32 The
next is analytical. Rather than separate the scientiﬁc text and images, this study will take

textual and visual evidence as one.33 Finally, I will challenge the now much out-of—date

 

29. Collection of essays on the Scottish Enlightenment in America, especially Andrew Hook,
“Philadelphia, Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment” and Deborah Brunton, “The Transfer of
Medical Education: Teaching at the Edinburgh and Philadelphia Medical Schools” in Scotland and
America in the Age of the Enlightenment eds. Richard B. Sher and Jefferey R. Smitten (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990); Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jeﬁ’erson 's Declaration of
Independence (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978) as Wills argues that the Scottish
Enlightenment had signiﬁcant inﬂuence of Jefferson during the writing of the Declaration of Independence,
he demonstrates the access to and acceptance of the Scottish enlightenment in North America.

30. See Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic, I7 76-1 787 (New
York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969); 1. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the
Political Thought of Jeﬂerson, Franklin. Adams and Madison (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995).

31. Studies that explore this same period include: Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1 768-1822:
The search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989).

32. This study supplements John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jeﬂerson (Ames: Iowa State
University Press, 1984) and George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1968). For an earlier study see Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in
Revolutionary America, 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).

33. For studies of visual representations of nature see: Ann Shelly Blum, Picturing Nature: American 19th
Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Michael Gaudio,
“Swallowing the Evidence: William Bartram and the Limits of the Enlightenment,” Winterthur 36, no. 1
(Spring 2001): 1-18; Amy R. W. Meyers, ed. Art and Science in American: Issues of Representation

(San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998); Charlotte M. Porter, The Eagle ’3 Nest: Natural History and
American Ideas, 1812-1842 (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1986).

25

study of the science of this period: Daniel Boorstin’s The Lost World of Thomas
Jeﬂ‘erson.“ By focusing more on the questions that occupied the scientists, rather than
attempting to identify a single answer, I hope to avoid the gross generalizations that
Boorstin falls into.

This study will supplement very competent biographies of Alexander Wilson and
Thomas Nuttall.” The biography of any single individual often neglects the perspective
of the interactions within a community. A number of scholars have examined Bartram’s
Travels, this study focuses on Bartram’s other, less well-known works.”5 Finally, this
research will supplement a number of biographies of William Bartram which neglect the
later years of Bartram’s life.37 This work ﬁlls in those later years, as well as discusses the
relationships William had with scientists and offer an analysis of him out from under the

shadow of his more famous father.38

 

34. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jeﬂerson (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1948).

35. Two good biographies of Alexander Wilson are in print, Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson:
Naturalist and Pioneer (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1961) and Clark Hunter, The Life and Letters of
Alexander Wilson (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983). A full-length biographical work
of Benjamin Smith Barton by Joseph Ewan is being edited and readied for press, for a shorter study see:
Jeannette E. Graustein, “The Eminent Benjamin Smith Barton” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 85 (1961): 423-438. For biographies of Thomas Nuttall, see Jeannette E.Graustein, Thomas
Nuttall. Naturalist: Explorations in America [808-184] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) and
I.M.M. MacPhail, Thomas Nuttall (Lisle, Il: Morton Arboretum, 1983).

36. The scholarship on Bartram’s Travels is discussed more in chapter two. For references see note 49 in
chapter 2.

37. The scholarship of this period of Bartram’s life is “sketchy” says Joel T. Fry the Curator of Bartram’s
Garden in email discussion, August 14, 2002.

38 There are a number of studies that deal with both John and William Bartram, see: Ernest Earnest, John
and William Bartram: Botanists and Explorers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940).
Josephine Herbst, New Green World (New York: Hastings House, 1954); Thomas Slaughter, The Natures
of John and William Bartram (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

26

Summary of Chapters

The chapters are arranged chronologically, to tell the story of the garden and the
people who worked there. Chapter two, “In search of nature’s scheme,” examines the
years immediately following the publication of the Bartram’s Travels, 1791-1803.
During these years, Bartram established a working and personal relationship with
Benjamin Smith Barton and helped to introduce the next generation of Bartrams to
Natural History. Benjamin Smith Barton and James Mease were establishing themselves
as signiﬁcant contributors to the scientiﬁc and medical community of Philadelphia. The
chapter also introduces a number of the basic processes of Natural History and medicine
during this period and discusses how those processes were part of the work going on at
the garden. Chapter three, Mutable Nature, which focuses on the years of 1803-1808,
sees the arrival of Alexander Wilson and Thomas Nuttall at the garden. During this
period Barton edited the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal producing and
organizing works on botany, medicine, and zoology and Alexander Wilson began
working on the American Ornithology. The community at the garden was struggling to
make sense of the malleability of species by examining hybrids, species distribution, and
the disappearance of species. Chapter four, “the immortal soul of nature,” examines the
very end of Bartram’s career, the years from 1809 to] 823. During this time, the United
States fought a war and because of the war, the community was separated for many years.
The untimely deaths of several of the younger members of the community cut short the
list of accomplishments associated with this group. Bartram and his colleagues
participated in the debates between vitalists and materialists, while attempting to

understand the distinction between humans and animals.

27

The study concludes with William Bartram’s death in 1823. By 1850, the garden
was declared bankrupt and the house and the surrounding lands were sold to pay debts.
What had once been a central location for the performance of the scientiﬁc projects of the
new nation no longer had a use to the scientiﬁc community. The “old ways” of science
were passing out of use and replaced by systems and paradigms more familiar to the ones
worked with today. The practice of science was becoming more specialized and
professionalized as the eighteenth century projects were reaching their conclusions. The
methods and the content of science were shifting. This study does not follow a
movement ﬁom one point to another so that the beginning is somehow different than the
end. Instead, framed to reveal a period of transition, the efforts to bridge and reconcile
two ways of thinking are highlighted. Great scientiﬁc revolutions attract much attention,
but the gradual yet dramatic movement from one perspective to another is a harder story

to tell. This is a story of an evolution such as that.

28

Chapter 2
“In search of nature’s scheme”

Sweet ﬂows the Schuylkill’s winding tide,
By Bartram’s green emblossom’d bowers,
Where nature sports, in all her pride
Of choicest plants, and fruits, and ﬂowers
Alexander Wilson, “A Rural Walk”

Spring at Bartr'arn’s garden must have been an extravaganza. Pennsylvania
winters are cold and unequivocal; spring comes to the mid-Atlantic relatively early but
with a sigh of relief. The collection at Bartram’s garden included many ﬂowering trees.
The Red Buckeye trees with stalks of tubular red ﬂowers bloomed at the end of April.
The bursts of red early in the spring attracted hummingbirds—Barton made note of the
red throated honeysucker (hummingbird) at the end of April as well. With May came the
tulip trees with their teacup shaped and sized ﬂowers. The month ﬁnished with the
Mountain Laurel in bloom—a tall shrub covered with bunches of delicate ﬂowers. Each
bunch made up of twenty individual ﬂowers making the blossoms look puffy. The
garden played host to swallows and martirrs, and water birds, like herons that ate the
insects and other critters living near the water. Many visitors must have enjoyed the
garden during this reawakening of nature. But they came to the garden not only for the
showy ﬂowers and ﬂowering trees, they came to take advantage of the resources the
garden offered. One of the main resources was William Bartram, “Mr. William Bartram

has a library within himself,” Henry Muhlenberg would write.39

 

39. Henry Muhlenberg to Zaccheus Collins, November 18, 1813, in Botanical correspondence of Zaccheus
Collins of Philadelphia, 1805-1827 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 1958).

29

William Bartram and his background

Born on April 20, 1739, William (and his twin, Elizabeth) was the fourth (and
ﬁfth) child to William’s mother, Ann, and seventh (and eighth) to John Bartram. William
received a classic education at the Academy of Philadelphia, learning Greek and Latin.
In the 1750s, when Bartram was in his teens, he traveled with his father to various parts
of New England, helping with the collecting and documenting that supported and
enhanced the family’s botanical collection. William showed much interest in Natural
History throughout his early years but his father believed it was not an option as what we
would call a “career path.” John Bartram’s connections among the Philadelphia
professions made a number of other options available, particularly, a physician, or a
printer. Instead, in a decision that seems to confuse many of William’s biographers
(myself included), the young man chose, in 1756, to become an apprentice to a merchant.
Upon the completion of his apprenticeship and with the support of his father and his
uncle, William went into business in North Carolina. But this business venture was not a
success. The failure made him available to accompany his father, in 1765, on a collecting
expedition throughout the American south. Rather than return to Philadelphia with his
father at that time, William attempted to establish a plantation on the St. John’s River in
Florida This was a complete failure, leaving William with few ﬁnancial resources or
options for a future in business.

His knowledge of the South would not go to waste however, because ﬁom 1773
to 1777, William, with the sponsorship of John Fothergill, a Quaker merchant and plant

enthusiast ﬁ'orn London, traveled to the very edges of white settlement for “the discovery

30

of rare and useful productions of nature, chieﬂy in the vegetable kingdom?”0 He traveled
and collected on a journey that would take him ﬁ'om North Carolina to the Mississippi
River through a greater part of Florida and much of the territory in between. Upon the
completion of this journey, William returned to Philadelphia, to the home and business of
his father and brother.

William’s failures in business may explain why John left the house and garden to
Jolnr, Jr., William’s younger brother. And, perhaps it was the failures of his early
business adventures that led William to stay so close to home for the rest of his life.
Perhaps it was the poor health he struggled with, recurring trouble with his eyes, or the
severe leg ﬁ'acture he suffered in 1786 when he fell ﬁom the tree in which he was
gathering seeds. Even before his health started to fail and before his accident, he seems
to have kept pretty close to home. Elected a member of the American Philosophical
Society in 1768 it appears that he did not attend any meetings, ever.41 He knew that he
was not living up to the expectations of society. In a letter written while he was in his
50s he refers to himself as being in the dishonourable status of a bachelor living with his
brother. The tone of the letter is not somber though—a little self-deprecation came easily
to him. Whatever the reason for his choices to stay, William Bartram lived and worked
for the rest of his life at the garden that belonged to his brother and brother’s descendents.

In May 1797, playwright William Dunlap makes the following entry in his diary
after visiting the garden: “Arrived at the Botanist’s garden, we approached an old man

who, with a rake in his hand, was breaking the clods of earth in a tulip bed. His hat was

 

40. William Bartram, William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings ed. Thomas Slaughter (New York:
Library of America, 1996), 27.

41. Francis Harper, introduction to The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalist 's Edition (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1958).

31

old and ﬂapped over his face, his coarse shirt was seen near his neck, as he wore no
cravat or kerchief; his waistcoat and breeches were both of leather, and his shoes were
tied with leather strings. We approached and accosted him. He ceased his work, and
entered into conversation with the ease and politeness of nature’s noblemen. His
countenance was expressive of benignity and happiness. This was the botanist, traveller,
and philosopher we had come to see.”"2 Dunlap describes Bartram as “old” though he
was only 58.

The only non-verbal portrait of William was painted by Charles Willson Peale in
1808 when Bartram was 69 years old. It shows a fragile looking older man with thinning
white hair, white eyebrows, and blue eyes against a plain background. Bartram is dressed
in a dark coat with brass buttons—perhaps an homage to the traveling for which he
would become famous. He looks away from the viewer, into the distance with his
eyebrows raised slightly, as though he sees something that interests him. Flowers tucked
in Bartram’s jacket are the only indication of his love for and dedication to Natural
History.43

When we meet him now, in 1791, these portraits of Bartram are still to come. He
is younger, perhaps he still has some darker hair on his head. It is in that year that his
literary and scientiﬁc masterpiece has ﬁnally been published after fourteen years of

writing and revisions. 4" Bartram’s best-known work, called The Travels, describes his

 

42. William Dunlap quoted in William Bartram: Thavels and Other Writings ed. Thomas Slaughter (New
York: Library of America, 1996), 604.

43. The ﬂower in Bartram’s lapel has attracted some scholarly curiosity, but no consensus has been reached
on the species. Portrait owned by Independence National Park.

44. For discussion of the differences between Bartram’s ﬁrst draft and the published version of the Travels
see Nancy Hoffman’s dissertation, “The Construction of William Bartram’s Narrative Natural History: A
Genetic Text of the Draft Manuscript for "Travels. . .”” (University of Pennsylvania, 1996).

32

journey through the American south-east in the 1770s.“ Consisting of four parts, The
Travels describes the people, geography, ﬂora, and fauna of the six states Bartram
visited. The expedition, much of which Bartram traveled alone or in small groups,
spanned a number of years allowing for botanical observations in every season.
Bartram’s connections opened doors and territory throughout the South; he visited wild
areas where his life was at times at risk from animals or the elements as well as the
plantations of land holding settlers. The Travels is ﬁlled with descriptions of both natural
and man-made phenomenon throughout the southern region. As he moves from place to
place the narrative alternates between broad impressions, “the land is lower and more
level and humid,”"6 and speciﬁc, minute descriptions of particular species. The effect of
this is to tell a story while providing data about individual organisms. The published text
included a number of illustrations, all completed by Bartram. They share the technique
of the text alternating between broad views, a map of a river basin, and the speciﬁc, the
head of a rattlesnake. Interspersed in the text are moments of recognition and awe for the
wonders of nature.

William Bartram’s Travels earned him the respect of “curious” and scientiﬁc
audiences. A contemporary review said that it deserved a “respectable place among those,
who have devoted their time and talents to the improvement of natural science.” The
unusual combination of science and art did not sit well with this reviewer, however. He

ﬁnds fault with the “rhapsodical effusions” and describes the style to be “disgustingly

 

45. The full title of the work is Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West
Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive territories of the Musogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the
Country of the Chactaws. Containing an account of the soil and natural productions of those regions;
together with observations on the manners of the Indians.

46. William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings ed. Thomas Slaughter (New York: Library of America,
1996), 40.

33

pompous.” An example of a rhapsodical effusion appears during a description of a lake:
“Ye vigilant and faithful servants of the Most High! Ye who worship the Creator
morning, noon and eve, in simplicity of heart! I haste to join the universal anthem. My
car and voice unite with yours, in sincere homage to the great Creator, the universal
sovereign.” The useful information and facts make the publication worth reading, the
reviewer notes, though the “garb in which they appear” may not meet with the approval
of the reader.47 It is possible that Bartram saw this review, for the magazine in which it
was published was in Philadelphia.48 The reviewer is not comfortable with the “poetry”
of the work, and believes it detracts ﬁ'om the success of the overall work.

The debate, whether The Travels is fundamentally a scientiﬁc or artistic
accomplishment, continues in modern scholarship. ‘9 Deﬁned and defended as both a
great scientiﬁc achievement and signiﬁcant contribution to development of American
Romantic literature, the work refuses to ﬁt neatly into any one category. Berta Grattan
Lee argues in the brief essay “William Bartram: Naturalist or “Poet”?” that Bartram is in

fact both a scientist and a poet. The literary devices employed by Bartram may diminish

 

47. “Impartial review of American publications. Travels through North and South... by William Bartram.”
The Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (March and April 1792): 266-267. APS Online.

48. William Bartram, William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings ed. Thomas Slaughter (New York:
Library of America, 1996), 101.

49. The scholarship on The Tl-avels is extensive. Primarily for this reason, this dissertation will not focus on
The Travels. For analyses of the work see among others: Charles H. Adams, “Reading Ecologically:
language and Play in Bartram’s Travels.” Southern Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1994): 65-74. Douglas, Anderson,
“Bartram’s Travels and the Politics of Nature.” Early American Literature 25, no. 1 (1990): 3-17. Larry R.
Clarke, “The Quaker Background of William Bartram’s View of Nature.” Journal of the History of Ideas
46 no. 3 (July — Sept. 1985): 435-448. N. Bryllion Fagin, William Bartram: Interpreter of the American
Landscape. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933). Christopher Looby, “The Constitution of
Nature: Taxonomy as Politics in Jefferson, Peale and Bartram.” Early American Literature 22, no. 3
(1987): 252-273. John Seeyle, “Beauty Bare: William Bartram and his Triangulated Wilderness.”
Prospects [Great Britain] 6 (1981): 37-54. Bruce Silver, “William Bartram’s and Other Eighteenth-
Century Accounts of Nature.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 4 (Oct-Dec. 1978): 597-614. Philip
G. Terrie, “Tempests and Alligators: the Ambiguous Wilderness of William Bartram.” North Dakota
Quarterly 59, no. 2 (1991): 17-32.

34

the pure “truth” of the work, but they do not eliminate the value of the work.50 This is
partly accurate. By posing the question if Bartram is either a naturalist or a poet seems to
suggest that they are mutually exclusive categories. The task of a scientist and the task of
a poet are inherently different, the question assumes. By not attempting to convey an
“objective” truth of his journey, Bartram can no longer be considered a scientist. Pamela
Regis, in Describing Early America: Bartram, Jeﬂerson, Crevecoeur, and the Inﬂuence
of Natural History, seconds this: “If a writer is scientiﬁc, he cannot truly be said to be
romantic. These divisions are modern, imposed from a perspective in which science is
looked upon as positivism and art as extra rational.”51 If this distinction is modern, the
question remains what is the relationship between science and romance in the late
eighteenth century when Bartram was writing? What is nature of scientiﬁc pursuit during
this period? How do the scientists themselves seem to understand their task? What was
the relationship between art and science? Bartram’s later works and the works of those
who worked around him offer insight into this dichotomy. The upcoming discussions

will help clarify that.

Type specimens
Around the time of the publication of the Travels, a ﬁiendship between Bartram
and Benj arnin Smith Barton that would last for a life-time started to solidify. William

wrote to Barton,

 

50. Grattan Berta Lee, “William Bartram: Naturalist or “Poet"? " Early American Literature 7, no. 2
(1972): 124-129.

51. Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jeﬁ'erson, Crevecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural
History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 61.

35

“I beg leave to offer these observations and specimens to your
notice and investigation since I ﬁnd you have an extraordinary talent and
relish for discoveries in every branch of Natural History (particularly with
regard to this our Native Country) which I hope you will pursue through
life. I am willing nay desirous of contributing all I know for its
promotion. I foresee the magniﬁcent structure and would be instrumental
for its advancement—Tools and instruments you know, are as necessary
as materials in the hands of an Architect. And tho I am comparatively like
an old Saw, or Auger, or Ax, worn out, rusty, and cast away as useless, yet
even these rejected instruments after being new steeled and repaired may
again be preferred to some useful purpose or other.”52
Barton would make use of Bartram’s skills and knowledge over many years of
collaboration and friendship.

Barton, born February 10, 1766 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was the nephew of
the astronomer David Rittenhouse (Barton’s mother was Rittenhouse’s sister). Formally
educated, Barton studied medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland and at Glittingen completing
his studies in 1789. Barton’s family connections gave him access to the scientiﬁc and
medical leadership of Europe. Barton carried a letter of introduction from Philadelphia
physician, Benjamin Rush, when he moved to Edinburgh: “Mr. Barton is the nephew of
the celebrated Mr. Rittenhouse, our great American astronomer, and possesses such
abilities, joined with a thirst for knowledge, as render him worthy of that connection.”53

These privileges, along with a secure ﬁnancial footing (the death of his parents left him

 

52. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, March 1791, American Philadelphia Society.
53. Letter reprinted in Jeannette E. Graustien, “The Eminent Benjamin Smith Barton” The Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography LXXXV (1961): 432.

36

with an independent income) provided Barton with the basic requirements for the
successful pursuit of his scientiﬁc interests.

A 1789 Samuel Jennings’s portrait of Barton is of a young man, 23 years old.

His hair, eyes, and eyebrows are brown; he wears a black coat and a white shirt with
rufﬂes at the neck and wrists. The dominant feature of the painting is Barton’s dramatic
head of hair; he is not an attractive man. The air is of a man who works indoors—he is
seated, with his head slightly bent over the papers in his hands, looking straight at the
viewer. Clouds, blue sky, and a tree form the background. While Barton’s chosen ﬁeld
keeps him within, the outdoors are included so the viewer learns that Barton’s subjects of
study lie there. In his hands is a map. Brandon Brame Fortune explains that this is a map
and diagram of ruins of a pyramid discovered near the Ohio River which Barton had
visited in 1785. Barton had written a treatise on the ruins and the portrait indicates his
pride in that work.“

While Barton was living and studying in Edinburgh and Amsterdam he had
carried on a formal, respectful correspondence with Bartram. (Barton had written to
Bartram to discuss the future publication of the Travels and the Bartram botanical
discovery, the Franklinia.55) Upon his return to the United States, throughout the 1790s
Barton and Bartram went botanizing along the Schuylkill and in the neighborhood of the
house. Barton kept notes of these trips. The boxes of Barton papers in the American
Philosophical Society contain dozens of little slips of paper with the date, name of plant

and where and with whom it was seen—eighteenth century post-it notes.

 

54. Brandon Brame Fortune and Deborah J. Warner, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of
Science in Eighteenth-Century America (Washington, DC: Srrrithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 1999).
Portrait owned by the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

55. Bartram Papers, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

37

Results of their work together were seen on May 28, 1792 when Barton published
“A Botanical Description of the Podophlum Diphyllum of Linnaeus” with illustrations by
Bartram in the American Philosophical Society Transactions. This collaborative project
begins with a brief history of what is known about two named plants. These plants had
been observed and documented but one had never been seen in ﬂower. With the help of
Bartram and his garden, Barton had seen one of these plants in ﬂower and with this new
data argues that it has been incorrectly identiﬁed as a species of the genus Podophyllum:
the Podophyllum Diphyllum. Barton asserts that in this plant he has identiﬁed a new
genus, with only one species; he proposes to call the new genus J effersonia, with this
plant being known as the Jeﬂersonia Binata. The anatomy of the plant and its behavior
as it blooms set it apart from the previously identiﬁed species.

Barton describes the “generic character” of the plant describing the calyx, corolla,
stamina, pistillum, pericarpium and semina. The identiﬁcation and isolation of essential
characteristics, the “generic character” of an organism was an accepted process in Natural
History. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon in his 1753 Histoire Naturelle, a book
that Barton owned and had given to Bartram, says “one proposes to make known the
qualities essential to each animal, and one is only able to achieve this by reporting on the
resemblances and the principal differences...” 56 While Buffon was speciﬁcally speaking
about the study of animals, the principle is the same for all Natural History.57 By looking
at the characteristics of a species and comparing them with others, the naturalist identiﬁes

those elements without which the plant or animal would not be itself. Those

 

56. Joseph Ewan, “One Professor’s Chief Joy: A Catalog of Books Belonging to Benjamin Smith Barton,”
in Science and Society in Early America: Essays in Honor of Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., ed. Randolph Klein,
311-344 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986).

57. Quoted in Alex Potts “Natural order and the call of the wild: the politics of animal picturing.” Oxford
Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1990): 22.

38

characteristics, which may or may not all appear on any single example of a species

combine to create the “type specimen” for that species.

 

\rrrl m l" 3 t7

 

 

 

Figure 4. Jeffersonla Binata by William Bartram. (American Philosophical Society)

Bartram’s illustration acts as a type specimen for this plant that few have seen in
ﬂower. Rather than a single representation this illustration consists of two parts: at the
top of the page the whole plant is shown cut off from the ground without any roots with

ﬁve, two lobed leaves (the “bi” in the binata of the name) and a ﬂower. Four of the

39

leaves are curled so that the viewer can see the underside of each. Along the top of the
top section are four smaller drawings of the reproductive organs of the ﬂower. The lower
half of the print shows ﬁve stages of the seed pod from fertilization through its opening to
disbrn'se the seeds. There is a vertical seam along the capsule, what Barton calls a
“longitudinal ridge.” Each successive representation of the seed capsule (ﬁ‘orn left to
right) turns it so that this ridge is located ﬁrst behind (not visible) then on the far left,
then in the center, and in the last stage of the development this ridge is invisible again.
Bartram has used the chronology of the development to show the seed capsule from all
angles; it twists its way across the page. Behind these is the outline of a single leaf, out
of scale to show detail. The stems of the seed pods hang down and cover parts of the
leaf, the open seed pod is sitting within the leaf‘s outline. The background of the plate is
unornamented, plain, white, there is no border; other than the numbers next to the
individual drawings, the only notation on the page is its place in the publication: “vol HI
pa. 347” in the upper right hand comer.

Bartram’s illustration marks the effort to capture the whole plant, throughout its
development. The emphasis is on the generic characteristics, as Barton calls them, rather
than on one particular plant. All of the stages of development are portrayed, while other
characteristics, like the root system, are not included. The superimposition of the
seedpods over the outline of the leaf remind the viewer that this is an artiﬁcial
representation of the plant. With no background, the plant is taken out of its natural
context. This “perfected specimen came to be preferred, or standard, because although

the image of a single unique specimen might be literally more truthful, it did not and

40

could not express the larger truth of being characteristic of its species,” explains Gil
Saunders?8

Bartram’s garden was an important resource for the data necessary to compose
type specimens. As naturalists and collectors struggled to preserve organisms in life-like
forms for their herbaria and curiosity cabinets, Bartram was providing living examples of
the plants themselves. This process was essential to the project of the garden. The use
and incorporation of type specimens in the process of identiﬁcation were statements in
themselves. At this time, it was not universally held to be true that species were real.
Many argued that what existed in nature were only multiple individuals of multiple
characteristics. The search for type specimens is a statement in the belief in species as
reality.

A type specimen is comparable to a “form” as described in the works of Plato.
Plato describes two orders: the world of appearances and the intelligible world. The
world of appearances is the visible world and the intelligible world is what we know
through thinking and knowledge. The forms are the highest level of objects, known only
through the power of the dialectic. The visible world, the world experienced through the
senses, is a reﬂection of the forms just as an image in a body of water reﬂects an object.’9
Though not existing in nature and not perceived with the senses, the form itself is the
reality of nature. The effort to identify type specimens and the forms they represented

was inherent to the projects of eighteenth-century science.

 

58. Gill Saunders. Picturing Plane: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 22. Alex Potts argues that this process of synthesizing a “perfect”
example was not unique to scientiﬁc illustrations but a tradition within “classical art theory” in “Natural
Order and the Call of the Wild: the politics of animal picturing” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1990): 22.
59. See Plato’s discussion of the four stages of cognition and the allegory of the line in chapter 24 of the
Republic. The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Comford, (London: Oxford University Press,
1945).

41

But the projects of science were not exclusively scientiﬁc. Type specimens were
the route to a greater understanding of a perfect nature. By creating a type specimen,
nature is brought under control, stripped of some of its chaos, elevated to a place where it
can be held and observed unchanging. That unchanging place reﬂects the work of God.
The process of identifying a type specimen is a kind of prayer. Belief in type specimens
is the belief that God has created nature with a plan, with clearly deﬁned categories into
which all individual organisms could ﬁt. The belief in species is a belief in a rational
nature. Bartram and Barton believed in species, and believed in the rational God of

nature.

James Mease and the Yellow Fever Epidemic of I 793

During those early years of the ﬁiendship between Barton and Bartram, tragedy
struck Philadelphia. The summer of 1793 was a relatively hot one and in August the ﬁrst
signs of yellow fever were observed by Philadelphia’s physicians. 6° Patients with the
disease showed an inconsistent variety of symptoms, including body pains, fever, purple
discolorations on the skin, bleeding ﬁ'orn the mouth and nose, and “black vomit.” The
disease got its name from the yellow, jaundice of the skin and eyes that often manifested
in its victims. The nature of the disease itself makes it difﬁcult to estimate how many
people in Philadelphia were infected, but it is possible to say that nearly 5,000 people

died in three months, while 17,000 people left the city hoping to escape the contagion. 6’

 

60. Susan E. Klepp “How Many Precious Souls are Fled”?: the Magnitude of the 1793 Yellow Fever
Epidemic” appendix 1 in Estes, J. Worth and Billy G. Smith, eds. A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The
Public Response to the I 793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic. (Philadelphia: Science History
Publications, 1997), 178.

61 . It is believed today that not everyone infected with the virus showed symptoms. See J. Worth Estes’s
introduction to A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1 793 Philadelphia Yellow
Fever Epidemic. (Philadelphia: Science History Publications, 1997), 5.

42

In addition to his work with Barton, Bartram had been working with another
young physician who lived near the garden and would play an important role in the
yellow fever epidemic. Bartram had read an article on “Observations on the Pea Fly or
Beetle, and Fruit Curculio” before the Society for Promoting Agriculture in 1789 which
had attracted the attention of this young physician, James Mease. Born on August 11,
1771, Mease was the son of a wealthy merchant, and had had a comfortable childhood.
Mease began his studies at the University of the State of Pennsylvania in 1784 when he
was 13 years old. He graduated with the ﬁrst class from Medical Department of the
University of Pennsylvania with medical degree in 1792. Inspired to write his
dissertation, “An Essay on the Disease produced by the Bite of Mad Dog, or other rabid
animal,” by a piece in the newspaper that “described in the most erroneous and dreadful
manner” the disease, and gave bad remedies, Mease started his medical career with a
success.

The education that Mease received in Philadelphia carried on the principles taught
in Edinburgh, Scotland. Many of the early professors of medicine in Pennsylvania,
including Adam Kuhn, elected professor of the theory and practice of medicine in 1789,
and Benjamin Smith Barton, appointed to the chair in 1813, were trained at the
University of Edinburgh and classes were modeled on those offered in Scotland.
Theories of illness taught in Edinburgh stressed the importance of a balanced nervous
system in the health of the human body. (Benjamin Rush even argued that the republican

system was good for the health because excessive excitement was avoided through the

43

more fair political system”) These models encouraged the classiﬁcation of diseases
much like the classiﬁcation of plants and animals. It was believed that diseases with
similar causes could be treated with similar remedies, therefore identifying the essential
cause of the disease was crucial to the effective practice of medicine.

A portrait of Mease attributed to Thomas Sully, painted for Mease’s son, Pierce,
shows a 63 year old man with a receding hair line and a prominent nose. He faces to the
right in partial proﬁle not looking directly at the viewer. He is shown not in the robe of a
scholar but the plain clothes of a serious man with no ornamentation or identifying
additions. The background is plain, emphasizing Mease’s head and face, a common
sitting for a man who was known for his cerebral contributions to society. But Mease is
still young, now, in 1793, only one year after completing his degree. As he did when he
selected the topic of his dissertation, Mease served the needs of the people of
Philadelphia during the Yellow Fever epidemic."3

Both Barton and Mease were practicing physicians during the epidemic. There is
evidence that both stayed in the city to treat the sick, were treated for the disease and
survived, but neither has left a personal account of the time. Mease himself became very
ill, “suspended by a thread over the grave,” Benjamin Rush said.“ Ten years later, in
1803, when the fever struck the city, not as harshly, again, William Bartram would make
note of the disease in his weather joumal-one of the only non-weather related items
included-“Malignant fever present in the city to the great terror of the inhabitants;”

“Malignant fever prevails in the city. People alarmed, many families ﬂying into the

 

62. Deborah Brunton, “The Transfer of Medical Education: Teaching at the Edinburgh and Philadelphia
Medical Schools,” in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment eds. Richard B. Sher and
Jefferey R. Smitten (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 249.

63. Portrait owned by American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

64. William Snow Miller, “James Mease,” Annals of Medical History 7 (1925): 12.

44

country. The same terrible fever in Alexandria in Virginia, New York, Harrisbourg on

Susquahana very sickly?“

This entry says two things to me, one that the danger of the
fever was felt very deeply, the other is that Bartram saw the presence of the disease as
being related to the environmental conditions. It was known that this was exclusively a
summer phenomenon. These entries into a scientiﬁc journal were scientiﬁc in nature.
The community at the garden saw the project of identifying the nature of and treatment
for the disease as their own. Rather than locating a type specimen, physicians, like Mease
and Barton, were struggling to identify what Mease would later refer to as the “seat of the
disease.”66

There was disagreement within the medical community of the city over the origin
of the disease, where it “sat” in the body. Without a consensus on that, doctors did not
agree about how to treat the disease, i.e. whether to work with nature and the workings of
the body or to shock/force them back into health (work against nature). Benjamin Rush,
one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious and best known physicians, believed in purges and
bleedings to force the disease out of the body, while others used gentle medicines that
allowed the body to repair itself. (When Mease became ill, be was treated by Rush,
proving his conﬁdence in Rush’s methods.) The medical community did not agree on
whether the disease was contagious. Rush believed yes, while other doctors did not.67
The public disagreements, and therefore detailed historical record, over these questions
reveal that Philadelphia’s physicians were struggling to identify the essential

characteristics of disease. This record shows that the project of the garden—to identify

 

65. William Bartram, Diary entry September 19, 1803. American Philosophical Society.

66. James Mease “Cases of the Gradual Loss of Muscular Power, without evident cause.” The Philadelphia
Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences 2, no. 4 (1821): 322 APS Online.

67. J. H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949).

45

the essential characteristics of flora—was being carried out in the larger medical
community as they worked to deal with disease.

The city of Philadelphia’s efforts to prevent another outbreak of Yellow Fever
included the creation of an inspection and quarantine procedure for all ships coming into
the port. Governor Mifﬂin appointed Mease the resident physician of the health ofﬁce of
the port of Philadelphia. This position required that Mease live at State Island, an island
set aside by the city. This position would place Mease at the center of a number of public
disagreements which established him as a known ﬁgure in the scientiﬁc and medical
communities."8 He would remain in this position until May 1, 1798.

For those years, while Mease was away from the garden, Barton was working
more closely with Bartram to complete the ﬁrst edition of the Collections for an essay
towards a materia medica of the United States which was published in 1798. In 1796,
Barton had been appointed chair of Materia Medica at University of Pennsylvania. And
it was Bartram who encouraged Barton to “attend to and encourage or promote the
Analysis of [word indecipherable] American Vegetables of medicinal powers.”69 In the
preface of the Materia Medica, Barton reveals his personal commitment to this work, by
confessing that Americans “are still less acquainted with the properties of our productions
[medicinal plants].” This “blank in the history of science” he says he views “with
pain.”70 The only thing available on Materia Medica, according to Barton, was published
by a German and follows the theory of Signatures (which Barton discounts). This early

edition, Barton would continue to modify and update throughout his career, grouped

 

68. For more on the debates that Mease participated in, see William Snow Miller, “James Mease,” Annals
of Medical History 7 (1925): 6-30.

69. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, September 1791; American Philosophical Society.

70. Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States, that
edition (Philadelphia, 1798), iv.

46

plants by their potential medicinal uses, but contained no illustrations and only the most
minimal descriptions of the plants and generalized locations where they could be found.
An obvious omission for a Materia Medica, doses and preparation are not really
discussed. Though limited, this work demonstrates how medicine and botany were
connected at the level of practice as well as theory. Without natural products, doctors
had very few weapons in their arsenals. The garden could provide the resources
necessary to assist people in their time of need.

With this work Barton contributed to a long tradition of plant collection and
documentation. Progressing along a parallel path with botany, the herbal tradition
contributed signiﬁcantly to the development of the knowledge of plants and medicine
during this period. These early catalogues of plants included descriptions of the plants,
sometimes with basic illustrations and allowed for the layman to have access to health
care. It was a slow and cumulative process in which the works of those who came before
were carried on and incorporated in new works. The development of herbals moved from
copied folk knowledge to the description and utility of newly discovered species, thus
moving these works from the purview of the amateur to that of the professional. The
Bartrams, including John, Sr. and William’s brothers were practicing apothecaries. There
is some evidence that William provided some medical care at the garden. 7' The projects

of the garden included the development and distribution of medicines.

 

71. Mease would note in a later essay that Bartram supplied him with evidence of the effectiveness of
geranium rnaculatum in stopping bleeding. Interesting because Bartram, as a young man, rejected the
option of studying medicine, but here seems to be nuking observations of and perhaps practicing
medicine. See “Account of the Efficacy of the external Application of the Geranium Maculaturn, in
stopping Hemorrhage.” The Philadelphia Medical Museum, Conducted by John Redman Coxe. MD. 3, no.
3 (1807): 154. APS Online.

47

Science and learning

With this and all aspects of the family business, William helped his brother, John,
J r. One visitor to the garden during this period introduces us to some younger members
of the family under John and William’s care. On January 2, 1799, Hipolito Jose da
Costa, the Portuguese envoy to the United States, visited the garden. While he waited to
meet John Jr., he sat by the ﬁre with a young woman who he estimates is ﬁfteen years old
(she was really 20). This young woman was John, Jr.’s daughter, William’s niece, Ann.
Da Costa noticed a book about geography sitting close to Ann and they had a discussion
about it, and “[w]e then turned to talking about botany, a ﬁeld in which she was no
stranger, for she knew the names of many plants and could apply the system of Linnaeus,
about which she could talk with exact, though limited, knowledge.” During this same
visit be also met twelve-year-old James Howell Bartram, Ann’s brother. J arnes and Ann
showed their guest some of their drawings—safe to assume that their uncle had been
giving them lessons—and da Costa notes that the drawings are “very good.” 72

Ann Bartram had been born at “a quarter after one in the morning” on February
15, 1779.73 The pictures we have of Ann, who was called Nancy by her family, show us
a responsible and serious young woman. Ann seems to have been serious about her work,
for she “did not keep a great deal of company but ladies sometimes came to see her.”74

She had taken charge of her father’s household when her older sister, Mary, had gotten

married in 1794. Later in her life she would be described as having a “the passionate

 

72. Diary of Hipolito Jose da Costa reprinted in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 78
(1954): 82.

73. Bartram Family Bible, Bartram Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

74. Testimony of Flora Murray, August 30, 1822, John Bartram, Jr. Estate, J. K. Kane Papers, American
Philosophical Society. I looked at photocopies in the library of Bartram’s Garden.

48

fondness” for working with plants” and was “a considerable botanist and draws well.” 76
There is no surviving portrait of Ann, so we do not know what she looked like. John’s
young family shared the Bartram house with their uncle William.

At this time, William was ﬁnishing a project with Benjamin Smith Barton. In
April of 1799, Barton’s Fragments of Natural History of Pennsylvania was published.
Though the author of the text is Barton, he acknowledges that much of the material
included was provided by “my ingenious and good ﬁ'iend, Mr. William Bartram?”
Barton, with the help of Bartram and his garden, which he ﬁ'equented throughout the
1790s, had compiled data on the ﬂora and fauna of Pennsylvania.78 The common and
scientiﬁc names of the plants that he had observed, as well as a “progress of vegetation,”
noting at what point in the year the stages of growth occur, make up a major part of the
text. Barton paints a whole picture of the environment of Pennsylvania by creating a
table arranged chronologically to show what plants and animals appear
contemporaneously and the interactions between the species rather than simply noting
single species.

The appendix contains more detailed observations of some of the birds that appear

in the tables. These observations include such notes as “I am not quite certain, whether

 

75. Alexander Gordon, “Bartram Botanic Garden” Horticultural Register, and Gardener ’s Magazine (Aug
1, 1837): 283, APS online.

76. David Douglas’s journal quoted in Jeannette E. Graustein, Thomas Nuttall, Naturalist: Explorations in
America [808-184] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 194.

77. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Fragments of a Natural History of Pennsylvania” in Selected Works by
Eighteenth-Centuty Naturalists and Travellers. ed. Seir B. Sterling (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 5.
(pagination of original document)

78. July 3 1794 makes notes of plant in bloom at Gray’s ferry, May 20 and June 13, 1795; Barton makes
note of ﬂowers he sees at Bartram’s garden; September 11, 1796 BSB notes plant seen in woods near
garden, Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, American Philosophical Society.

49

they are DOt bOth the same species; but, I believe, they are different.”79

The process of
identiﬁcation required much more data than just appearance; habits, such as migration,
nest building, and favorite foods, help to distinguish the birds. These external
characteristics, visible to the naked eye, distinguish one species from another.

Barton is concerned that in past identiﬁcations of distinct species the recording
naturalist has identiﬁed “birds which merely differ in sex, or in age, and in their
colouring, for which these animals, at different seasons of the year, are so remarkable.”80
J ust as the scientiﬁc description of a plant incorporates its whole life, it is not just what
the bird looks like at a single moment that identiﬁes the species but the composite of its
appearances throughout the year. Any single observation is not enough to identify a
unique species. A type specimen is not one that exists in nature, but one that can reﬂect
the changing nature of a single species. Certain organisms could only be classiﬁed by a
combination of characteristics or what is called “polythetic character combinations.” 8'
Barton points out, in an effort to differentiate two birds, that they build different kinds of
nests. For animals, as well as plants, essential to an identiﬁcation is not just the physical
characteristics but the behaviors that are demonstrated.

The importance of the collection of data through the senses was at the heart of
Enlightenment science. In fact, the direct relationship between the senses and truth was a

core of Enlightenment epistemology. The process of turning data ﬁom the senses into

knowledge was of some controversy, however. John Locke, the fount of much of

 

79. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Fragments of a Natural History of Pennsylvania” in Selected Works by
Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Travellers. ed. Seir B. Sterling (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 18.
(pagination of original document)

80. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Fragments of a Natural History of Pennsylvania” in Selected Works by
Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Travellers. ed. Seir B. Sterling (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 6.
(pagination of original document)

81. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 190.

50

Enlightenment thought laid it out this way. Ideas are gained by gathering data through
the senses. Inference is the recognition of the connections between ideas and when the
agreement or disagreement of ideas is established, knowledge is gained. All knowledge
depends on this two step process. Based ﬁrst on the use of the senses, conﬁrmation of
knowledge requires the application of comparison, establishing agreement or
disagreement. Since this is the only way to acquire knowledge, Locke argues, there are
no innate ideas.

Lockean theory was taught in the universities in Scotland and was responded to in
the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Disturbed by the path that the skeptics took
Locke’s theories, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers argued to return certain ideas to
humans. In particular, Thomas Reid saw that David Hume had drawn logical conclusions
ﬁ'om Locke so Reid attempted to go back to what he saw as the source of skeptical
thought to correct the errors in the conception of knowledge.82 Reid argues that pe0ple
do have the inherent knowledge that both they and matter exist. Locke, Reid explains,
says that judgments of nature come from “comparing ideas and perceiving the
agreements and disagreements” but Reid says that judgments do not come ﬁ'om the act of
comparison but are “immediately inspired by our constitution.”83 Reid says that
operations of the mind that determine the past and present are examples of “simple and
original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind?“ “Original acts of the mind” is

understood as existing as part of the mind, not acquired through the two-step process of

 

82. The ideas of the skeptics and Hume in particular will be discussed more fully in chapter 3.

83. Thomas Reid, Chapter 2, section 7 An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common
Sense Flynn, Philip, ed. Enlightened Scotland: A Study and Selection of Scottish Philosophical Prose from
the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1992. Page 49

84 Thorms Reid, Chapter 2, section 7 An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common
Sense Flynn, Philip, ed. Enlightened Scotland: A Study and Selection of Scottish Philosophical Prose ﬁ‘ont
the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1992. page 43

51

experience and comparison. The operations that determine past and present are not
discovered by reason, Reid says. If certain ideas exist before the process of reason
discovers them, then these inherent ideas, or common sense, must be part of human
nature. The mind has access, through the hard-wired “common sense,” to an
understanding of the workings of nature.

All of nature is the work of God, Natural Religion posited. If one has access to
the workings of nature through one’s own inherent capabilities, then one has access to
God through those same capabilities. That knowledge is part of human nature and human
nature is the work of God, then by listening to those inherent ideas (common sense) one
has access to a higher, unchanging truth. Those ideas, and that truth are the external
reality seen in imperfect representations of nature. Observations of nature become ideas
in the mind, and then those ideas are ﬁltered through the “common sense” inherent in the
mind. This is not only a scientiﬁc process, but also provides the scientist with the higher
truth of reality. The connection between what is seen, the idea of that observation, and
what is reality is ﬁrm according to Reid. The scientist’s eyes can see the similarities
between the organisms, the mind recognizes that this plant has the same shaped leaves as
that one, for example, therefore those similarities are a reﬂection of the higher,
unchanging truth that common sense dictates. While Barton and Bartram may not have
expressed their philosophy in exactly these words, they were conscious of their belief in
the reality of species and dedicated their scientiﬁc lives to collecting the observations that
gave them access to their truth.

The circle at the garden were establishing important relationships the summer of

1800. Their collaboration on Fragments of a Natural History of Pennsylvania seems to

52

have strengthened the ﬁiendship between Barton and Bartram. The affection in the
correspondence between them goes beyond the conventional hyperbolic courtesy of the
period. “Believe me when I tells the my heart leapt with joy when I saw the lad coming
down the Avenue to the House. Thy note relieved me from much anxiety fearing
sickness and misfortune, not seeing nor hearing ﬁom you so long. Sympathy is the best
substitute or representative of an absent ﬁiend, Hope’s the last resort.”85

James Mease married Sarah Butler. Butler was the daughter of Pierce Butler, the
Senator from South Carolina. It seems safe to assume that they met while the Butler
family lived in Philadelphia; the Butlers owned a summer home in Philadelphia. (Pierce
Butler accepted the marriage since he would later move to Philadelphia to be close to his
daughter and is buried there.) The marriage to the daughter ’of a prominent
Revolutionary war hero and politician convinces me that Mease was a signiﬁcant ﬁgure
in the social hierarchy of Philadelphia.

During this time, Benjamin Smith Barton, who was teaching at the University of
Pennsylvania, was taking his classes to visit Bartram’s Garden.86 In 1801, James Howell
Bartram, the nephew who had shown his drawings to the Portuguese envoy, started his
studies in medicine with Barton. That he traveled back and forth between the city where
Barton was teaching and practicing and the garden is clear ﬁom the ﬁiends’ letters. The
younger Bartram acted as a courier between the two ﬁiends. Bartram took much interest
in “J emmy’s” education, speaking of him in his letters to Barton. He reported on Jarnes’s

progress and recommended his work, saying once “J emmy has painted a pretty little

 

85. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, April 3, 1800, William Bartram Letter Series 1, American
Philosophical Society.

86. William Darlington quoted in Francis Harper’s introduction to The Travels of William Bartram,
Naturalist ’s Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 33.

53

Hawk.”87 He and the young man read and discussed poetry together sharing their
impressions; William would write later: “Remember that line of the Poet, which thee
pointed out to me as beautiful.”88 James was trusted with transporting specimens along
with the letters between the two naturalists. Barton, over the years requested many
specimens and drawings ﬁom Bartram. Bartram was able to accommodate Barton with
any number of specimens, minus one. For that one, Bartram said he would check with
his neighbor, “our friend Hamilton.”
William Hamilton, Bartram’s neighbor and the owner of the Woodlands, and

the Bartrams exchanged specimens and produce for years. Hamilton, who was not a
scientist, seems to have been the epitome of what has been called a “virtuoso.” The
virtuoso is characterized by “his inveterate collecting of coins, shells, and fossils. . .his
passion for new means of studying nature.”89 He fussed over his plants and his
greenhouses, his letters to his personal secretary are ﬁlled with nagging instructions about
watering each and every plant and ﬁxing doors and securing plants.90

Barton also worked at the Woodlands, collecting and making observations. He
continued to work on his Collections toward a Materia Medica, publishing another
edition in 1801. This edition is particularly interesting because it was printed by Robert
Carr. In fact, this may have been one of the ﬁrst documents printed by Carr in his newly
established business. Robert Carr had come to the United States from Ireland with his

family when he was quite young. After completing an apprenticeship with Benjamin

 

87. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton April 3, 1800. William Bartram Letter Series 1, American
Philosophical Society.

" William Bartram to James Howell Bartram, September 23, 1804, Reprinted as appendix in N. Bryllion
Fagin’s William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1933), 202.

89. Lewis Perry, Intellectual Life in America: A History (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), 17.

90. William Hamilton to his private secretary, June 1790, reprinted in Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography 29: 159.

54

Franklin Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Carr established himself as a source
for ﬁne printing in Philadelphia. His business specialized in the techniques necessary for
the high quality of scientiﬁc texts of the time. Carr’s place in the garden would become
more permanent in the years to come.

The summer of 1801 was a hard one for William Bartram. He was very ill; he
had been plagued with trouble with his eyesight since he fell very ill during his journey to
the southern states in the 1770s. On October 25, 1801 Benjamin Smith Barton received a
letter signed by William, but the handwriting and the content of the letter indicate that he
was not able to write it for himself. James had brought a letter to William in which
Barton asked William to complete a drawing. Ann had had to read the letter to her uncle;
in his response he says he was “not able to read it therefore got my niece to read it to
me.”91 The letter goes on to disappoint Barton because Bartram will not be able to
complete any drawings for the near future.

The handwriting of the letter is clearly distinct ﬁ‘om that of the signature. The
shaky hand that signed the note was not the same who penned it. Did Ann handle any of
her uncle’s other correspondence? It is clear ﬁom the family records that it was
William’s responsibility to maintain the correspondence for the family business and what
remains of his papers shows that he had an active correspondence with ﬁiends and
colleagues. For at least a brief time, Ann was a crucial part of both the maintenance of
the business and the continuation of the scientiﬁc pursuits of the period. In his poem, “A

Rural Walk,” about the Bartrams, Alexander Wilson describes Ann’s work with William

 

91. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, October 25, 1801, Benjamin Smith Barton papers,
American Philosophical Society.

55

this way, “When science calls, or books invite, II-Ier eyes the waste of age supply, /Detail
their pages with delight, /Her dearest uncle listening by.”92

Though disease kept Bartram ﬁ'om the projects that he loved, it was another
disease that was helping James Mease establish himself as a medical authority in
Philadelphia. In 1801, the pamphlet “Observations on the arguments of Prof. Rush, in
favour of the inﬂammatory nature of the disease produced by the Bite of a Mad Dog”
was published. This work continued the debates about the essential characteristics of a
disease and where one fell in the classiﬁcation scheme of diseases. The argument
referred to in the title is whether the disease, today known as rabies, is one that causes too
much excitement in the body or not enough. (Rush believed too much, Mease, not
enough.) Mease examines the relative success of various treatments and reads them
backwards to argue the nature of the disease, i.e. bleeding or weakening the system does
not cure the disease therefore this disease is not about inﬂammation or “over-
excitement.”

The theory of diseases, called the “Brunonian System,” where the root of disease
was thought to be in the nervous system, was taught in Philadelphia and Scotland and
was being applied by Mease; “vigor and relaxation are foundation of disease,” he says.93
Medical courses in Philadelphia focused on the “nervous system and its properties of
irritability and sensibility, then went on to describe pathological processes as the result of

”94

excessive changes in sensibility. This system of classifying diseases was based on

 

92. Alexander Wilson, “A Rural Walk” The Port-Folio S, no. 16(Apr. 27, 1805): 126-127.

93. Reprinted as “Observations on the arguments of the late Prof. Rush, in favour of the inﬂammatory
nature of the disease produced by the Bite of a Mad Dog” in the American Medical Recorder 6, no. 1
(January 1823): 3 APS Online.

94. Deborah Brunton, "The Transfer of Medical Education: Teaching at the Edinburgh and Philadelphia
Medical Schools.” Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment Richard B. Sher and Jefferey R.
Smitten, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 249.

56

certain assumptions about the signiﬁcance of the characteristics of the disease. The seat
of the disease was seen as the nervous system, therefore the deﬁnition of and treatment
for an illness must address the imbalance in the nervous system. Classiﬁcation systems
were employed by physicians as a shortcut to methods of healing. If two diseases were
classiﬁed together, then a remedy for one would act as a remedy for another. This
pamphlet about rabies reenacts the arguments that took place during the Yellow Fever
epidemic. (Although about Yellow Fever, Mease and Rush had agreed.) Diseases were
identiﬁed and classiﬁed using the same methods as ﬂora and fauna. The methods of
medicine reﬂected the same belief in an organized, classiﬁable Nature as the methods of
Natural History. (The disagreement between Mease and Rush about the correct treatment
for rabies did not diminish their respect for each other. Mease would be one of the last to
visit with Rush as he was dying in April 1813.)

On January 1, 1802, William Bartram began keeping a weather diary in which he
notes the appearance of plants and their ﬂowers and migrating birds. The diary starts
with a day worth remembering: a day in January that was as “serene and warm as in the
month of May.”95 Bartram would keep his weather journal for nearly twenty years.
During the summer of 1802, the regulars at the garden were working separately. Barton’s
status as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania did not prohibit him ﬁ'orn going
out in the ﬁeld and doing his own collecting. He traveled to Virginia from July through
September where he traveled by foot, collecting and observing plants, natural springs,
stones, and talking with doctors about diseases.96 During that same year, Mease, recently

elected to the American Philosophical Society, was continuing his service to the

 

95. The original diary was given by Ann B. Carr to Thoma Meehan. I looked at a microﬁlm copy in the
American Philosophical Society.
96. Benjamin Smith Barton, 1802 Journal, I looked at the photocopy in the Library of Congress.

57

community. He established the Company for the Improvement of the Vine. Mease
owned his own small vineyard and worked with his own plants. This short-lived
organization was ultimately not very successful. 97 He also spent the year editing the
ﬁrst American edition of the Domestic Encyclopedia, originally published in London by
A. F. M. Willich, MD. The illustrated encyclopedia includes entries on farm machinery,
milling, grinding, farm animals, transportation, and architecture, among others. He

edited the entries for what he considered to be of greatest utility to an American reader.

The Elements of Botany and systems of classiﬁcation

In February of 1803, Benjamin Smith Barton published a text book, Elements of
Botany, for use in his classes in Botany and Natural History at the University of
Pennsylvania. Like the F ragrnents of a Natural History and the article on the Jeﬁ'ersonia,
Barton collaborated with Bartram to complete this project. In the preface, Barton thanks
Bartram for his help, “The greater number of the plates, by which the work is illustrated
have been engraved ﬁ'om the original drawings of Mr. William Bartram, of Kingsessing,
in the vicinity of Philadelphia. While I thus publicly return my thanks to this ingenious
naturalist, for his kind liberality in enriching my work, I sincerely rejoice to have an
Opportunity of declaring, how much of my happiness, in the study of natural history has
been owing to my acquaintance with him. . 3’98 Acknowledgement of their ﬁiendship and
professional partnership is preserved with the text.

Barton’s text makes every effort to explain and describe with a neutral voice. The

reading is at times, pretty dull going. Barton seems disturbed by the Linnaeus’s reference

 

97. Simon Baatz, “Venerate the Plough A History of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture,
1 785-1985 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1985), 17.
98. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), 1: xi.

58

to the calyx as the “conjugal bed” saying that this “poetical language seems ill adapted to
the grave dignity of science.”99 Yet Barton is not always successful in keeping his own
“poetical language” in check. His description of seed encasements is a striking example:
"The ﬁnal object or ultimate end of the Great Creator of the Universe, in forming buds,
must now, be sufﬁciently obvious. They are the protecting domes, the cradles, of tender
embryons, which, in due time, are to burst ﬁ'om their enclosures, expose themselves to
the light of day, and spread eternal beauties over this earth.”100 Though Barton attempted
to maintain a clinical tone, the beauty of nature was too much for him at times. The
striking difference between the two styles, one cold and the other warm, makes me
wonder if Bartram (whose “rhapsodical effusions” were already well known) was not
more involved in the writing of the Elements than Barton gave him credit for.

The textbook has three sections: plant anatomy, plant functions, and a description
of the Linnaean classiﬁcation system. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European
naturalists attempting to document the vast number of newly identiﬁed species required a
workable system to organize them. Carl Linnaeus’s sexual system, published in the
Systema Naturae (1735), placed plants into categories based on the number, shape, and
arrangement of pistils and stamen—the reproductive organs. The classes were based on
the number of stamen (male parts); each class was then subdivided into orders (based on
female organs), genera and species'o' It was an artiﬁcial system, that is, one based on
arbitrarily identiﬁed characteristics of the organisms being classiﬁed. Though arbitrary, a

major advantage of the system was that it was fairly easy to learn. Inherent in the

 

99. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), l: 124.

100. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), 1: 101.

101. A very useful description of the system appears as an appendix, “Linnaean Classiﬁcation,
Nomenclature, and Method,” by William Steam to The Compleat Naturalist; a life of Linnaeus by Wilfred
Blunt (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 248.

59

Linnaean naming system were the separate processes of identifying and classifying or as
William Steam explains, Linnaeus’s “major contribution to science was to separate these
designatory and diagnostic functions by using for a time two sets of names concurrently.”

The need for an easily understood system did not lead to the universal acceptance
of Linnaeus’s system, however. Benjamin Smith Barton wrote, “I think, it is a matter of
much more consequence to ascertain the place of our genus in some natural system of
vegetables. I would not wish you to think, from this observation, that I undervalue the
sexual method of Linnaeus. This is so far ﬁ'om being the case, that I am an implicit
believer in the doctrine which asserts the existence of sexes in vegetables, and the
necessity of an intercourse between them for the purpose of perpetuating the species. I,
moreover, greatly admire the system of your countryman. In most respects, it is
preferable to the method of Toumefort, or of any other botanist. But, still, I cannot help
wishing that the day may arrive, and, if the physicians of Europe continue to cultivate
botany as some of them have done, it will arrive, when the sexual arrangement shall give
way to a more natural method, one in which the order, or assemblage, of nature will be
pursued more rigorously than it has been by Linnaeus.”'02 Barton gave only his qualiﬁed
support for the Linnaean method.

Bartram wrote of the Linnaean system, “[n]ot withstanding the excellent system
invented and established by Linnaeus; and the industry and labours of that celebrated
naturalist in correcting and reforming Botany, there still remains much confusion and
error, particularly in regard to the vegetables of America, arising from a disagreement

betwixt European and American Botanists. .. I must observe, that in my opinion that

 

102. Benjamin Smith Barton, “A Botanical description of the Podophyllum Diphyllum of Linnaeus, in a
Letter to Charles Peter Thunberg, M.D. Knight of the order of Wasa, Professor of Medicine and botany in
the University of Upsal, etc.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 3 (1793): 339-340.

60

most valuable part of Linnaeus’s botanical work, namely the Synomymal for the Spec.

Plantarium is the cause of not a little confusion. . .”'°3 The acceptance of the Linnaean

system was neither universal nor unquestioned. While recognizing the merits, Bartram
saw Linnaeus’s system as the source of confusion.

That confusion came in part from the very nature of attempting to shape
categories around the vastness and diversity of the ﬂora of many continents.
Identiﬁcation of distinct species and classiﬁcation share the process of determining the
“essential characteristics” of a plant. The processes differ, though. The question of
identiﬁcation is: which parts of the organism most clearly distinguish it ﬁom other
species? The question of classiﬁcation is: which shared characteristics of organisms
allow for logical grouping? Classiﬁcation schemes demand a certain logic or what Ernst
Mayr calls “top-down versus bottom-up methodology.” Top—down classiﬁcation schemes
start with the largest categories ﬁrst and eliminate options by dichotomies using yes/no
questions. Bottom-up classiﬁcation starts with a body of individuals and groups them by
like characteristics. Like the processes of inductive and deductive reasoning, top-down
and bottom-up methodologies start in different places. One is based on preconceived,
weighted (by functional importance) ideas about life, the other is based on the data itself.

The Linnaean system is a “top-down” or deductive methodology. Linnaeus says
in the Philosophia Botanica: “The ‘character,’ or the deﬁnition of the genus, is threefold:
the factious, the essential, and the natural.” Linnaeus goes on to explain that the “generic
character is the same as the deﬁnition of the genus. . .The essential deﬁnition attributes to

the genus to which it applies a characteristic which is very particularly restricted to it, and

 

103. William Bartram to Henry Muhlenberg, Sept 8, 1792; Muhlenberg Correspondence, 21, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania.

61

which is special. The essential deﬁnition distinguishes, by means of a unique idea, each
genus from its neighbors in the same natural order.”104 The process of classiﬁcation
makes use of the same essential characteristics as the process of identiﬁcation, but sorts
the characteristics differently. (not unlike “lumping” and “splitting”)

An example of determining the appropriate characteristics to base a system of
classiﬁcation on can be seen in the Elements when Barton argues that classiﬁcation
cannot be based on leaves. The leaves of the same species of plant vary considerably
because of environmental factors (soil, climate and elevation).'°5 The shapes and
placement of the leaves of any individual species are too variable to constitute an
essential characteristic of classiﬁcation, Barton says. In this he disagrees with Linnaeus.
Rather than looking at leaves, Barton argues, in “the study of plants, it is a matter of
essential importance to attend to the structure of the bulb, or bulbous root. These bulbs
ﬁ'equently afford excellent marks for distinguishing one species of plant from another of
the same genus.” ‘06 Without looking at this part of the plant, making the distinction
between one species and another is not valid. Plate H is dedicated to illustrating root
systems of various plants. With several ﬁgures showing the same plant at different stages
of development, the root and bulb’s consistency in the life of each plant is reinforced.
The accompanying drawings are not simply illustration, they help to argue Barton’s
points.

Intimately related to the belief in type specimens and the reality of species, the

belief that a system of classiﬁcation reﬂects some universal reality was in dispute.

 

104. Linnaeus quoted in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and

Inheritance (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 176.

105. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803 ), l: 44.
106. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), l: 12.

62

Buffon says, “. . .since in nature only individuals exist, while genera, orders, and classes
only exist in our imagination.” ‘07 Barton, however, did believe in the reality of a
classiﬁcation system, writing that botanists are “in search of nature’s scheme.”108 In the
Elements, Barton describes and comments on ﬁfteen alternative systems of classiﬁcation
that date back to the mid-sixteenth century. Each system places the weight of the
classiﬁcation on a different parts of the plant. For example, Boerhaave’s Method makes
the ﬁrst division between herbs and trees, then where they grow, and ﬁnally the number
of seeds and how they are enclosed. By providing the alternatives to Linnaeus’s system,
Barton is commenting on the utility of that system, while simultaneously emphasizing the
need for some method of classiﬁcation.

A system of classiﬁcation was needed not only because there were an
overwhelming number of species that needed to be documented, but also because
taxonomy was necessary in understanding the laws of nature and nature’s God. The
patterns seen in ﬂora and fauna were in fact evidence of a divine intelligence. Type
specimens and classiﬁcation systems provide us with insight into the scientiﬁc projects of
the garden and the era. They also reveal how science and religion were intertwined more
intimately than simply the deﬁnition of Natural Religion or the belief that all of nature is
a reﬂection of God’s intelligence would convey. How scientists conceived of the ﬁnite
representations of nature and the acceptance of an inﬁnite truth were inseparable. The

true nature of nature was being discovered by examining one plant or one bird at a time.

 

107. John Lyon and Phillip R. Sloan, eds. From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from
Buﬁ’on and His Critics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 115
108. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), l: 46.

63

Chapter 3
Mutable Nature
Where’er I view this vast design,
On earth, air, ocean, ﬁeld,or ﬂood,
All, all proclaim the truth divine,

That God is bountiful and good.
Alexander Wilson, “A Rural Walk”

Fall is a beautiful time in the mid-Atlantic region. The days continue to be warm
but the cool nights bring about the dramatic changes that made American trees desirable
all over Europe. The garden was host to the dramatic Scarlet Maple with its bright red
leaves and ﬁll] round shape. Adding some novelty to the garden, Witch Hazel, which
ﬂowers in the fall with blossoms that look like they have been shredded and seem
misplaced on land—looking much more like something from under the sea. The yellow-
bellied woodpecker and the snow bird spent some time in Pennsylvania during these
months. While the ducks and teals pass through on their annual migrations.

Winter was not completely silent in either plant or animal activity in the garden.
Though the deciduous trees lose their leaves, the evergreens continue to provide color.
Ground ivy, an evergreen, creeping shrub, grows along the ground under the trees that
had provided it shade in the summer. The grey bark of the Silver Maple splits and peels
vertically revealing reddish trunk underneath. The contrast of the silver on red gives the
tree a visual appeal in the slumbering garden. Some birds over-winter in Pennsylvania,
and perhaps the Carolina-Pigeon made an appearance in the garden as it moved through
the area.

In January 1803 with the garden “white with hoarfrost,” Nancy seems to have

been working on something called the “Kalendar” for Benjamin Smith Barton. Her

uncle, William, in a letter to Barton writes, “[m]y niece Nancy requests the favour to
keep the Kalendar one week longer in order to make some amendment she thinks it
requires before its presentment and promises to send it by J arnes next Sunday.”109 At the
end of part one of the Elements of Botany, Barton notes: “I have, also, collected materials
for a much more complete [Calendarium Florae], which it is my intention to publish, on
some future occasion.”l '0 The Bartrams, speciﬁcally Ann, were helping Barton with
another project. Barton’s much more complete work does not seem to have been
produced. Barton’s many promises of work that never appeared assure me that it was not
Ann who failed to complete the project. The projects of the garden were proceeding,
though.

Alexander Wilson

The spring of 1803 brought a new ﬁiend and colleague to the garden. In March,
Bartram received a letter ﬁom the new teacher at the Union School in Gray’s Ferry, about
a mile from the garden. Alexander Wilson shared an interest in birds with the Bartrams
and seems already familiar with Ann’s interests and talents: “This Bird I take to be the
female Yellow Rump. I suppos’d it on ﬁrst sight to be some other. If Miss Bartram
thinks it worth drawing it is at her service.” Though the earliest of the surviving letters,
this one was clearly one of many. His appreciation of Bartram is growing quickly at this
time. A clear morning in March with host that warmed to a pleasant day and “great
numbers of Ducks in Schuylkill ﬁ'om the south,” Wilson wrote in the same letter to

Bartram, “I have this moment rec’d yours, which like all the letters you have honoured

 

109. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, January 23, 1803, Barton letters series 1, American
Philosophical Society.
110. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), l: 302.

65

me with are to me as valuable as Bank Notes to a Miser.”lll Bartram and Wilson would
exchange many letters over the next ten years—many of which indicate that Bartram,
Wilson, and Nancy were teaching and learning about omithology ﬁ'orn each other.
Alexander Wilson was born in Paisley, Scotland on July 6, 1766. After an
abbreviated education at a country grammar school, he worked as a weaver and a peddler.
At the age of 28, he was imprisoned for what has been interpreted as political
persecution; Wilson had written a poem that criticized manufacturers and defended the
rights of inborers.112 After this was resolved, Wilson left Scotland and arrived in the
United States on July 14, 1794. He settled near Philadelphia where he taught school at
Milestown. ‘

Two portraits of Wilson, one textual and one visual, give us a sense of his
appearance and character. Wilson is remembered as “very particular on the subject of the
linen he wore, and the white cravat and rufﬂes were as important to him as a ﬁne ladies’
dress is to her. [H]is dress was that of other gentlemen of the period. Wilson was almost
a pure type of the bilious temperament, which you are aware is one best ﬁtted for
constant exertion either mental or physical. He could bear great fatigue without
ﬂinching. His height was ﬁve feet and eleven inches. When preparing for one of his
expeditions he was in the habit of taking a walk every morning, increasing the distance
daily and when he could make twenty miles without much fatigue, he started on his

journey.”1 '3 Wilson was said to have been poised and well-spoken. ' 1‘

 

111. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram March 4, 1803, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson,
ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 202.

112. The early life of Wilson is researched thoroughly in Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson: Naturalist
and Pioneer (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1961).

113. Franklin L. Burns, “Miss Lawson’s recollections of ornithologists,” Auk 34, no. 3 (July 1917): 278.

66

A painted portrait of Wilson, attributed to Thomas Sully, shows Wilson in his
forties. Handsome and young, the painting gives no hint of the illness that would take
Wilson’s life when he was only 48. Sitting slightly proﬁle, Wilson’s head and shoulders
only are visible against a background that is lighter around the face and grows darker
around the shoulders. Wilson’s thin features, dark hair, high forehead and sideburns are
not as noticeable as his brown eyes. They are deep and expressive, attracting the
viewers’ attention immediately. (I was a little disappointed to see a number of Sully’s
other portraits whose subjects had those same deep eyes; an artist’s technique rather than
a distinguishing characteristic of the sitter?) As though to conﬁrm the textual description,

Wilson is shown wearing an elaborate tie and collar.“

Advising the younger generation

Wilson, Ann, and William worked in the garden that was coming to life with
spring. By the river in the mornings and evenings, one would notice the sound of the
male bull frog beginning in April. Sturgeon were seen in the Schuylkill jumping ﬁom the
water. In May, glow worms could be seen in the grass in the evenings. That spring of
1803, ﬁom April through June, Meriwether Lewis was in Philadelphia preparing for
famed “Corps of Discovery” expedition. Lewis was sent to Philadelphia by Thomas
Jefferson to take advantage of the many scientiﬁc resources there. During the 17903
Thomas Jefferson had lived across the river from the Bartram’s garden and continued to

corresponded with both Barton and Bartram. When the time came to give the leader of

 

114. Thomas Crichton, Biographical Sketches of the late Alexander Wilson, Author of Poems and American
Ornithology (Paisley [Scotland]: J. Neilson, 1819) refered to in Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson:
Naturalistand Pioneer (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1961).

115. Portrait owned by American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

67

his team of explorers a crash course in Natural History, Jefferson arranged for Lewis to
study surveying with Andrew Ellicott, medicine with Benjamin Rush and Natural History
with Benjamin Smith Barton. Barton introduced Lewis to methods of identiﬁcation and
preservation; Lewis would carry Barton’s Elements of Botany with him on the
expedition. The textbook that had partially resulted from Barton’s work at the garden
would travel to the Paciﬁc.

In June, William Bartram and James Mease collaborated on an article called,
“Account of the Species, Hybrids, and other Varieties of the Vine of North America”
published in The Medical Repository. Mease had requested that Bartram contribute to his
work with the “Company for the Improvement of the Vine.” He has published the article
earlier than he had originally planned, he writes in the introduction, because he wants to
“give an opportunity of comparing the living vines with the botanical description during
the present season, and to diffuse the knowledge of the erroneous and perplexing
arrangement of Linnaeus and Walter on this subject.” ”6 The classiﬁcation of different
species and varieties of grape was the subject of some disagreement.

The effort of the article is to determine what is a species and what is a hybrid. A
hybrid is the offspring of heterogeneous parents. Not exclusive to the vegetable
kingdom, these new creations had occupied Bartram for some time. Earlier Bartram had
written to Barton acknowledging receipt of a preserved black squirrel. He had noticed
that it is a different color than he has ever seen before, and hypothesized that squirrels

mate and produce blends of colors; “I believe they interrnarry and produce varieties as

 

116. James Mease, “Account of the Species, Hybrids, and other Varieties of the Vine of North America,”
The Medical Repository, (1803): 19-24.

68

mankind do.” ”7 Hybrids were common knowledge among horticulturalists and
agriculturalists, but for the pressing questions of a botanist, hybrids raised serious
questions. The formation of a hybrid, either natural or man-made complicate the
identiﬁcation and classiﬁcation processes. If one believes that type specimens reﬂect a
higher reality, then what is one to make of a hybrid? Often, the offspring display
characteristics unique enough for it to be considered a new species, but does that mean
that the higher reality one sees in nature can be altered? The possibility of malleable
species was troubling not so much in themselves but for their implications. Bartram’s
observations of grapes contributed to a more serious conversation about the permanence
of species.

Bartram continued to keep his weather journal. On August 23 1803, Bartram
made a remarkable entry in his journal: he has seen the Aurora borealis. Extremely rare
on the east coast of the United States as far south as Philadelphia it must have been an
awesome sight. That same fall, William started to make note of numeric temperatures in
his weather diary rather than a qualitative description: rather than “cool and pleasant” a
temperature is noted in a number of entries. The addition of a thermometer to the garden
adds the element of quantiﬁcation to the observations made at the garden.

The following spring, Barton received word ﬁ'om the garden to send James home,
for a member of the family had died. John, James’s brother, had died around 11 o’clock
on March 6 ﬁ'orn some cause related to alcohol. He was not quite 23 years old. Bartram

asks Barton to keep an eye on his beloved nephew when he is gone. ”8 How could he

 

117. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, January 11, 1793, William Bartram letter series 1,
American Philosophical Society.

118. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton , March 7, 1804, William Bartram letter series 1,
American Philosophical Society.

69

know that he would outlive both of the younger men? Bartram’s relationship with his
nephews was paternal and caring. James left Philadelphia later that same year to serving
as a ship’s surgeon on a voyage that would take him to the Cape of Good Hope and
Batavia

On a hazy, cloudy day at the garden in September, Bartram penned a letter to his
nephew J arnes. Bartram seems particularly worried about James drinking. Perhaps
because J arnes’s father, John, Jr. was known to have been a bit of a drinker or even more
ﬂesh in his mind, the recent loss of James’s brother John to “ardent spirits.” It is
interesting to note that the letter was written while John, Jr., J ames’s father, was still
alive. Offering the guidance of a father, Bartram reminds his nephew to observe religious
tolerance, respect for authority, and “[b]e charitable, and always be foremost to
administer relief to the poor and distressed.”119 He tells him to “guard the honour of
women.” I believe he is warning his nephew not to take advantage of prostitutes, when he
says “never join in the low witty remarks of the ill bred coxcomb to turn into ridicule of
the sex some natural foibles...” He notes that the women were more than likely no longer
in their “happy state of inosence” because of some “unprincipled rake.” Bartram despises
the taking advantage of the weak. He repeats this concern in other works, especially in
descriptions of how people abuse animals. Bartram’s affection for his nephew and their
bond is clear. The advice he gives the younger makes not only his feelings obvious, but
also his impressions of the weaknesses of human nature.

While Bartram was writing to J arnes, Wilson was away ﬁom Philadelphia. He,

his nephew, Duncan, and a young man from Kingsessing named Isaac Leech walked

 

119. William Bartram to Dr. James Bartram, September 23, 1804, Reprinted as an appendix in N. Bryllion
Fagin, William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1933), 201.

70

from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls. The 1,200 mile journey would provide the subject for
Wilson’s poem “the Foresters.” Wilson was also planning a number of other projects.
Earlier that year, after working with the Bartrams to improve his drawing skills and
identiﬁcation techniques, Wilson had started conversations with the engraver, Alexander
Lawson, about the prospect of doing a bird book. These were the ﬁrst steps he would
take toward his major contribution to the Natural History of the United States. He was
exploring his options for compiling and illustrating an ornithology of American birds.

The following year, 1805, started with a publication ﬁom an unexpected source.
William Hamilton, of the Woodlands, published in the The Philadelphia Medical
Museum an account of the Agave Americana that had ﬂowered in his collection during
the summer of 1804. In the account, Hamilton documents the growth of the agave over a
two month period and notes that the plant remained in ﬂower for forty days. Hamilton
had shared his greenhouse with the Bartrams, but how well he took care of the plants is
up for debate. He defensively asked his secretary to get in touch with the Bartrams after
their plants have been returned to them. He told his secretary that Bartram “should be
reminded that [the plants] were sent too late to me, being absolutely dead when they
came to ye Woodlands.” Sending back dead plants didn’t stop Hamilton ﬁ'orn expecting
something in return though, “remind him of his promise to give a few of his East & West
India seedlings.”120

It is unexpected that Hamilton would publish in a scientiﬁc journal because he

was not a scientist, or even an amateur naturalist. He was a plant collector participating

 

120. William Hamilton to his private secretary, June 1790, reprinted in Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography 29 (1905): 159. William Hamilton seems to have seen Bartram as one of the people
provided for his service. He sent Bartram a note asking if he (Bartram) could remember the name of the
person he (Hamilton) had met a few days before. Bartram Family Papers, 4.44, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania.

71

in what has been called curious culture. Curious culture “involved wonder and
admiration at whatever was rare or outstanding, whether in size, shape, skill of
workmanship, or in any other respect. Such rarities formed the curiosities whose unusual
and outstanding qualities curiosi admired and wondered at.”m For Hamilton, Bartram’s
garden was a resource for the rarities that would reﬂect well on him. Remember
Bartram’s grapes? Hamilton learned of them and is anxious to see the “white gape
which you called Blands gape.” His interest isn’t scientiﬁc, though. He wants to impress
his guests--“if it is ripe and you can spare them, you will oblige me by sending as many
as will ﬁll a plate and if the fruit good, it would serve as an interesting part of our dessert
at dinner today for Mr. And Mrs. Merry whom I expect will be here. (Mr. and Mrs. Merry
were the British Ambassador and his wife.)‘22 Contributing to the scientiﬁc projects of
the time was not all the garden was good for.

In the Spring of 1805, Ann and William collaborated on a short piece that
appeared in the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, Benjamin Smith Barton’s
journal begun a year earlier. Short-lived—published for only four years—it provided the '
medical and scientiﬁc community in Philadelphia with observations, accounts, and
theories of many topics. “Description of an American Species of Certhia, or Creeper”
included a textual description by Bartram and an illustration by Ann. Ann had continued
to study William; Wilson refers to her as William’s “amiable pupil.” Wilson’s letters
indicate his own support for her undertakings; he had sent her drawing paper and wrote,

“Nobody, I am sure, rejoices more in her acquisition of the beautiful accomplishments of

 

121. Katie Whitaker, “The culture of curiosity,” in Cultures of Natural History, eds N. Jardine, F. A.
Secord, E.C. Spary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a discussion of English attitudes
about ﬂowers and trees see chapter ﬁve of Keith Vivian Thomas, Man and the natural world : a history of
the modern sensibility. (New York : Pantheon Books, 1983).

122. William Hamilton to William Bartram, Bartram Family Papers, 4, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

72

drawing than myself. I hope she will persevere)”23 In her illustration of the Creeper, a
tree sitting on a gound cluttered with growth is rooted in the lower left corner, curves
slightly to the right, before it curves back to the left and out of the picture. The bird sits
on the trunk of the tree farthest to the right. The composition of the drawing is very
elegant. The curve of the branch over the head of the bird echoes the curve of the bird’s
head and its relatively long, curved beak. This echoing is repeated in the truck of the tree
and the curve of the bird’s back. The composition is weighted to the left, leaving nearly
the entire right side of the drawing blank giving the bird room to escape if danger comes.
The written description says that the length of the bird is ﬁve inches, so the scale of the
drawing is deceptive. Relative to the tree, which looks old and established, the bird looks
quite large. The tail of the bird tucks under it showing how the animal would use its tail
to balance while climbing. Ann’s drawing, with its distorted scale and positioning of the
bird indicates the belief that habits, like this bird’s climbing, are important in identifying

a species.

 

123. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram, March 31, 1804, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson,
ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 211.

73

 

Figure 5. Ann Bartram’s illustration to “Description of an American Species of Certhia, or
Creeper.”

Barton had talked about animal behavior in his Fragments of a Natural History of
Pennsylvania. There he discusses the variability of behaviors, important because
behavior is a crucial element in identiﬁcation. The relationship between identiﬁcation and
behavior was a serious question. If a particular species behaves differently under
different circumstances, is that enough to classify the animal as a distinct species? About
migration—a behavior very important to bird’s survival—Barton says, “the migration of
birds is not ‘determinate instinct’ but an act of volition, or will. Hence, the seasons and

other circumstances will greatly regulate the arrival of birds in, and their ﬂight or

74

removal ﬂour, a particular country.”124 Barton is arguing that because the migration
patterns are a voluntary response to environmental conditions, this is not a legitimate
characteristic to determine the distinction of species. He also points out that “[w]e are
certain that the torpid state of many animals is altogether an accidental circumstance; that
is, it is not necessary to the species”'25 What is important is not that the individual
animal could survive without the ability to enter a torpid state, but that this behavior
should not be used in determining the lines between the species. Some of the same
species, depending on where they live and their environments, differ in their hibernation
habits, Barton says. Barton is participating in a discussion of whether certain birds
hibernate or migate in cold weather—a virtual obsession during the period.‘26

Though obviously important to the projects of the garden, these observations
foreshadow the questions that will occupy the studies of naturalists for much of the latter
parts of the nineteenth century. Barton is here making note of environmental effects on
animal behavior or what modern biologists refer to as “proximate causes” of changes in
behavior. This is an important stepping stone to the recoglition that changes in behavior
might lead to what is called “evolutionary causes” for the change in the genetic programs
over long periods of time. Without this ﬁrst recognition of the relationship between
environment and behavior, the concept of natural selection would not be possible.

By early November the garden had fallen quiet, the night insects had stopped their

noises, and the deciduous trees had lost their leaves. One might see a falcon as it passed

 

124. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Fragnents of a Natural History of Pennsylvania” in Selected Works by
Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Travellers. ed. Seir B. Sterling (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 9.
(pagination of original document)

125. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Fragments of a Natural History of Pennsylvania” in Selected Works by
Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Travellers. ed. Seir B. Sterling (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 13.
(pagination of original document)

126. see Andrew Lewis’s dissertation “The Curious and the Learned: natural history in the Early American
Republic” (Yale, 2001).

75

through Pennsylvania on its migration ﬁom north to south. By late 1805, J arnes has
netrnned to Philadelphia from his journey. Ann and William continue to work together,
but William’s health seems to have been poor. He has excused himself ﬁ'om at least one
social function for the reasons of poor health. Either feeling poorly, or not wanting to
participate in the function for some other reason, we know that Ann was there with him.
In December, Barton must also have been bothered by illness, since on a cold and clear
day with a wind ﬁom the northwest, Barton predicted his own early death.

This prediction was made in the dedication of the Philadelphia Medical and
Physical Journal to “the Students of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania.” In his
dedication he puts into words the transitional state Natural History was ﬁnding itself,
“[b]y enlarging the stock of useful facts; by walking in the rose-spread paths of Truth,
with Nature as your guide, you will prepare the way for those more permanent systems,
which Providence has given man the ability to found: systems not liable to be affected by
a few slender facts; not liable to be dissolved by the discovery of a new species of animal,
of vegetable, or of mineral.” “Rose-spread paths of truth” aside for the moment, it is
interesting to note that Barton is sensitive both to the need for systems of classiﬁcation
and the ﬁagility of them. He senses the instability of the paradigns in which scientiﬁc
observations have been organized, but has faith. He makes here an argument that the
perfection of nature, “the rose-spread paths of Truth,” can handle the incorporation of all
new knowledge and discoveries. While it may seem on the surface that the greater truths

are being called into question, he has faith that nature and nature’s God are seenre.‘27

 

127. Benjamin Smith Barton, ”To the Students of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania.” The
Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 2 (1806):
iii. APS Online.

76

On April 1, 1806, a day that saw “a slight shower of rain early this morning,”
Alexander Wilson resigred as the teacher at Union School in Gray’s Ferry. He took a
position with Bradford and Inskeep editing Rees 's Cyclopedia and worked closely with
the printer, Robert Carr. This publication would provide Wilson with skills, connections,
and resources to begin working on the American Ornithology full time.‘28 Carr and
Alexander Lawson were also working on James Mease’s Geological Account of the
United States that would be published early in 1807. This encyclopedic project included
a handful of engavings by Lawson (one of a buffalo hunt in which the buffalo look much
more like African water buffalo than American bison.) Mease acknowledges Barton and
Bartram, the “human resources” of the garden, as sources of information. This team of
naturalists, engraver, and printer worked well together publishing some of the most

important works of the period.

Barton ’s fossils

In March 1806, Barton published the ﬁrst of two installments of a letter on “Facts,
Observations, and Conjectures, relative to the Elephantine Bones (of different species),
that are found in various parts of North-America.” Barton’s letter was addressed to “Mr.
G. Cuvier.” George Cuvier, a French scholar working at the National Museum of Natural
History in Paris, had published on the fossils of jaw bones of Mammoth and the living
Indian elephant in 1798. By sending his ﬁndings to Europe, Barton was participating in
one of the most controversial scientiﬁc arguments of the period. Cuvier, Larnarck, and

Buffon were only a handful of the sigliﬁcant minds attempting to make sense of whether

 

128. The success of the Rees Cyclopedia was in part due to its ﬁne quality; one review said, “Rees
cyclopedia is welleprinted by Mr. Carr, good quality paper, illustration of good quality, well edited,
informative.” Port-Folio 4, no. 18 (October 31, 1807): 280.

77

species of animals that once existed could disappear altogether and why. Fossils and
bones of non-living species had been discovered all over the world. The most famous set
of bones found to date in North America had been excavated on a farm in the Hudson
River Valley by Charles Willson Peale in 1801. The nearly complete specimen had been
put on display in Philadelphia in December of 1801.129

Barton starts the 1806 section of his letter with a discussion of a set of remains
found in Wythe, Virginia, including a description of the conditions in which the bones
and remains were found. These are important because those conditions have allowed for
the preservation of some soft tissues. The primary discovery of this particular animal is
the stomach and its contents. Barton asserts that this species was herbivorous; apparently
this had been one of those persistent issues that had been dividing the scientiﬁc
community for some time. Since behaviors, including diet, are essential to determining
distinct species, the ﬁndings of the stomach contents is sigriﬁcant. If the bones and
remains are ﬂour a distinct species, then it can be conﬁrmed that that species is different
than similar ones now living. This, Barton says, is not the same species as ones that are
now living.

He then goes on to clarify his own belief about extinction: “[w]e shall never,
perhaps, be certain at what period the species of the Mammoth ceased to exist in
America. We may, however, I think, conﬁdently assert, that several centuries have

elapsed since this vast animal was a common inhabitant of the forests or marshes of this

 

129. See “Exhuming the Mastodon” by Charles Willson Peale for Peale’s visual representation of the
expedition

78

continent ”130

Though the particulars shifted over time, the debate about extinction and
malleability of species had been and would be raging for years. Barton would say in
another publication, “I speak of animals as extinct. In doing this, I adopt the language of
the ﬁrst naturalist of the age. No naturalist, no philosopher; no one tolerably acquainted
with the history of nature’s works and operations, will subscribe to the puerile opinion,
that Nature does not permit any of her species of animals, or of vegetables to perish.”‘3 1
Only a person who is really not paying attention would think species do not become
extinct, Barton is saying.

Why send this letter to Cuvier? Cuvier had been focusing his work on establishing
the difference between extinct and living species, so he had a proven interest in the topic.
Barton also wanted to send one of the molars found in North America to help in Cuvier’s
projects. Barton ageed with Cuvier about extinction in general but disagreed on some of
Cuvier’s speciﬁc assertions. Cuvier hypothesized that “revolutions,” often taking the
form of ﬂoods and wiping out any number of species, had occurred in the long history of
the earth. Barton, in his letter, suggests data that undermines the hypothesis of
“revolutions.” The bones and tusks (defenses Barton calls them) were found in the earth
in a vertical position, as though the animal were standing when it was buried; “Thus,
allowing the fact to be correctly stated, no one will imagine, that the skeletons, to which

these bones belonged were conveyed to the morass in which they are found by a deluge,

 

130. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Additional Facts and Observations, relative to the Extinct Species of
American Elephants. In a letter ﬁom the Editor to Mons. Cuvier, of Paris,” The Philadelphia Medical and
Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 1 March 1806): 28.

131. Benjamin Smith Barton, “A discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History and the
best means of promoting the study of Science in the United States” Read before the Linnaean Society, 10
June 1807 (Philadelphia: Denham and Town, 1807), 20.

79

or by any other violent convulsion of nature?”32

These bones weren’t swept to their ﬁnal
resting place and buried by a ﬂood—the animal walked to that place and sunk into the
swamp.

The question remains: where do the species go? If they are not destroyed in a
ﬂood or other catastrophe, why don’t they exist anymore? One suggestion was that
species changed over time. The mechanism for change like this had been seen over short
periods in the development of hybrids. Cuvier did not believe that organisms evolved
over time, however. He believed species were immutable. Each species is precisely
made of interdependent parts, said Cuvier, any change would have the result of disrupting
the organism. Based on this conception, Cuvier developed a system for classifying
species based on four categories or types. Within each category the species were alike
enough in their anatomy that they could be seen as related. There was, according to
Cuvier, no evidence any species from different categories could have a common ancestor.

Another sigliﬁcant ﬁgure in the debates of the period was J can-Baptiste Lamarck
who had recently (1802) published the beginnings of that would become the Philasophie
zoologique (1809) in which he laid out his theory of organic development. Larnarck did
believe that species were mutable. He posited that change occurred as a “nervous ﬂuid”
worked within the body of an organism. In the most oft used parts of a body, the ﬂuid
carved paths and ultimately generated new structures. Over generations, new, more
complex forms developed by the power of the nervous ﬂuid. Larnarck’s system for
variation of species partly related to organisms responding to their environments, but

differed ﬁom the notion of natural selection in that common descent was not a part.

 

132. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Additional Facts and Observations, relative to the Extinct Species of
American Elephants. In a letter ﬁom the Editor to Mons. Cuvier, of Paris,” The Philadelphia Medical and
Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 1 March 1806): 172-73.

80

Larnarck argued that simple organisms are spontaneously formed. Over time, and with
the power of the nervous ﬂuid, species become more complex, therefore, the more
complex a species, the longer it has existed. Each group of species originates with a

different instance of spontaneous generation. ’33

These differing conceptions of the
origins of species and their relationships to one another were occupying the minds of
many of Europe’s scientists.

Barton was also struggling to make sense of malleable species and extinction and
his belief in type specimens. In 1799, Barton had published in the American
Philosophical Society Transactions, “Some Account of an American Species of Dipus, or
J erboa.” In it Barton had asserted that “the number of marnmalia that are common to the
old and the new world is much smaller than naturalists have supposed, and that America
possesses many species of these and other animals, as well as of vegetables, which ever
have been peculiar to herself. Everything, in my opinion, favors the idea, that with
respect to many of the living existences, there has been a separate creation in the old and
in the new world.”'3" With the acceptance of separate creations as an explanation for the
differences between species, Barton allows for a continued belief in the reality of species.
Species that started out different could not be expected to be anything but different. For
Barton, it was possible to reconcile the problem of similar, yet distinct species with his
faith in the permanence of nature and nature’s God.

The theory of separate creations also directly responds to the theories of Georges-

Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon who was Larnarck’s teacher. According to Buffon, all

 

133. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1983), pages 83-88.

134. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Some account of an American Species of Dipus, or Jerboa,” American
Philosophical Society Transactions 4 (1799): 118.

81

matter is made up of parts that are identical. Each individual is created through a process
like nutrition and gowth. The mixture of seminal liquids sparks the gowth of a new
individual, which is created by each of the parts of the body molding the organic matter,
let’s call it clay, into the shape the body needs to complete itself. So the clay is added
until each part is made and gows to be ﬁll] sized. Buffon argues that “so long as there
subsists individuals the species will ever be new; they are the same at present as they
were three thousand years ago, and will perpetually exist, by the powers they are
endowed with, unless annihilated by the will of the Almighty Creator.”'35 His point is
that as long as there is a species, then there will continue to be that species and that off-
spring are always identical to their parents. As individual organisms responded to new
environments, say from traveling to new places, they “degenerated” into the variations
that were mistaken for distinct species. If an individual is taken out of the environment,
it will revert to the original type.‘36 So, according to Buffon, organisms are in fact
constant, though their environments may temporarily alter their immediate appearance.
What was particularly disturbing to American naturalists was Buffon’s assertion
that degeneration had occurred at a faster rate on North America. Animals in Europe
were less degenerated than those found in the new world. This, of course, rubbed
American naturalists the wrong way. Barton would say in a lecture on natural
knowledge, “Of all the countries of the earth there is none, perhaps, which exhibits

scenes of greater magnitude, sublirnity, and gandeur than America.”'37 Buffon’s

 

135. John Lyon and Phillip R. Sloan, eds., From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from
Buﬁbn and His Critics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

136. Peter J .Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1983).

137. Benjamin Smith Barton, Lecture, Benjamin Smith Barton 11 Misc. Papers, American Philosophical
Society

82

theories were both offensive and incorrect according to Barton. The interdependent
questions of malleability and extinction that took up so much of the attention of
naturalists during this period would lack a nearly universally accepted theory to explain
them for another generation.

Why did it matter that certain species might or might not become extinct or
whether species were malleable? Inherent in the projects of the garden, to identify and
classify was the search for the laws of nature. The conception of knowledge that
underlay the projects, the belief that what is observed reﬂects a higher truth, suggested
that species remain constant. The truth, or the laws, of nature that species reﬂect remains
constant, so to disrupt the equation of observation to reality would be extraordinarily
problematic. Those laws reﬂected the unchanging immutable order of nature and the
God that nature reﬂected, according to the eighteenth century paradigns.

The danger of rejecting the fundamental acceptance of a static universe had
already been seen with the arguments of the skeptics. The debate between the Scottish
Enlightenment and the Skeptics was: can one make the leap from the data presented to
the senses—the shape of the leaves—and the existence of an unseeable truth—particular
species? The skeptics questioned this connection and argued that it was not possible to
make that leap. We can no longer be sure that what we see represents some kind of higher
reality. David Hume argued that if there are no inherent ideas then we have no tool for
determining the reality of our experiences. Without the inherent ability to judge truth, all
knowledge remains in a state of uncertainty (hence the name, skeptic). For skeptics the

connection between experience and Truth is broken.

83

The search for the essential was a search for the inﬁnite. If we can be sure of
nothing then we can not be sure of the existence of God. The rejection of ﬁxed species
led down a similar path. Without ﬁxed species it became much harder to accept a ﬁxed,
unchanging truth that reﬂected the nature of God. The challenge for this period of
transition and the scientists working within it was to reconcile a belief in God with the
evidence that animals became extinct. Without a belief in some higher truths then a
person is left with no certainty, no moral compass. The intellectual process of throwing
away the construct of species led to a very dangerous, amoral place. Believing in type
specimens was a rejection of skepticism—it was a belief in Truth.

The processes of evolution and extinction, though recogrized, had to be
reconciled with the faith in these constants. There is evidence that Barton believed in a
teleological nature—nature that has been and is created toward an ultimate purpose. He
writes in another work “But who will seriously believe, that Nature has exerted so much
care and skill in the construction of the beautiful petals of ﬂowers, merely to form a
palace for insects, whilst they are aiding in a work, which, in irmumerable instances, is
fully accomplished without the least of insectile aid?”I38 His argument in this case, about
the petals of ﬂowers, depends on the assumption that the petals have been desigled for a
particular purpose. The source for a purpose in Nature is God. By holding a teleological
view of nature, the scientist is able to reconcile extinction with the laws of nature.
Extinction occurs because it is the intention of a plan. The teleological view of nature, so
crucial to the eighteenth century conception of nature, did not survive into the nineteenth
century. To believe in both divine purpose and extinction is to hold the middle ground

between eighteenth and nineteenth century sciences.

 

138. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), 1: 139-140.

84

Barton published his part in this debate in two parts stretching over 1806 and
1807. The others at the garden continued their own work. James Mease traveled to
Georgia and published a short piece on the alligator Mease’s trip retraced some of the
steps that Bartram had taken in the 1770s. In his article, he describes what the alligators
eat and their interactions with the human populations of the area. Mease injured and
captured a large alligator and describes the battle he fought to keep the animal in
captivity. The alligator “twisted of the handle [of a boat hook] in an instant, though more
than one inch and a half in diameter?”9 Without speciﬁcally mentioning Bartrarn’s
name, the testimony in the article goes a long way to adding credit to the seemingly
hyperbolic descriptions found in the Travels. Bartrarn’s reviewer’s criticism of
“rhapsodical effusions” rings with less authority. This article was one of a number by
Mease who over the years would work to preserve the garden and the reputations of its
inhabitants. This year also saw an important addition to Mease’s family: his son, Butler
Mease was born. The young man would later change his name to Pierce Butler as a
condition of his inheriting sigliﬁcant wealth and property from his maternal grandfather.
Butler would go on to marry Fanny Kemble, and become infamous in the anti-slavery
movement. But that is years to come and another story.

The garden was struggling because of the Napoleonic Wars Embargo. Ann would
say in later years that the garden business was not quite the same after this extended
interruption in the trade with Europe. In addition, competition among Philadelphia plant
and seed growers was intensifying. With the limiting of the international market because

of the embargo, the increased number of nurseries in the Philadelphia area, for example,

 

139. James Mease, “Observations of the American Alligator” The Philadelphia Medical Museum,
Conducted byJohn Redman Coxe, MD. 3, no. 3 (1807): 146.

85

David Landreth and his very successﬁrl and well-known seed business, put pressure on
the Bartram family’s business.‘40 In 1807, the Bartrams issued a thirty-three page
catalogue of plants in garden. In it, the Bartrams made available for sale species that
“have been lately discovered” that were not yet established within the scientiﬁc
community (i.e. did not have accepted names). William and his brother hoped that by
releasing these plants to the public, along with descriptions, the scientiﬁc community
could work together to establish names; the catalogue is a scientiﬁc project as well as a
commercial one. The dual nature of the garden, that of a “botanical academy” and a
working business, is obvious at this point.

Ironically, in the early months of 1807, Thomas Jefferson was making
arrangements with Bernard M’Mahon, the Philadelphia horticulturalist and nurseryman,
and with William Hamilton to g'ow plants ﬁom seeds gathered by Meriwether Lewis on
the Corps of Discovery expedition. M’Mahon’s American Gardener ’s Calendar had been
published in1806, and would prove popular enough to support eleven editions. Jefferson
wrote directly to William Hamilton asking him to look after the plants at the Woodlands,
“it is with great pleasure that, at the request of Governor Lewis, I send you the seeds now
enclosed, being a part of the Botanical ﬁ'uits of his journey across the continent.””' In
April, 1807, Lewis himself returned to Philadelphia to work with the community of
scientists to document the scientiﬁc discoveries ﬁ'om the expedition. The live plants
along with the preserved specimens were returned to the very place where Lewis learned

his collecting techniques.

 

140. Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, From Seed to F lower, Philadelphia [681-1876, A Horticultural
Point of View (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, 1976), 69.

141. Thomas Jefferson to William Hamilton, quoted in Rodney H. True. “Some Neglected Botanical
Results of the Lewis and Clark Expedition” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 67, l
(1928): 8. p

86

The summer of 1807 was a busy one for Barton. He was getting established as a
home owner and head of the family.142 Throughout the summer Barton had visited and
made observations at the garden. He employed Frederick Pursh, who had been the
gardener at the Woodlands to do some collecting for him. Pursh, who had started
working at the Woodlands in 1803, was familiar to the community at the garden. Barton
employed Pursh to travel west of Philadelphia then on to the south through Maryland,
Virginia and North Carolina. Pursh’s journal ﬁom this collecting trip became the
property of Barton. After his return, Pursh worked with Barton and Lewis over the
summer on compiling the records of Lewis’s expedition. Their work together seems to
have soured however. It is unclear the nature of the arrangements made between Lewis,
Barton and Pursh. But it is known that Lewis was looking for assistance in identifying
the plants that were collected on the expedition and that although Barton was the leading
scholar and employer of Pursh, it was Pursh, not Barton, who ended up in possession of

Lewis’s specimens.

 

142. Barton purchased Venetian blinds for his front parlor windows in July. Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography 27 (1903): 54.

87

 

Figure 6. The garden in summer. (photo by author)

While in Philadelphia, Lewis also worked with Wilson and Alexander Lawson to
create illustrations of some of the sixty-six birds that the corps had discovered in the

west. ”3

Lewis, in their time together, made an impression on Wilson and would lead
him in 1810 to play an unexpected part in the history of the expedition. Meanwhile,
Wilson was hard at work on his own major project. He sent to Bartram a proof sheet
from the American Ornithology, apparently Bartram’s conﬁrmation was necessary before
plates could be made. On a cloudy day in May, Wilson asked for Ann’s help preparing
the plates. He also suggested that “Mary” might help. Mary Leech, a ﬁfteen year old
former student at the Union School lived with her family on land rented ﬁom John, Jr.

The Leech family had lived on the Bartram land sincel 796 and would stay until at least

1810.144 Wilson was ﬁiends with the family, it was Mary’s brother, Isaac, who had

 

143. Arthur F.W. Hughes, The American Biologist Through Four Centuries (Springﬁeld, 111: Charles C.
Thomas, 1982).

144. William Brooke Fetters, Six Columbiana County, Ohio Pioneer Families, Family William Fetter: and
Mary B. Leech Ancestors and Descendents. Maximilan Leech of Blockly and Kingsessing. a supplement.

88

traveled with Wilson on his trip to Niagara Falls. One can imagine, Ann, nearly old
enough to be Mary’s mother, and Mary working to paint the plates of the ﬁrst ornithology

of the United States with the conﬁdence of their friend.

Biogeography

On June 10, a cool, pleasant day in Philadelphia, Barton addressed the
Philadelphia Linnean (sic) Society. Barton who had been working to get the organization
established had been elected the ﬁrst president and presented the ﬁrst anniversary oration
called “A Discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History, and on the
best Means of promoting the Study of this Science, in the United-States. ” (The oration
was published with a preface dated August 12 1807.) More speciﬁc than his dedication
to his students ﬁom a few years earlier, Barton lays out the future of the study of natural
history as he sees it. Barton starts with the call for a system of classiﬁcation that will
bring it “regularity and beauty” to Natural History.

One of the projects that Barton sees as most signiﬁcant for the advance of science
is a “geogaphical view of vegetables.” By this he means “an arrangement of vegetables
according to the extent of country which they occupy from north to south, and from east
to west; as well as according to their altitude above the level of the sea.””5 Alexander
von Humboldt had published his Essai sur la geographic des plantes on plant distribution
in 1807 (which Barton owned) based in part on his journey to the Americas in 1804.
Humboldt had visited Philadelphia in that year; Charles Willson Peale had painted his

portrait for his collection in the Natural History Museum. The community around the

 

145. Benjamin Smith Barton, “A discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History and the
best means of promoting the study of Science in the United States” Read before the Linnaean Society, 10
June 1807 (Philadelphia: Denham and Town, 1807), 42.

89

garden was well aware of Humboldt’s visit and his work. Wilson had sent to Bartram an
account of the visit.146 Humboldt argued that the process of mapping species and
understanding their relationships to each other was a far more sigliﬁcant project than
simply identifying and classifying. He said the goal of the biogeogaphy was to
“investigate the conﬂuence and interweaving of all physical forces.”m Humboldt argued
that through this gathering, documenting and synthesizing of data, the forces, the
conﬂicts and the balance of nature could be better understood.

Barton had been working on explicit biogeography projects for some time. In his
1792 article “An Inquiry into the Question, whether the Apis Melliﬁca, or True Hone
Bee, is a native of America” Barton compiled accounts and linguistic evidence that
argues that the honey bee is not native. Here, he uses history to make an assertion about
species distribution.148 In his discussion of the elephantine bones, Barton points out that
the distribution of this species was wide and asserts that Asia is the origin of many of the
species in North America. The project of biogeography was tied to the effort to trace
origins and whether living species are descendents or not. Barton, along with the broader
scientiﬁc community, struggled to ﬁgure out which current species is most like an extinct
one.

Barton, in his presentation before the Linnaean Society, offers an example of the
process and implications of the study of biogeogaphy: “Thus, from a mere attention to

the vegetables of the north-eastem parts of Asia and north-western parts of America, we

 

146. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram, August 16, 1804, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson,
ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 219.

147. Alexander von Humboldt quoted in Michael Dettelbach, “Hurnboldtian science” in N. Jardine, F. A.
Secord, E.C. Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 290.
148. Interestingly, Barton points out that in several Native languages there are no words for honey or wax.
From this he concludes that wax-making honey bees were unknown to the native peoples. Ifthey were
unknown he goes on to argue, they must not have been there, not much gets past those folks.

90

should conclude, that these two continents had once been united to each other: for many
of the vegetables of these regions of the old and new world are specifically the

same. . ””9 The debates over malleability of species and extinction gain much from the
geogaphic data. Barton had argued that species that differ differ because they have
origins in separate creations. The species that are similar are, in fact, the same and have
the same origin. There is no contradiction in imagining that animals and plants moved
ﬁ'om one location to another.

The project of a biogeogaphy was part of the effort to understand the
“changeableness” of the universe along with malleability of species and extinction. But,
the project of biogeogaphy complicates the concepts of the type specimen. While the
process of identifying the type specimen removed the subject ﬁom nature and viewed the
specimen out of its context, biogeography put the plants and animals back into their
native spaces, required that a specimen be viewed within its context. The techniques and
strategies of eighteenth century projects were colliding with the demands of nineteenth
century projects. The process of viewing organisms in their context was essential to
ﬁnding solutions to the questions of malleability of species and extinction (nineteenth
century projects), but undermined the technique of collecting type specimens (eighteenth
century projects).

Throughout the fall of 1807, Wilson applied himself to his project. He went to
New York and Albany, collecting data and looking for subscribers. In October the
American Ornithology got one of its most prestigious subscribers: Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson wrote that he was “satisﬁed it will give us valuable new matter as well as

 

149. Emphasis is Barton’s. Benjamin Smith Barton, “A discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in
Natural History and the best means of promoting the study of Science in the United States” Read before the
Linnaean Society, 10 June 1807 (Philadelphia: Denham and Town, 1807).

91

correct the errors of what we possessed before?”0 Advertisements for the publication
appeared in a number of major newspapers around the country. The publication will be a
beneﬁt to the individual, the ads explain, the pursuit of natural history provides access to
the workings of the God of nature. Moreover, the publication will be an important part of
the national project. Wilson’s Ornithology will “rescue this part of American history,
ﬁom the obscurity in which the mistakes, the prejudices, and circumscribed situation of
foreiglers have involved it,” and “additional motives for self-congratulation and love of
country, are the goat desigls of this publication.”'5' Only an American would have the
access and exposure to the live specimens necessary to make an accurate study, Wilson
argues in the advertisements. Jefferson responds that to correct the errors is most
important. The Ornithology will be a part of the American project of creating a system
that corrects the errors of the past dominated by the work of Europeans.

Life continued at the garden as in the past. The household account books of 1808
show a sigriﬁcant purchase of building supplies during this period. Was John making
repairs to the house or outbuildings? Construction is always disruptive. Late summer,
after many of the birds had stopped their songs of spring but the Ka-te-did-it had started
its “cheerﬁil chattering,” Wilson visited the garden and participated in a rather g'uesome
experiment.‘52 He caught a daddy long legs and he, with Ann and William looking on,
systematically pulled all of the legs off. This did not seem to be the spontaneous cruel

entertainment of a sultry afternoon since they brought the spider inside and carefully laid

 

150. Thonns Jefferson to Alexander Wilson, October 9,1807, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson,
ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 266.

151. Advertisment reprinted in in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson, ed Clark Hunter (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1983), 267-272.

152. Benjamin Smith Barton, “Fragments of a Natural History of Pennsylvania” in Selected Works by
Eighteenth-Century Naturalists and Tl‘avellers. ed. Seir B. Sterling (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 6.

(pagination of original document)

92

each leg on a piece of paper. They noticed that the legs continued to move after being
severed hour the body and would continue to respond to touch. Wilson notes that these
“convulsive motions, if they may be so called seemed to originate in the joints and what
is very singular each leg before its ﬁnal cessation seemed to suffer expiring agonies
starting about more violent than ever for a second or two, after which no attempts with
the ﬁnger could restore it.” Wilson’s poetic nature seems disturbed by their

observations—“expiring agonies,” for goodness sake. ‘53

Thomas Nuttall

That same summer, Thomas Jefferson made arrangements with Charles Willson
Peale for his grandson to study Natural History and botany in Philadelphia. The plan that
Jefferson laid out was for his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, to live with the
Peales and study with Caspar Wistar and Benjamin Smith Burton.”4 Jefferson hoped
that the gardens in Philadelphia would be an especially valuable resource for his
gandson’s education. Jefferson’s grandson was not the only student to start studying
with Barton that summer. A new ﬁiend had arrived at the garden: Thomas Nuttall. Over
the next years, Nuttall would work regularly at the garden, so often in fact that he “had a
room expressly reserved for him at [Bartram’s] house, called Nuttall’s room, which he

occupied occasionally for a whole week?”5

 

153. Alexander Wilson’s notes, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson, ed. Clark Hunter
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 272-273.

154. Thomas Jefferson to Charles Willson Peale, in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 28
(1904): 314.

155. “Biographical notice of the Late Thorms Nuttall” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
7 (1859-1861): 301.

93

Nuttall had arrived in the United States from England and met Benjamin Smith
Barton soon after his arrival. Thomas Nuttall, born on January 5, 1786 in Yorkshire,
England, was the ﬁrst of three children of Margaret Hardacre and James Nuttall. His
father died in 1798 when Thomas was 12. He received a formal education until he was
14, then was apprenticed as a printer. Without the consent of his family, he left for the
United States and landed in Philadelphia on 23 April 1808356 It was said about Nuttall:
“He was described as stout and stooping, moving like an Indian, and morbidly
unsociable, except with the very rare individuals who struck a sympathetic chord.”157 A
mid-nineteenth century biographical notice describes him as having a fair complexion
“sometimes very pale from hard labor and want of exercise. His height was above the
middle; his person stout, with a slight stoop; and his walk peculiar and mincing,
resembling that of an Indian.” 158

An unattributed and undated portrait of Nuttall shows a seated man around 35
years old with a receding hair line of short curly hair against a dark, plain backgound. He
is very trim, dressed in a black coat and white shirt, collar and tie. Grey eyes look
squarely at the viewer. He is not smiling exactly but there is a slight upturn to his mouth
and no contraction of the eyebrows. If not happy, he is cahn and content. There is no

indication of Nuttall’s scholarly pursuits. Since Nuttall was only 22 when we meet him,

the portrait gives us the idea that the years to come will be good ones for him. He started

 

156. Jeannette E. Graustein, Thomas Nuttall, Naturalist: Explorations in America [808-184] (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967).

157. M. L. Ferald, “Some Early Botanists of the American Philosophical Society” American Philosophical
Society Proceedings 86 (1943): 63.

158. “Biographical notice of the Late Thomas Nuttall” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society

7 (1859-1861): 306.

94

studying botany soon aﬁer his arrival in Philadelphia and would work with Barton for a

number of years.‘59

The American Ornithology

That June, as Wilson traveled to New England searching for specimens and
subscriptions, volume one of American Ornithology was published. The ﬁrst volume
includes 38 drawings of 34 birds on nine plates. The introduction says the work is
“intended to comprehend a description and representation of every species of our native
birds, from the shores of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and from the
Atlantic Ocean to the interior of Louisiana.”160 Wilson says about the birds he portrays
that he will become “their faithful biographer.” It is not for idle curiosity this work, the
introduction promises, it is a “study thus tending to multiply our enjoyments at so cheap a
rate, and to lead us, by such pleasing gradations, to the contemplation and worship of the
Great First Cause, the Father and Preserver of all.”.These pursuits “can neither be idle nor
useless, but is worthy of rational beings, and doubtless agreeable to the Deity.”161

Looking at a couple of the plates can give a reﬂection of the work as a whole.
The ﬁrst plate starts the collection off so beautifully. Three birds are posed on a single

unattached tree branch—two smaller birds (Goldﬁnch and Baltimore bird) at the top and

bottom with the larger Blue Jay in the center. The two smaller birds face to the leﬁ, with

 

159. Portrait owned by the F033 Museum, Harvard University.
160. Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1878), 1: l.
161. Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1878), l: 2.

95

the larger one facing right. The space is balanced and orderly. Wilson’s ﬁrst plate sets

the tone for the work. Here, nature is tidy and ordered with “regularity and beauty.”162

 

Figure 7. Plate one of volume one of the American Ornithology.

The ninth plate shows four woodpeckers on a single page with very little white
space shown. The birds’ tails are tucked into the open spaces on the page. They sit, three
vertically and one horizontally. Broken bark on the tree branch alerts the viewer to the
birds’ primary food source. Each of the birds shares the red and black coloring giving the
plate a visual consistency that is very decorative. The result is not just decorative; the

viewer is able to compare the four species, a grouping technique that is not oﬁen used in

 

162. Barton uses this expression to compliment a classiﬁcation system Benjamin Smith Barton, “A
discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History and the best means of promoting the study
of Science in the United States” Read before the Linnaean Society, 10 June 1807. (Philadelphia: Denham
and Town, 1807).

96

this ornithology. Balance and order turn these birds into the type specimens that they are

meant to be.

 

Figure 8. Plate nine of volume one of the American Ornithology.

The plates were created in a process of many hands. Wilson started by drawing
the birds as he wished them to be portrayed including important details of each animal
and its placement on the page. Then the engraver, Alexander Lawson, created copper
plate engravings of the drawings, by cutting lines in the plate to make the outline and the
shading. To make a print, the whole plate was inked with black ink, then wiped clean,
leaving ink only in the etched lines, with deeper indentations making darker lines.

Wilson acknowledges the signiﬁcance of the partnership between artist and engraver in

97

the introduction when he says, “[e]very person who is acquainted with the extreme
accuracy of eminent engravers, must likewise be sensible of the advantage of having the
imperfections of the pencil corrected by the excellence of the graver.”163 The last step is
for the colorist—for the ﬁrst volume there were a number—to hand paint each element of
the drawing.

A number of Wilson’s drawings are preserved in the library of the Academy of
Natural Sciences. By comparing the original sketch with the ﬁnished plate, one gets a
better impression of the collaboration between the artist and the engraver. Wilson’s
sketch of the Great American Shrike (volume one, plate ﬁve) shows the bird perched on
a piece of a tree branch, facing to the right, with its wings closed and the tail drooping
slightly. The Shrike in the ﬁnished plate is exactly the same size and sits on the same
branch. A quick glance would say that the engraving has replicated the drawing exactly.
But a closer look reveals the slight differences which contribute to changing the attitude
of the bird on the page. In Lawson’s engraving, the bird’s head thrusts forward slightly
more, the line of the neck and chest is straighter as though the bird is reaching toward
something. Wilson’s bird is more relaxed, with gently curved lines forming the neck and
chest. The tail in the engraving is higher and the neck is more stretched out giving the
bird a more elongated air. The effect is that Lawson’s bird, the one that appears in the
printed volumes, seems more aggressive. Wilson’s plates have been criticized for
seeming to lack life because the birds are stretched into unnatural positions. Perhaps this
criticism is not fair to Wilson since the resulting plate clearly reﬂects the work of two

artists, not just one.

 

163. Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1878), l: 8.

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Work on the next volumes of the Ornithology continued for Wilson. In December
he was off again, heading south this time. His travels took him to Washington, DC,
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia On December 18, 1808, Wilson
visited the White House. William Bartram had introduced Wilson to Thomas Jefferson
by letter in 1805 when Wilson sent to Jefferson a drawing of two birds. Jefferson carried
on intermittent correspondence over the years with both Wilson and Bartram. In fact
earlier that year, Bartram had sent to Jefferson seeds for a “silk tree” (a native of Persia,
he explains by letter). Jefferson replied that “he salutes Mr. Bartram with ﬁiendship and
respect” and will “cherish with care at Monticello” this plant.‘“ Wilson strongly
supported the president, he had said in 1805 that “the re-appointrnent and continuance of
our beloved Jefferson to superintend our national executive, is one of those distinguished
Blessings whose beneﬁcent effects extend to Posterity; and whose value our hearts may
feel, but can never express.”'°5 Wilson was more than just a political supporter, he
brought the latest news from the garden Jefferson knew and respected.

The projects of the garden and their contributors found the support of ﬁgures like
Jefferson extremely valuable. Those projects were characterized by the struggle to
reconcile changing notions of Nature while staying active in the vibrant debates of the
period. The work of the Bartrams, Barton, Wilson, and Nuttall was challenged by

shifting paradigms.

 

164. Thomas Jefferson to William Bartram, November 23, 1808, American Memory Collection, Library of
Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jeﬁ'erson_papers/

165. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram, March 4, 1805, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson,
ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 231-232.

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Chapter 4
“the immortal soul of nature”

Thus twines the honeysuckle sweet
Around some trunk decay’d and bare,
Thus angels on the pious wait,

To banish each distressing care.
Alexander Wilson, “A Rural Walk "

Summer brings heat and plenty of insects to the garden, but also songbirds which
are attracted to the Sassaﬁas trees. Rice Buntings visited in August, for example. The
monotony of late summer with the hot days, warm nights, and plenty of weeds in the
ﬂower beds, would be broken by the Carolina Allspice with its lovely scent that
continued to bloom late into the summer. The crops in the working parts of the Bartram
land would start to be harvested. Many of the plants that had bloomed in spring would be
making seeds. The bounty of spring is present even in the most stiﬂing heat.

On March 4, 1809 Ann Bartram married Robert Carr at the garden. Today, a pale
brown silk dress with short sleeves and an empire waist is hanging in the closet of one of
the upper bedrooms at the Bartram house (and museum). Family legend has it that this is
Ann’s wedding dress. The archeologists and material culture experts who have been
enlisted in the debate say that the material, style and dating of the fabric are appropriate
for it to be Ann’s.166 Attending her wedding were John Bartram, Jr., her father, her sister,
Mary and her sister’s husband, Nathan Jones and her uncle, William, along with the
tenants and servants of the farm. It must have been a happy day. Her marriage to a non-

Quaker meant that she was disowned by the meeting, so I like to imagine that she loved

 

166. Kate Sahrnel, Conservations Report, Winterthur Museum, Division of Conservation Textile
Laboratory. March 31, 2005.

100

him, that she got something in exchange for what she lost.167 Ann and Robert would
have no children of their own, though Ann helped to raise Carr’s son from his ﬁrst
marriage, who was what we would call a pre-schooler when his father remarried. The
boy, John Bartram Carr, grew up at the garden and would go on to produce a minor work
in Natural History, as short journal piece entitled “The Diary of a Naturalist” in 1831.
Around the time of her wedding, there is a noticeable change in the language of the
Bartram family account books. Until 1809, Ann was referred to by her childhood name,

Nancy. After 1809, Ann becomes “Ann.”

Wilson and “The Foresters ”

Alexander Wilson missed Ann’s wedding, not returning to Philadelphia until late
March. In fact, the day after the wedding, he wrote to Bartram detailing his trip to the
areas that Bartram must have remembered from his own journey to the South. The
expedition has been tiring, Wilson confesses in his letter, but successful. He made a
discovery of a distinct species in a most grisly way, he tells Bartram. He had “presided at
a singular feast” at which a dead horse was cleaned by 237 carrion crows, 38 vultures,
and ﬁve or six dogs; he jokes that he “left the eating part entirely to the others.” The
signiﬁcance is that he has discovered a species “very distinct” from the well-known
turkey vulture. It was during this same trip that Wilson attempted to trap a woodpecker

in his room in Wilmington, North Carolina. The bird did signiﬁcant damage to the

 

167. Merril D. Smith, “The Bartram Worrren: Farm Wives, Artists, Botanists, and Entrepreneurs,”
Bartram Broadside of the John Bartram Association (Winter 2001 ): 6.

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interior space and nearly escaped his captivity tluough a wall. ‘68 Wilson returned soon
after this letter was written and incorporated his observations into the Ornithology.
Starting in June 1809 (until March 1810) Alexander Wilson’s “The Foresters”
was published serially in Port-Folio. The poem tells of Wilson’s journey by foot to
Niagara Falls in the fall of 1803. He had traveled with his cousin, Duncan and “young
Leech,” making note of ﬂora, fauna, and local people along the way. Wilson had been
writing poetry for years. In Scotland, he had won local poetry contests and was known in
his community for his verse. He had published very little since he arrived in the United
States, but of this work Wilson said, “I have bestowed more pains upon this than I ever
did upon any former poem?”69
Wilson believed in enlisting the arts, especially poetry, in the cause of advancing
the development of America. This work goes hand in hand with the American
Ornithology in his efforts to glorify his adopted country. He sets the mood of the poem
by opening with his conviction that he is performing a duty to his country. He joins with
others around this time in asking if the beauties of the arts are exclusive to Europe, “To
Europe’s shores renowned in deathless song,/ Must all the honours of the bard
belong7/And rural Poetry’s enchanting strain/ Be only heard beyond th’ Atlantic main?”

He will do what he can to save the glories of America ﬁ'om obscurity by writing a poem

about her nature because nature is silent until a human speaks for it, “Yet Nature’s

 

168. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram, March 5, 1809, in The Life and Letters of A lexander Wilson,
ed Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 307-9.

169. Alexander Wilson to William Duncan, February 20, 1805, in The Life and Letters of Alexander
Wilson, ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 231.

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charms that bloom so lovely here/Unhailed arrive, unheeded disappear.”170 Wilson’s
stated goal is to draw attention to the beauties of nature through the beauty of poetry.

The poem is attributed to the “Author of the American Ornithology.” This
attribution signals that this was to be read in connection with the author’s scientiﬁc
accomplishments. Throughout the work, footnotes explain in prose either what could not
ﬁt in verse, or what Wilson wanted to draw attention to. The distinct voice of the
footnotes, the voice of an accomplished scientist, acts to ground the reader in the realism
of the poem; the “bard” is not describing some ﬁctive, fanciful place, but one that is real,
with real place names and census data Scientiﬁc names of birds appear in this voice
reinforcing the veracity of the poem, as well making it accessible not only to the highly
educated but also to all who read its lines.

Many of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers argued that aesthetic production was
important to the development of the mind and morals. Wilson’s poetry is written not just
for the pleasure of a few, but for the good of the many. Intended to appeal to the
“common sense” of everyone, the poetry is accessible and clear. The epistemology of the
Scottish Enlightenment, that all are endowed with the ability to know through their senses
and conscience the higher authority of God, also argued that all have a knowledge of
beauty. Wilson’s poetry complemented his Natural History in his social projects. Science
and art are working hand and hand.

Wilson enlisted the aid of moments of sublime experience in his effort to make
the beauties of North America truly known to all. When he and the travelers ﬁrst see the

Falls they are ﬁlled with awe, “All hearts confess an awful joy serene,/And, humbly, bow

 

170. Alexander Wilson, “The Foresters; A Poem: Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of
Niagara, In the Autumn of 1803,” Port-Folio 1, no. 6 (June 1809): 538. APS Online.

103

before the glorious scene./ Such were our raptures, such the holy awe/That swell’d our
hearts, at all we heard and saw.”m Through this sublime imagery, Wilson puts to use the
poetic theories of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaﬁesbury, and other thinkers
of the Scottish Enlightenment. These sublime moments of heightened awareness of
beauty inspire a person to virtue, Shaftesbury argued.172 The Falls themselves inspire
awe, and the poem about the Falls is the way to promote higher values in all. Virtue and
Beauty are inseparable, argued many of the Scottish philosophers. A person’s sense of
beauty is inherent in human nature and accessing that sense promotes virtue. If all can
know beauty, and beauty is a path to virtue, then all can beneﬁt from the work of art that
‘ depicts nature’s beauties. The projects of the garden, with their roots in the European
debates of the period, were not limited to those of a strictly scientiﬁc nature.

In part because the deﬁnition of what is scientiﬁc was different. Beauty provided
access not only to virtue, but to truth, some argued. That truth could be of a scientiﬁc
nature. Incorporating concepts of the Romantics, Naturphilosophen had advocates in
England and in Europe.173 This belief stated that living things reﬂected ideal patterns.
Not unlike the Platonic ideals seen in the quest for type specimens, visible nature
reﬂected perfect nature. Acquiring scientiﬁc knowledge was not limited to the scientiﬁc
process, but included the exploration of higher truths accessed through the emotions.
Idealism, at the heart of the Romantic movement, argued that the ideals or the truths of

nature, were seen not through direct access of the senses but through the experience of

 

171. Alexander Wilson, “The Foresters; A Poem: Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of
Niagara, In the Autumn of 1803,” Port-Folio 2, no. 6 (March 1810): 184. APS Online.

172. William Charvat, The origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-I835 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1936).

173. For a rrrore complete discussion of naturphilosophen and the Philosophical Naturalists in Britain, see
Philip F. Rehbock, The Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in early Nineteenth-Century British Biology.
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).

104

one’s emotions. Virtue was an ideal, but so were the laws of nature. Through his poetry,

Wilson was participating in a transatlantic scientiﬁc discussion.

Naturalists and history

While Wilson’s poem about Niagara Falls was appearing in print, Thomas Nuttall
' was making his way there, collecting and making observations for Barton. They would
correspond along the way, exchanging letters of introduction for specimens and
observations.”" Barton was, through his own connections and resources, promoting the
collection of botanical information of North America. Mease also spent the summer
applying his scientiﬁc knowledge to improving the community. In July 1809, the
organization for which Mease had become secretary, Pennsylvania Society For
Improving the Breed of Cattle, held a two-day cattle exhibition. Though the organization
got off to a strong start, this one would prove to be another short-lived experiment for
Mease. '75

Throughout the fall, while the Franklinia was in bloom at the garden, Wilson,
now back in Philadelphia, worked with Bartram on the American Ornithology. In
November during a visit to the garden, Wilson and Bartram must have talked about
Wilson’s upcoming trip because the next day he wrote to Bartram inviting him to join

him.I76 Bartram would not go with Wilson on any of his journeys but Wilson had

another idea for Bartram to be of assistance to him. In addition to all of the natural

 

174. Jeanette E. Graustein, Thomas Nuttall Naturalist: Explorations in America 1808-1841 (Harvard
University Press, 1967).

175. Simon Baatz, “Venerate the Plough A History of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting
Agriculture, 1785-1985 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1985), 17.
176. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram in Hunter, November 1 l, 1809, in The Life and Letters of
Alexander Wilson, ed Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 319-320.

105

knowledge he could share, his reputation was a key to Wilson’s success. Wilson made
the suggestion, “your favourable opinion of my work (if such you have) would, if
publicly known, be of inﬁnite service to me, and procure me many ﬁ’iends.”177 This time
the resource that Wilson sought at the garden was Bartram’s good word.

In January 1810, Volume two of the American Ornithology was published. This
volume differed from the ﬁrst in the number of birds per plate. The average number of
ﬁgures per plate in the ﬁrst volume was four while in the second that average raises to
nearly six. The density of information on each page reﬂects the constraints of time and
money more than an artistic decision. Wilson’s successes in collecting data and some of
his failures in securing subscribers could be seen in these plates.

The year ended on a sad note at the garden. In December, William’s brother,
Moses, died at the age of 78. Moses was an apothecary, contributing his knowledge of
botany to the medical community of Philadelphia. He had dabbled in some horticultural
work when he was younger, publishing a short piece on the results of his experiments
with silk worms in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1771.
William Bartram’s generation was starting to pass.

In January 1810, the community at the garden was involved in another tragedy.
On October 18, 1809, Meriwether Lewis had died in Natchez Trace. The circumstances
of his death were mysterious; Lewis died of a gun shot wound, but it was unclear if it had
been self-inﬂicted. Wilson, who was traveling west through Pittsburgh and south to
Louisville, Kentucky and on to Tennessee and Mississippi to collect for and market the

Ornithology, decided to visit the location of Lewis’s death and make an investigation.

 

177. Alexander Wilson to William Bartram, August 4, 1809, in The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson,
ed. Clark Hunter (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 316.

106

The ofﬁcial record of the Lewis and Clark’s expedition was still not complete at the time
of Lewis’s death, so as Wilson started his journey, William Clark traveled to Philadelphia
to arrange for the publication of the journals from the expedition. Clark and Barton met
to make arrangements for Barton’s assistance with the identiﬁcation of the ﬂora and
fauna observed during the expedition.

Because of the timing of the visit with Clark, it seems unlikely that Nuttall’s next
trip was not at least partly inspired by it. Leaving Philadelphia in the early morning of
April 12, 1810, Barton arranged with Nuttall to head west, following much the same path
as the Lewis and Clark expedition, but other opportunities would present themselves
along the way. Under the constraints and dangers of western travel, Nuttall diverged
from Barton’s original plan and traveled west with the John Jacob Astor company. Much
like for Nuttall’s previous trips, Barton had helped prepare Nuttall for the trip by lending
him supplies and materials for collecting and would provide guidance along the way.

While Nuttall was away, Barton sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson about some
drawings of bones of the Asiatic mammoth he had recently received from a
correspondent in St. Petersburg. Jefferson had been interested in the fossils and bones
found around the country for years and had even published a piece in 1797 in the
American Philosophical Society Transactions on bones that had been found in Virginia.
In this letter, Barton continues his argument that the mammoth bones found in North
America are ﬁom a distinct species and that neither the North American nor the Asiatic
mammoth is now living. What is especially interesting is that he addresses the concern
that with the acceptance of the possibility of extinction comes the rejection of a

perfection in nature; “There is something awful in the consideration of this subject; and

107

yet this very subject is admirably calculated to display to us the wisdom, as well as
power, of him who formed all things. The harmony of nature is not, in the smallest
degree, disturbed by the total destruction of what many have deemed necessary integral
parts of a common whole.”178 The God of Nature has removed the species from the
earth, Barton says. The possibility of a malleable nature does not eliminate the
participation of an all powerful God. Barton struggles to work at the point of convergence
of these two scientiﬁc paradigms. It is also interesting to note that this exchange of bones
from Europe to America mirrors Barton’s sending the molar to Cuvier in 1806. The
international exchange of data and results went both directions across the Atlantic. The
publication of that data reﬂects the method of “peer review” so essential to modern
scientiﬁc methods.

Upon his return at the end of the summer, Wilson continued to work on the
Ornithology as he had in the past, referring questions to Bartram, compiling data and
making portraits of the birds. There was one change in Wilson’s routine; while he was
away, he had started writing directly to Sarah Miller; it was a blossoming relationship for
him. Alexander Lawson, the engraver working with Wilson on the Ornithology had
introduced him to the Millers. In October, Wilson’s account of his trip to Kentucky and
Tennessee was published in Port-Folio. Wilson had written a long letter to Alexander
Lawson about visiting the site of Meriwether Lewis’s death in Natchez, Mississippi in the
previous May and it was a version of that letter that appeared in Port-Folio. Wilson
would be one of the only people to visit the site of Lewis’s death and it was Wilson who

erected a small fence around the grave to protect and preserve it.

 

178. Benjamin Smith Barton to Thomas Jefferson, July 13, 1810, in Port-Folio 4, no. 4 (October 1810):
343.

108

The circle of scientists working around the garden played important parts in
keeping the work of Natural History alive after the end of the glamorous journeys.
Wilson’s work on documenting the circumstances of Lewis’s death has helped us
understand the man who led one of the greatest exploring expeditions of the nineteenth
century. Barton also contributed to the effort to remember the men behind the science. In
1806, in his Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, he published accounts, tributes,
and memorandums on the lives of ﬁve naturalists.179 Barton used his position of editor of
a journal to document the accomplishments of European and American naturalists and
their contributions to the knowledge of North American Natural History. By documenting
the lives of the men and making them a part of our national history, the circle working
with Bartram made sure these men were not forgotten. Much of modern scholarship
demands that we view the works of natural description through the lens of the biases and
personalities of the people who made the observations. Our scholarship of science today
owes much to the work of the Bartram circle.

James Mease also contributed work to record and preserve the accomplishments
of Americans. A Picture of Philadelphia, with descriptions of many aspects of life in
Philadelphia, was published around this time. Mease describes the scientiﬁc institutions,
including the Philadelphia Linnaean Society with its committee structure, and the purpose
of the organization. The Society solicited submissions of unknown plants, animals or
minerals ﬁ'om throughout the United States. These discoveries will prove “extensively
valuable in the arts and manufactures,” Mease argues. Another institution working to

forward science in Philadelphia was Charles Willson Peale’s museum. Mease’s

 

179. These are: John Banister, Dr. Thomas Walmsey, William Vernon and Dr. David Krieg, and Mr. John
Clayton.

109

description quantiﬁes the space by listing its measurements and lists a number of the
animals on display—a short catalogue of sorts. This was not Mease’s only effort as a
preservationist. On January 20, 1812, James Mease wrote a letter to the governor of
Pennsylvania arranging for the original charter of Charles H— “Grant of King Charles II
to William Penn, 4th March 1680”—which John a Coates had brought ﬁom England, to
be deposited “among the archives of the state.”180 He would also exchange letters with
Thomas Jefferson about the physical location of the composition of the Declaration of
Independence. The work of the Bartram circle included preserving history as well as
preserving plants.

At the garden, John, Jr. had started to shift the responsibilities of the property to
his children. Legal arrangements were made for James and Robert Carr to take over a
section of the property (a piece of proﬁtable meadow land, to be speciﬁc). William
witnessed this legal document. I imagine the whole family together making
arrangements for the future. During that summer, Wilson lived with the Bartrams and the
Carrs at the garden. He worked on the fourth volume of the Ornithology and traveled
short distances from Philadelphia collecting data for the unﬁnished volumes. Wilson
worked tirelessly on his project. In September, during one of his stays in Philadelphia,
Volume four of American Ornithology was published."“ Volume three had been
published earlier that year and Wilson spent the fall and winter hard at work coloring

plates for Volume ﬁve, which would be published in February.

 

180. James Mease to Simon Snyder, January 20, 1812, in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 73 (1949): 423.

181. An interesting aside, this is one of the ﬁrst publications to experiment with printing in color. Colored
ink was used to print from the copper plates (rather than exclusively black). This innovation was discussed
by James Green, in paper presented, “Hand Coloring vs. Color Printing in Early Nineteenth-Century
Natural History Color-Plate Books” at ‘Curious in our way’ conference, Saturday, November 20, 2004.

110

Vitalism

Barton continued to teach Botany at the University of Pennsylvania. To aid his
teaching, the second edition of Elements of Botany was published. This edition, with few
changes from the ﬁrst, provided a vehicle for Barton to emphasize his own interests: the
function of the leaves, “[a] subject more pleasing than any of those which I have hitherto
touched upon, now presents itself to my view. I am to inquire into the uses of the leaves
in vegetable economy.”182 Throughout the Elements, Barton refers to and acknowledges
the scientists who conducted experiments to determine the role and signiﬁcance of
various botanical processes. Barton had been performing experiments on plants for some
time. Early in his career he experimented with the stimulant effects of Camphor on
plants (“Hints relative to the Stimulant Effects of Camphor upon Vegetables”) with the
results published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. His
experiment was replicable—to place cuttings of the same plant in two pots, one with
carnphor and one without. The hypothesis he is testing is that carnphor, which is a known
stimulant to animals will also act as a stimulant to plants. This he found to be true. This
information has utility; perhaps carnphor could be added to fertilizer to aid in plant
growth or used by ﬂorists to extend the life of cut ﬂowers. In the Elements he refers to
experiments that were “so frequently repeated. . .that I cannot imagine, that I have been
deceived in my observation.”183 Barton is referring to the process of repeatable

experiments, inherent in our modern deﬁnition of science.

 

182. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), 1: 51.
183. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), 1: 58.

111

That Barton would consider it possible that a stimulant known to work on animals
would have similar effects on plants indicates his recognition that the processes of life are
analogous in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The analogy is especially obvious
when one observes the movement of plants. For anyone interested in plant life, the
movement of leaves toward the light and their circulatory systems were obvious. But
what role in the life of the plant did these behaviors and structures provide? Barton
rejects the hypotheses that the leaves are perspiratory, excretory, or digestive organs. He
presents the possibility that the circulation and respiration that are known to take place in
plants has the function of nourishing the plant with oxygen, like the circulatory system of
an animal brings oxygen to its tissues. What he calls, “vital air” that is “necessary to the
maintenance of animal life” may also have the same function in the life of plants. Barton
was participating in a scientiﬁc discussion that had been going on transatlanticly for a
number of years. The most signiﬁcant recent discovery was that of Joseph Priestly who
in 1772 had discovered that plants release the very gas that keeps animals alive.

The functions of the leaf and the mechanisms for performing those functions
make up the subject matter of Plate VI of the Elements of Botany. This plate (not drawn
by Bartram) includes two ﬁgures, separated evenly by a straight horizontal line through
the center of the page. The top ﬁgure shows a glass container within which is hanging a
single leaf. Beside the container stands a representation of a candle—the whole candle is
not shown, the candle itself is not important, only the idea of a light source. A shadow of
the container lies on the surface opposite the light source, this light is strong, the shadow
indicates. The description explains that this leaf of a vine has been placed in a glass

vessel ﬁlled with water. When the light is positioned close to the vessel, the leaf will

112

move so that it “presents its upper surface to the light.”'“

The ﬁgures on the lower half
of the page illustrate the same process, altering the conditions of the experiment only
slightly. The experiments prove that it is the upper surface of the leaf that beneﬁts ﬁ'om

exposure to light and that plants have the power of movement necessary to survive.

 

NV]

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 9. Plate VI of the Elements of Botany.

Beyond an academic interest in the processes of plant life, the questions of plant

frmctions have their origin in a larger debate that had been raging at the conceptual level

 

184. Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1803), 2: 21.

113

for a hundred years or more. Barton and the circle at the garden were struggling to make
sense of the very source of life, or echoing the debates between “vitalists” and the
“materialists.” The crucial question is: does the power of life originate in matter alone or
is there some other, non-organic, power at work? Very simply, materialists believed that
matter itself holds all the properties of life. Movement and energy come directly from
matter and there is nothing real other than what is material. Vitalists believed that there is
a life force, something outside of matter that brings organisms to life.

A central tenet of the Romantic movement and the German Naturphilosophie,
vitalism had many advocates among the arts and was oft discussed in the intellectual and
artistic communities during the period that the Bartram circle was working. The
philosophical naturalists believed that all of nature was reﬂective of a uniﬁed whole.
Because what can be seen is a direct manifestation of what cannot be seen, the artist or
scientist knows that the visible and invisible universes are one. The wholeness of
Nature, according to this perspective, was the uniﬁcation or coming together of
opposites. This constantly maintained, delicate balance demonstrated that the universe
itself was a living being. In the discipline of the natural sciences, Alexander von
Humboldt’s descriptions of nature also reﬂected a belief in Nature consistent with the
Romantic perspective which saw nature as a constant balancing of forces. The oneness of
nature meant that organisms shared fundamental characteristics. One of those
characteristics was the life force. The vitality of nature came from this life force.
Materialists saw nature in a more mechanical way. Matter itself was the source of
movement within each organism. While important to artists, what difference did it make

to scientists?

114

These debates related to the debates about origins of organisms. While the
debates about extinction and malleability of species stressed the question: where do
species, in the abstract, come from? This debate asked: when and how does the life of a
particular organism begin? The signiﬁcance goes beyond the strict parameters of
science. By questioning the origin of life, one is forced to ask: where was God in the
equation of life? If matter is wholly mechanical, is there still room for God in nature?185

Barton’s scientiﬁc text, one used in an academic environment and including discussions

of repeatable experiments, was saturated with the metaphysical debates of the period.

War of 1812

In June of 1812, after years of building tension, the United States declared war
on Great Britain. The effects of these tensions had been felt at the garden for years, but
with the declaration of war came signiﬁcant changes. Thomas Nuttall who was still a
British citizen when war between his home and adopted countries broke out had not
returned to Philadelphia ﬁ'om his journey west. Instead, he left the United States for
England directly; he stayed in England for the war’s duration. The war also called Robert
Carr away from the garden. Carr hoped to serve in the army, so he petitioned for a
commission. The signatories of his request reveal a snapshot of the community that
gathered at the garden: “We the subscribers do certify to the honourable the secretary of
War that we are well acquainted with Robert Carr the above applicant that he holds a

respectable station in society and sustains a fair and unblemished reputation and that his

 

185. For more on the debate between vitalism and materialism see Nicholas Jardine, “Naturphilosophie and
the kingdoms of nature,” in Cultures of Natural History, eds. N. Jardine, F. A. Secord, E.C. Spary (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Shirley A. Roe, “The Life Sciences,” The Cambridge
History of Science, Volume 4: Eighteenth Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).

115

connexions (sic) are highly respectable.” This testimony is signed by William Bartram,
James Mease, Benjamin Say, Alexander Wilson and Dr. Benjamin Srrrith Barton.186
While the war took some away, another was conring to stay. While Carr and Nuttall were
away, Wilson lived at the garden between his collecting trips.

That fall the garden said good-bye to another of its residents. Ann’s father, John,
Jr. died on November 16, 1812. His three children, Mary, James and Ann, and their
spouses inherited the Bartram estate. After John’s brothers, William and Isaac Bartram,
completed an inventory of the property in December, the Bartram estate was divided
between the three families, with Ann and Robert Carr maintaining the house and garden,
J arnes and his wife living in one of the tenant houses, and Mary and her husband Nathan
Jones taking over another portion of the property.187 James and Robert had agreed a few
years earlier to occupy, maintain, and proﬁt from the farm jointly. But all was not easy
between the three families; Robert Carr and Nathan Jones were not the best of ﬁiends and
their disagreements about how the estate was to be run led to family troubles over many
years. Accusations of nrisrnanagement of land would send the brothers-in-law to court
looking for a ﬁnancial settlement. For now though, the war kept Carr away from his
family and the garden they loved.

Throughout 1813 Robert wrote letters home. There is anecdotal evidence that
Ann valued the letters she received from her husband very much. Bartram wrote to Carr,

“Mrs. A. Carr my esteemed Niece continues in tolerable good health and spirits,

 

186. Carr letter book, Robert Carr Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

187. Joel T. Fry, “Bartram family history” in “Phase I Archaeological Survey of the Proposed Wetland
Restoration Site: Historic Bartram’s Garden.” 2 vols. bound as one. MS report prepared for the john
Bartram Association, (October 18, 1996): 2: 131.

116

especially at receiving Letters ﬁ'om you.”188 This brief acknowledgement could be
interpreted in two ways: Bartram hopes Carr will feel guilty for not writing more often,
or Ann genuinely appreciates the correspondence from her husband. The latter seems
more consistent with Bartram’s character. He was again looking out for the welfare of
his beloved children. Carr’s duties with the military fell in the category of “support.” and
his letters indicate that he was anxious for something more glamorous to do than make
sure the bread was baked properly. He sought the help of the garden community to make
something happen, “wrote to Mr. A. Wilson requesting him to apply to Colonel Pike to
have me transferred to 15th regiment as it is ascertained the 15th will be ordered to the
lines immediately.” It is uncertain if Wilson was able to pull the appropriate strings but
by September Carr was marching with four companies of the 16th regiment toward
Albany. "’9 Prospects for his business at home were not as promising. The printing
business, overseen by his brother while Carr served, failed during his absence.

For Wilson, 1813 was overwhehning with the requirements of completing the last
volumes of the Ornithology. He wrote to Bartram to say that all his colorists had left
him. He continued to color his own plates for the printed volumes as well as travel to
collect and observe for the upcoming one. On August 13, Wilson returned to Philadelphia
from Cape May where he had been collecting. He settled in with his ﬁiend, William
Jones—the brother-in-law of Sarah Miller, the woman Wilson hoped to marry. But the
stress of work and exhaustion were taking their toll. It got bad enough that he wrote a
hasty will and on August 23, 1813, Wilson died of dysentery. The next day, his body was

buried in the graveyard of Gloria Dei Church. The day was hot and the mourners grew

 

188. William Bartram to Robert Carr, November 5, 1813 Gilbert Collection College of Physicians,
Philadelphia, PA. Photocopy viewed in collection in Lrhrary of Bartram’s Garden.
189. Carr letter book, Robert Carr Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

117

tired as the ﬁrneral procession followed Wilson to his grave.190 Wilson’s will reveals the
strength of his commitment to Sarah; after making arrangements to settle his obligations,
Wilson left all of his possessions to her. The ﬁnal volume of the American Ornithology
which had gone to press earlier in the summer appeared after Wilson’s death. His friend
and champion George Ord oversaw its production.

Port-Folio magazine published a warm obituary of Wilson in September saying
that Wilson was “equally useﬁrl, eminent, and beloved.”191 Wilson had succeeded at at
least one of the goals he had set for himself—he was considered the faithful biographer
of the feathered tribe. The obituary states that the American Ornithology was successful
in part because he “seemed to have a peculiar aptitude for cultivating an acquaintance
with these children of the forest?”2 Oddly, the obituary refers to Wilson’s friendship
with the “late William Bartram.” Bartram would not die for another decade, but it seems
he had been enough out of public view for the writer to have mistaken him for dead.

Though not nearly as personal, another blow hit the community at the garden that
year. Frederick Pursh’s Flora Americae Septentrionalis: Or, A Systematic Arrangement
and Description of the Plants of North America was published in London. This
publication included many of the plant discoveries of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It
was frustrating for many, not least of whom Barton, to realize they had been scooped by a
German publishing in England. The plants brought back by the “Corps of Discovery”
should have been introduced by an American in an American publication. The business

relationship between Pursh and Barton at the time of the publication is disputed. Did

 

190. In a letter from William Bartram to Robert Carr, Bartram indicates that Carr’s brother attended the
funeral. Isitsafetoassume thatBartramandAnnattendedaswell? WilliamBartramtoRobertCarr,
November 5, 1813, College of the Physicians of Philadelphia.

191. “C.” “Obituary Notice-Alexander Wilson,” Port-Folio 2, no. 3 (September 1813): 346. APS Online.
192. “C.” “Obituary Notice-Alexander Wilson,” Port-Folio 2, no. 3 (September 1813): 349. APS Online.

118

Pursh “steal” the credit for these discoveries? Perhaps, but, that, is also a story for
another time.
In April 1814, a review of American Ornithology appeared in Annals of Medicine,

Natural History, Agriculture. '93

The review lays out some of the problems with the
naming conventions and classiﬁcation systems of omithology to date and the technical
difﬁculties in preserving specimens. It also compliments Wilson for overcoming these
“disadvantages” inherent in the current state of the ﬁeld of ornithology. His work, the
review states “excels all that precedes it,” and the “delineations of Wilson are done in
such a masterly style that the bird is at once recognized?”94 But the illustrations of the
species included are more than simple delineations. With the combination of textual and
visual descriptions, the volumes of the Ornithology come alive as a work of art. It is
the very art of the Ornithology that makes it such an effective scientiﬁc tool. The
liveliness of the images makes them ready tools for the aspiring orrrithologist. When the
subjects come alive in the representation, they make better models for comparison to the
living specimens. Since the scientiﬁc process of identiﬁcation depends on accurate
comparisons, successful artistic expression makes for a more useful tool.

If, as it has been argued and with which I agree, art is deﬁned as the creative
expression of self then the American Ornithology is as much an artistic project as a

scientiﬁc one.195 The expression of this precision is not separate from the artist; Wilson

arranged the birds as he saw them; he wrote about them in the ﬁrst person. His

 

193. “American Ornithology; or the Natural History of the Birds of the United States: illustrated with
plates, engraved and coloured from original drawings taken from Nature,” Annals of Medicine, Natural
History, Agriculture (April 1814): 574.579. APS Online.

194. “American Ornithology; or the Natural History of the Birds of the United States: illustrated with
plates, engraved and coloured from original drawings taken from Nature,” Annals of Medicine, Natural
History, Agriculture (April 1814): 577. APS Online.

195. S. Peter Dance makes this argument in The art of natural history : animal illustrators and their work
(Woodstock, N.Y. : Overlook Press, 1978).

119

descriptions of the birds are about his own experiences with them. His personality is
present throughout the work. Barton’s Elements is not artistic by this deﬁnition, Barton
remains in the background, rarely surfacing. The process of removing oneself from the
act of science, remaining neutral, would become an ideal in scientiﬁc study. But for this
group, that idea] was not established and the differences seen in Wilson’s and Barton’s
works illustrate that.

For the remainder of the war years, life at the garden progressed quietly. Even
visits home for the holidays were not enough to reconcile Carr with his experiences with
the Army. He even wrote home “intimating my thoughts of resigning.”196 He did not
resign, but he was able to work closer to home. For the winter of 1814, Carr worked as
recruiter for the Army in Philadelphia. While he was away, Ann and William looked after
his son. Young John Carr had been learning to read and would develop skills for and a
love of botany and horticulture that would occupy his adult life. Barton continued to visit
the garden and add notes to his collection of observations. During this time, James
Mease was also serving in the war effort working as a hospital surgeon. On February 5,
1814, the city of Philadelphia celebrated the victories of the war in a general illumination
of the city. This must have been visible from the part of the garden that touches the

Schuylkill—the city is still visible from the garden. With the city lit up, it must have been

 

196. Carr letter book, Robert Carr Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

120

 

beautiful.

 

Figure 10. The Philadelphia skyline from Bartram's garden. (photo by author)

Natural Progress
As the war drew to a close the family and ﬁiends of the Bartrams started to gather
again at the garden. On Sunday February 12, 1815, Carr received the news that the peace

'97 He would

had been concluded at Ghent in December. He left for home the same day.
be formally “disbanded” in May. Thomas Nuttall returned to the United States ﬁ'orn
England but left Philadelphia soon afterward for a trip to the South to collect specimens
and meet with southern naturalists. He would not leave without visiting with Bartram
however. He must have consulted with Bartram about his journey, because he retraced
Bartram’s steps through Georgia.

For some time, Barton had not been in the best of health. In the preface to the

revised edition of the Elements he mentions a number of times that he is sick while he is

 

197. Carr letter book, Robert Carr Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

121

' ’1

writing. He decided to travel to England in hopes that the journey and sea air would
improve his health. He returned to the United States in November via New York, but the
trip was not effective. On December 19, 1815, Barton died of pulmonary tuberculosis at
his home in Philadelphia. Thomas Nuttall would not have the opportunity to say good
bye to Barton since he did not return from his collecting trip until February 1816.

A major development in Nuttall’s career would come in 1817 with the beginning
of the publication of the Journal of The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
The Academy had been established in early 1812 “for the encouragement and cultivation
of the sciences, and the advancement of useful learning.”198 With only 20 members in
1814, the Academy sponsored a lecture series on “Botany for the use of the Ladies of
Philadelphia.” As much as a fund raisers as anything else, this was followed by a series
on chemistry in the fall of 1815. The organization grew slowly as it built a collection of
specimens, sponsored expeditions and opened a public museum in 1828. Nuttall would
work on the publication committee of the Journal and do some of his most important
work with the Academy.

The establishment of the Academy signiﬁes an important milestone in the
institutionalization and professionalization of science in America. It has been argued
that institutionalization is the inevitable result of a group’s recognition that the
knowledge they hold in common is somehow outside of the norm. Once this awareness is

raised, formal relationships and protocols to build and protect that knowledge form.I99

 

198. “History of the Academy,” The Academy of Natural Sciences.
http://wwwacnaftsci.orgﬂeam/historvhtml visited May 9, 2005.

199. It is the second of four stages in the development of the profession laid out by George Daniels—
Preemption, institutionalization, legitimation, attainment of professional autonomy—in “The Process of
Professionalization in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820-1860” Isis 58, no. 2 (Summer
1967): 150-166.

122

This process, combined with factors external to science, including the building of
physical and political inﬁastructures, led to the rapid development of organizations in all
ﬁelds.200 This institution, without any consciousness on the part of its members, marked
the end of the usefulness of institutions like the garden. The more formal membership
and ﬁlnd raising allowed the work of many to be pooled rather than the work of few to be
displayed. The more formal organizations allowed for the work to take on a life of its
own, rather than be dependent on a single individual or a single family. The structures of
teaching and learning, of the pursuit of knowledgethat had been in place in the early
years of the garden were shifting. The development of scientiﬁc institutions led to a shift
in the modern perception of where science takes place or the “location of science.” The
garden had been an accepted location of science where knowledge circulated rather than
observed a strict hierarchical ﬂow. 20‘ But with the development of institutions like the
Academy, the legitimate work of science moved to laboratories, universities, people with
PhDs and formal ﬁrnding.

A visitor to the garden in September 3, 1817 gives us a picture of what was
happening there. “In the afternoon we rode to Bartram’s garden, now in the possession of
a Mr. Carr who married old Bartram’s daughter. This is a beautiful spot, and rather better
kept than formerly. As a nursery of young plants, it is rising in consequence. Mr. Carr
informed me that he had 6000 plants in pot for sale. His forcing beds are ﬁne, and

enable him to take the ﬁrst cucumbers to town, for which he obtained 50 cents each for

 

200. Alexandra Oleson, “Introduction: To Build a New Intellectual Order,” in The Pursuit of knowledge in
Early American Republic, eds. Alexandra Oleson and Sanbom C. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976).

201. Mary Fissell and Roger Cooter, “Exploring Natural Knowledge: Science and the Popular,” in The
Cambridge History of Science, Volume 4: Eighteenth Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).

123

the ﬁrst 50 and 25 cents for the ﬁrst hundred. In addition to this, he is now building a
large greenhouse.”202 Carr was working to expand the business of the garden and make it
more appealing to casual visitors.

Working partly in the more formal world of the Academy and partly in the
informal classroom of the garden, Thomas Nuttall published The Genera of North
American Plants, and Catalogue of the Species to the Year 181 7, funding the printing of
the text himself. Nuttall introduces his text with an explanation of his methodology: “In
this interesting and now prevailing view of the subject, a reduction of heterogeneous
materials to their natural types, has led the way to the construction of genera better
according with the plan of nature.” By “reduction of heterogeneous materials to their
natural types,” Nuttall is referring to the process laid out by Buffon and Cuvier called
comparative anatomy. Though more concerned with the anatomy of animals, Buffon and
Cuvier’s theories were equally applicable to plants. Cuvier’s Lessons in Comparative
Anatomy had been published in 1805; Buffon discussed the process in 1753: “The result
of this process of comparison will not only be a distinct knowledge of each [organism],

”203 Documenting similarities of species

but also a general knowledge of all [organisms].
through the process of comparison would lead to a more “natural system” of
classiﬁcation, it was argued.

A new natural system had been the subject of Correa da Serra’s botany lectures in

Philadelphia in 1815 when he presented Antoine Laurent de J ussieu’s “Natural System of

 

202. Samuel Breck, "The Diary of Samuel Breck, 1814-1822,” ed. Nicholas B. Wainwright, Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography 102 (October 1978): 491.

203. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire Naturell, 1753 quoted in Alex Potts, “Natural order
and the call of the wild: the politics of animal picturing,” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1990): 22.

124

Plant Classiﬁcation.”204 Nuttall had published a brief botanical piece earlier that included
both the Linnaean classiﬁcation and the “Natural Order of Jussieu.” But Nuttall worried
about moving away ﬁom Linnaean system. He was afraid of “revolutionary” change, but
argued that the classiﬁcation system must be based on “the great plan of natural
afﬁnities” and goes on to call such a system “sublime and extensive.”205 Tapping into
imagery of the sublime, Nuttall makes every effort to keep natural religion alive in
botany. The belief that there is such a thing as a natural system shows continued faith in
a higher order. Though some of the eighteenth century conventions, like the Linnaean
system, were falling out of favor, the more fundamental faith in nature’s reﬂection of a
higher reality held fast. Nuttall wrote, “Can we deny the perception of a prevailing
afﬁnity throughout the vegetable kingdom, and carp at the anomalous character of a few
individuals?” The “prevailing afﬁnity” that Nuttall mentions is his bow to the type
specimens that deﬁned the identiﬁcation process of the previous generations.

Sadness struck the garden on April 18, 1818. James Howell Bartram died at the
age of 31. It was not a lovely spring day but one with a “cool wind high, blustering from
NW.” Bartram notes in his weather diary, “NB died this morning Dr. James Bartram of
Kingsess, grandson of the celebrated John Bartram the Botanist and Naturalist.” This
small note speaks volumes. Bartram made no note of other family milestones and no
mention of his own illness. J ames’s death must have touched the old man deeply. Little
is known about the circumstances of James’s death. Jarnes’s widow, Mary Ann, would

be looked after by Robert Carr until she remarried.

 

204. Thomas Nuttall, The Genera of North American Plants, Facsimile of the [SIS edition, ed. Joseph
Ewan (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1971), vii.
205. Thonns Nuttall, The Genera of North American Plants, Facsimile of the 1818 edition, ed. Joseph
Ewan (New York: Hafrrer Publishing Company, 1971), vi.

125

With James gone and the failure of his printing business during the war, Robert
Carr took over full-time responsibility for the garden. He recognized that the dedication
to the garden of his wife and her family made it necessary to settle in for the time being.
Carr would write “the advanced age of our uncle, Mr. W. B., who resides with us and
who could not bear the thought of parting with the garden, forbids the idea of selling
during his life.”206 Carr began to participate more in the projects of the garden. In June
1819, he published “Observations on tea shrubs” as letter to Constantine Raﬁnesque in
the Western Monitor. Raﬁnesque, a naturalist, trained in France, but working in the
United States, had visited the garden in 1802 before taking a position at the Transylvania
University in Lexington, Kentucky.

Hoping to defend the Bartram family’s role in the introduction of tea in the
Philadelphia area, Carr lays out a brief history of the plant in Pennsylvania. At the
conclusion of the letter appears the brief conﬁrmation, “1 have read the above statement
of Robert Carr, and believe it to be correct”; this is signed William Bartram. Perhaps
Bartram oversaw the writing of the article, perhaps the observations were really his, but
he was getting too old to work on publications of this kind. This would be one of the
only botanical publications by Carr and it was observed by contemporaries that he had
little knowledge of scientiﬁc botany—he was remembered for his pleasant personality.
David Douglas would say that Carr “has but a modest share of knowledge [of botany].

This deﬁciency, however, is made up by his pleasing manner.”207 Put those two

 

206. Robert Carr quoted in Merril D. Smith, “The Bartram Women: Farm Wives, Artists, Botanists, and
Entrepreneurs,” Bartram Broadside of the John Bartram Association (Winter 2001): 7.

207. David Douglas quoted in Jeanette E. Graustein, Thomas Nuttall Naturalist: Explorations in America
1808-1841 (Harvard University Press, 1967), 194.

126

observations together and perhaps you can imagine that Carr was helping Bartram more
than the other way around.

After the completion of his service during the war, Mease returned to his service
to the improvement of American agriculture. Numerous publications over the next few
years built a signiﬁcant body of work.208 Mease’s efforts to apply botanical and medical
knowledge to agriculture and beneﬁt the nation reinforce scholarly arguments that the
science of this period was deﬁned by its contributions to the developing nation. John
Greene argues that in the context of nationhood science “meant two things: as the
example par excellence of useful knowledge, science must be cultivated to promote the
interests, prosperity, and power of the rising American nation; and as the supreme
example of the powers of the human mind, the successes of science challenged
Americans to prove to the world that republican institutions were as favorable to
intellectual achievement as they were to liberty.”209 Mease’s 1818 assessment of British
malt liquors (he had published on the subject in 1807 as well) exempliﬁes Greene’s
argument. The substitution of ingredients in British malt liquors made them useless for
their medicinal properties, while American malt liquors were made with only the best
ingredients. Mease wrote “the improvement in the manufacture of porter and ale,
particularly the last, has been great; and they ought to be solely used by all those whose

health require them.”210 Drink American, he seems to be saying. By using only

 

208. See James Mease, “On the Adulteration of British Malt Liquors,” The American Medical Recorder 1,
no. 1 (January 1818): 29-35; “On the Cultivation of the Vine in the United States,” The Philadelphia
Register and National Recorder 1, no. 21 (May 22, 1819): 341-343 and 2, no. 2 (July 10, 1819): 17-20;
“Remarks on the late Cattle Procession in Philadelphia, with Directions how to effectually promote the
Breed of Cattle,” The National Recorder 5, no. 12 (March 24, 1821): 186—190. All found at APS Online.
209. John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jeﬂerson (Ames: Iowa State University Press,
1984).

210. James Mease, “On the Adulteration of British Malt Liquors,” The American Medical Recorder 1, no. 1

(January 1818): 35.

127

 

American products in the practice of medicine, citizens will support the agriculture of the
new nation. It is through the promotion of agriculture (he had recently been elected
secretary of Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture) that Mease saw true
independence for the citizens of the United States. Like Thomas Jefferson, he argued that
the farmer possessed “that independent spirit, that honest demeanor, that unsuspicious
ﬁankness, and that unaffected patriotism. . .”2 '1 The resources of the garden, through one

of the members of its community, contributed to the development of the new nation.

Value of Life

The processes of reproduction in plant life had been of interest to the community
at the garden for many years. Barton had discussed it in detail in his Elements and
Nuttall contributed to this discussion in1822 when he published “Thoughts on the
proximate cause of fecundation in vegetables” in the Philadelphia Journal of the Medical
and Physical Sciences. In this article, Nuttall is grappling with the question of the
mechanics by which plants become “impregnated.” In the process of external
impregnation, the seed becomes impregnated after it leaves the parent plant. How does
this occur? Nuttall argues that pollen is able to ﬁnd its way without the assistance of
insects. This is an anticipation of the discovery of what would be called “Brownian
movement” after Robert Brown whose experiments in 1827 led to observations of the
movement of pollen in water. (Brown’s experiments were performed ironically on an
American plant named for William Clark.) It is the movement of the pollen that allows

for reproduction without direct contact. Brown concluded that movement existed within

 

211. James Mease, “The Preface” of the Domestic Encyclopedia, quoted in Don Yoder, “Domestic
Encyclopedia,” Pennsylvania Folklife 14, no. 3 (1965): 16.

128

pollen. It is this very same movement that Nuttall attempts to describe in his article. The
pressing scientiﬁc discussions of their day were a transatlantic conversation.

The movement of pollen, along with the more obvious movement of leaves
provided fodder for the debate between vitalists and materialists—the debate about the
sources of life. Nuttall’s arguments about the movement within tiny particles weighs in
on this debate. He calls the process of fecundation “active and recondite.”2'2 The source
of life is within tiny particles, too small to see with the naked eye. The power to create
life is barely visible. This realization begs the question: what effect does this realization
have on the perception of the value of life? With the source of life being identiﬁed in
such seemingly insigniﬁcant powder, the value of each life, no matter how puny,
becomes huge.

Bartram continued to keep his weather journal and one can observe the aging
process as the handwriting becomes weak in places. Bartram was weak at this point but
still accepting and chamring visitors. Alexander Lawson’s daughters, who were young
around this time would later write, “When a child I saw Mr. Bartram. He was a very
charming old gentleman and he gave me a very double yellow rose, a great rarity at that
time, and every summer we made more than one excursion to the garden.”213 The garden
still allowed Bartram, though now getting quite old, to be a resource; this time he
provided happy and unique memories for the children of a colleague.

Though the country was suffering from an economic depression, the garden must
have been a lively place during the early 1820s, Ann, Robert, and their son John

continued to run the family seed and plant business. For the younger generation at the

 

212. Thomas Nuttall, “Thought on the proximate cause of F ecundation in Vegetables,” Philadelphia
Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences 4, no. 8 (1822): 257. APS Online.
213. Franklin L. Burns, “Miss Lawson’s recollections of ornithologists,” Auk 34, no. 3 (July 1917): 277.

129

garden, steps were being taken toward advancement: Robert Carr became a justice of the
peace for Kingsessing in 1821 and in 1822, Thomas Nuttall accepted the position to take
over responsibility of the botanic garden at Harvard University. The Carrs and a staff of
workers who helped to maintain the garden started spring work in the garden in March
though the weather was still unpredictable at that time of the year in Pennsylvania. The
trees in the collection had gotten quite large and dramatic.

In addition to the many people working the beds and hothouses, pets and working
animals lived at the garden. “Anecdotes of an American Crow,” published earlier by
William Bartram, describes one of the more active animal residents. In this piece,
Bartram says he is speaking of one crow, named Torn, rather than giving a species
biography—“since I am convinced, that these birds differ as widely as men do from each

other, in point of talents and acquirements.”214

The crow’s actions, including stealing
Bartram’s glasses and hiding them under some leaves, and teasing an old dog, “exhibited
incontestable demonstrations of a regular combination of ideas, premeditation, reﬂection,
and contrivance.”m This animal showed characteristics thought to belong only to
humans.

For Bartram, a project of the garden was to better understand the distinction
between the animal kingdom and humans. As part of their study of nature, the
community at the garden considered what both people and animals were capable of.

Bartram had corresponded with Barton on this issue and wondered why people are so

resistant to the possibility of animals having reason. Bartram argues that “men have put

 

214. William Bartram, “Amcdotes of an American Crow,” in William Bartram: Travels and other
Writings, ed. Thomas Slaughter (New York: Library of America, 1996), 573.
215. William Bartram, “Anecdotes of an American Crow,” in William Bartram: Tkavels and other
Writings, ed. Thonms Slaughter (New York: Library of America, 1996), 576.

130

 

invention to the rack” in trying to establish that animals do not possess reason.” He
wonders, “What are they aﬁaid of, that the Spirits of Animals will rise up in judgment

?”2‘6 Wilson’s work echoes Bartram’s sentiment

against them for killing and eating them
in his description of how the mother partridge fools a predator by pretending it is injured
and leading the threat away from her young. “This well-known maneuver, which nine
times in ten is successful, is honourable to the feelings and judgement of the bird, but a
severe satire on man. The affectionate mother, as if sensible of the avaricious cruelty of
his nature, tempts him with larger prize, to save her more helpless offspring; and pays
him, as avarice and cruelty ought always to be paid, with mortiﬁcation and
disappointment.” 2” Bartram and Wilson agree that reason is not exclusive to humans.
It is not only that animals have reason, it is that man is often ‘no better than an
animal.’ How can we hold ourselves above animals, Bartram argues, when man is the
most “cruel and hypocritical” of all?218 Bartram’s assessment of the difference between
people and animals is not always complimentary toward people: “It evidently appears,
that the Animal creation are endowed with the same passions and affections we are, and
that the affections operate after the same manners; It is too true I fear, that the Malicious
Order abound and predominate in Man. Not only in their actions among one another but

toward the Animal creation.“9 Bartram had abhorred the use of force of the strong over

the weak all his life.

 

216. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, December 23, 1792, Benjamin Smith Barton Papers,
American Philosophical Society.

217. Alexander Wilson, “The Partridge,” American Ornithology, Volume six.

218. Bartram’s sentiments anticipate the growth of humane convictions. The founding of the SPCA in
England is only a few years away in 1824, followed by the American Society in 1866.

219. Emphasis is Bartram’s. William Bartram to Benjamin Smith Barton, Bartram Papers, 1.9, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania.

131

While offering insight into an astute observer of nature, Bartram’s opinions about
animals also provide us with another layer of the debate between vitalists and
materialists. Bartram was unequivocal in where he stood in this debate, “We say this
Divine Intelligence penetrates and arrimates the Universe. This is the Immortal soul of
nature, of living moving beings, of vegetables and in the Elements.” The difference
between animals and people is too indistinct for the source of life not to be in all living
things. God is greater than people are capable of demonstrating, “I can not believe, I
cannot be so irnpious. . .to desire or imagine that Man who is guilty of more mischief and
wickedness than all the other animals together in this world should be exclusively
endowed with knowledge of the creator...” Though their talents and achievements differ,
who can say that one is more impressive than another? In an undated essay, or draft of a
letter, Bartram admits that no animal could “weave a piece of Brocade, make a compleat
Ship, a watch or Clock,” but counters that with the observation that no man could make a

b.220 The similarities between people and animals demonstrate

spider web or a honey com
that they share fundamental characteristics. Reﬂecting the Romantic notion that all of
nature is reﬂective of a life force, Bartram clearly adheres to the vitalist perspective.

Not only do animals possess and use reason, but they have access to God, Bartram
argues. In fact, man is closest to God when he is closest to his animal instincts. Bartram
says, “Thus it appears I think that we act most rationally and virtuously when our actions

seem to operate from simple instinct or approach nearest to the Animal Creation.”22'

 

220. These undated notes bear a strong resemblance to arguments that appear in the introduction to the
Duvets: “We admire the mechanism of a watch, and the fabric of a piece of brocade, as being the
production of art. . .” 19. William Bartram, Bartram Family papers, 1.72, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania.

221. (emphasis Bartram’s) Undated notes by William Bartram, Bartram Family papers, 1.72, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania.

132

Value and spirit, “the immortal soul of nature” are found in all living things. Bartrarn’s
Quaker belief that the “light of God is within all” must have inﬂuenced his perception of
animals. This light, that is argued to be in all humans, is actually in all living things,
Bartram seems to be saying. Living beings are not simply proof of God’s power, as
Natural Theology had been arguing, but are capsules of God’s divinity. This acceptance
of the luriversality of life’s value, like the patterns and similarities that contributed to the
development of classiﬁcation systems, illustrate the faith in a higher order. Both require
a belief in a reality that cannot be seen. The reality of life, the order and source of life is
seen in the ﬁnite examples perceivable by the senses. The truth of life is something taken
on faith.

Bartram had this faith. Each in their own way, each of the scientists working at
the garden demonstrated their faith through their scientiﬁc work. Barton, Wilson and his
much loved nephew James would express this no more; they had been gone for years. i
The time for the next generation, of both people and ideas, was coming. On July 22,
1823, when the kitchen garden would have been ripe with melons and squashes and the
wild potato in ﬂower, William Bartram died at the age of 84 “under a pear tree that grew

”222 The accounts of his death vary some as to the

at the south comer of the house
immediate cause and location, but one thing is consistent. Bartram died in the garden
where he spent the majority of his life. The location of Bartram’s grave is unknown.
Later that year, Nuttall returned to the garden for a visit, perhaps to give his condolences

to the family. His companion at this time reported that the garden was in a “deplorable

 

222. “On a visit recently to Bartram’s garden Mr. Carr pointed out the spot where the old man died.”
Thomas Loraine McKenney to Dolley Payne Todd Madison, 28 July 1835, in The Dolley Madison Digital
Edition, ed. Holly C. Shulman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004):
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde/DPM0826 (viewed February 7, 2005).

133

state.” Robert Carr admitted that after Bartrarn’s death, his “present property barely

produc[es] a decent livelihood.”223 The garden mourned.

 

223. Robert Carr to Major General Jacob Brown quoted in Joel T. Fry, “John Bartram Carr, The Unknown
Bartram,” Bartram Broadside of the John Bartram Association (Fall 1994): 4.

134

Chapter 5
Epilogue and Conclusion: Seeds from the garden

But while remembrance’ power remains,
There rosy bowers shall bliss my view,
Sweet shades of peace! On foreign plains,
I’ll sigh and shed a tear for you.
Alexander Wilson, “A Rural Walk”

Epilogue

After Bartram’s death, what was left of the community at the garden disbursed.
Nuttall had left Philadelphia just before Bartram died, to work at Harvard University
maintaining the new botanic garden there. Not satisﬁed to settle in an academic position,
Nuttall would continue to travel and collect throughout North America. Due to family
obligations, he eventually returned to England to spend the end of his life pursuing the
less adventurous side of botany. J arnes Mease continued his work with the Society for
Promoting Agriculture, and efforts to preserve the history of the young country. He
continued to publish until close to his death in Philadelphia on May 14, 1846.

John B. Carr, Robert’s son, died in June, 1839, of pulmonary consumption; he
was 34 years old. His “Diary of a Naturalist” bares a remarkable resemblance to the
weather diary kept by his Uncle William. The notations are of similar format and
language choice. The herbarium specimens from the Bartram family collection that he
prepared in the early 18305 would perhaps be the last type specimens to leave the
garden?“

In May 1829, Mease wrote a brief history of the garden that would appear in the

Gardener 's Magazine. His short description was sent to the editor as a correction to a list

 

224. “Today, 63 of Carr’s specimens survive in the Darlington Herbarium preserved at West Chester
University.” Joel T. Fry, “John Bartram Carr, The Unknown Bartram” Bartram Broadside of the John
Bartram Association (Fall 1994): 4.

135

of botanic gardens in Philadelphia that had appeared in an earlier issue. Mease’s
description defends the garden’s signiﬁcance and says that Robert Carr is running it with
“great zeal and success.”225 This says two things, one is that the garden has already
started to drop off the “radar screen” of at least some of the gardening community by
1829, and that Mease’s connection and loyalty to the family continued after William’s
death. A committee of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society visited the garden in 1830
and “found the estate to be in most excellent order.”226

After William’s death, Ann and Robert attempted to maintain the house and
expand the garden and nursery business. The expanded garden included 1400 native
plant species and as many as ten glass houses ﬁlled with exotic plants. The Bartram
garden continued to supply plants to notable customers. For example, Thomas Say,
working at the community at New Harmony, ordered fruit trees from the Carrs. There
were now two very different possible directions for the garden to go in, one toward the
intellectual, scientiﬁc or the other toward the culture of curiosity. In the mid 1840s, Ann
and Robert chose to try to accommodate the desires of the curious, turning the garden
into a “pleasure park” complete with entertainers, ice cream vendors and steamboat rides.
It was not enough, though, for the garden to survive as a viable business.

The garden and the plants were sold at public auction in the summer of 1847.
After a few years of a sort of transitional ownership, the garden ﬁnally went ﬁrlly into the

hands of Andrew Eastwick, an inventor and railroad entrepreneur. Eastwick would

preserve the garden as a “curiosity” on his private estate until it became part of the public

 

225. James Mease, “Bartram’s botanic garden on the Schuylkill, near Philadelphia,” Gardener ’s Magazine,
Loudon 7 (December 1831): 665.
226. John. W. Harshberger, “Bartram Arboretum and Park,” Gardeners Magazine 32 (October 1920): 80.

136

park system in Philadelphia. The Woodlands, too, would be turned to another use. The
garden would become a cemetery, though some of the original paths are still in the park.

By the time of Ann’s death in 1858 (she is buried at the Woodlands), the nature of
nature study had changed. She was a victim of these changes. What must her last years
have been like? Did she pine for the days gone by? Or was she relieved to have the
burdens of her family, burdens she did not choose for herself, lifted ﬁom her shoulders?
Was she excited to see the greater interest in science? Was she ﬁ'ustrated by the
exclusion of women from the scientiﬁc processes?

The garden had succeeded partly because it was held together by the intellect,
personality and reputation of a single person. William may not have been a successful
business man, but his presence leant success to his family’s business. Equally
importantly his personality—his willingness or preference to stay out of the limelight—
made him a beacon for students, colleagues, and peers. His self-deprecation played and
important part in the development of the younger men who worked with him. He seems
always willing to assist with a project, but spent little or no time on self-aggrandizement.

After his death, the family reputation passed to Ann. There is little doubt that she
was an accomplished naturalist, but she was a woman. One reason the garden could not
survive is that its leading scholar, Ann, was “caught between two almost mutually
exclusive stereotypes: as scientists they were atypical women; as women they were
unusual scientists.” Ann shared these disadvantages.227 By the mid-nineteenth-century
texts on Botany for ladies were available. They were infused with decorative illustrations

and poetry. As the sciences became more specialized and professional the legitimacy of

 

227. Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), xv

137

these texts published especially for ladies became undermined. The association of
women and Botany took on a form that undermined the legitimacy of as a resource.

The institutionalization of the sciences in the academy and the establishment of
science as a profession forever changed the way that science was conducted. The physical
arrangement of the garden and Bartram’s willingness and openness to teach may have in
the end undermined the success of the garden as an institution of leaming. The lack of an
atmosphere of authority, with a clear hierarchy between teacher and student, meant that
the garden may not have been considered a place of learning from authorities once

institutions with these features were available.228

As was true for the conduct of science,
gardening was becoming more institutionalized. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
was founded in 1827. (Interestingly, Ann Bartram Carr was not a member.) Written
resources about plants became more readily available, so the necessity of living reference
guides decreased.

The business of the garden could not survive the multiple challenges it faced.
The economic depression of the early 18203 must have had an effect on the proﬁtability
of the garden. With soup kitchens in Philadelphia distributing soup at a rate of a pint per
person per day it seems unlikely that the seed business was not affected.229 The market
for American plants was changing; David Landreth’s nursery grew and by 1824 had
expanded to thirty acres in two locations. (The two locations allowed for some control of

cross-pollination.) John Lyon in England, in 1811, had offered American plants for sale

to the English market for the ﬁrst time.

 

228. For a discussion of authority and space see Dorinda Outram, “New spaces in natural history,” in
Cultures of Natural History, eds. N. Jardine, F. A. Secord, E.C. Spary (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).

229. For more on the economic crisis of this period see Samuel Rezneck, “The Depression of 1819-1822, A
Social History,” The American Historical Review 39, no. 1 (October 1933): 28-47.

138

 

 

 

The work of the men and women who worked at the garden was within a few
years of their deaths overshadowed. Amos Eaton’s Manual of Botany for the Northern
States, aﬁeld guide would go into its eighth edition in 1840 and John Torrey’s Flora of
the Northern and Middle Sections of the United States Or A Systematic Arrangement and
Description of All the Plants Hitherto Discovered in the United States North of Virginia”
would displace the work of Barton and Nuttall. In 1827 the huge ﬁrst volume of John
James Audubon’s The Birds of America was published. Wilson’s American Ornithology

was dwarfed in comparison and soon forgotten.

Conclusion
Bartram’s garden was a living resource for the scientiﬁc communities of

Philadelphia and beyond. Many documents written by residents, neighbors, and visitors
owe their existence to the plants, animals, and humans who lived and grew in the garden.
Some of the data for these documents was gathered during traveling expeditions, and
some was gathered within those several acres along the Schuylkill. The scientiﬁc
accomplishments of the Lewis and Clark expedition, for example, depended in some part
on the community in Philadelphia. Without their assistance in preparing for and
documenting the discoveries of the expedition, the achievements may have been lost. By
providing such necessary elements as institutional backing and peer review of ﬁndings,
the established scientiﬁc community at the desks and in the gardens of Philadelphia
contributed materials and support for the expeditions to far reaching places. The
environment in which the ﬁnal reports were composed was as important to the results of
the journey as the observations themselves. The resources of Philadelphia, including the

garden, shaped the nature of the historical record.

139

Institutions like the garden were important to the scientiﬁc process. A community .
gathered there around the turn of the nineteenth century. But by the mid-nineteenth
century, the garden as a focal point came to an end. The obvious explanation for the
dissolution of the community discussed here is that the members died. But why did
another, similar community not take its place? The garden itself had particular utility to
the effort to document nature through its collection of plants, the geographic situation on
the migration routes of many birds, and mostly in the encyclopedic knowledge of its
primary intellect, William Bartram. But knowledge accumulates and is passed on and
collections grow, so why did the garden cease to have the use it once did?

What had been a single community was during this period starting to split apart.
The gardeners who had helped support the garden through their enthusiasm and
commerce took their patronage elsewhere. The curious tumed their interests away from
North America and focused its interests on more exotic locales. The artists who had
worked hand in hand with the scientists came under new expectations for their practice.
Objectivity came to be valued in ways previously unknown. The artist’s creativity and
self-expression in the representations of nature came to be avoided within the
performance of science. The scientists who used the garden as a reference guide were
moving into more institutionalized environments. The casual resource of the garden no
longer suited their needs.

With the shift in emphasis to more formal settings, the utility of the garden to the
projects of science diminished. The search for the type specimen, the effort to identify
similarities between species, whether plant, animal or disease, could no longer be carried

out by single individuals. Searching for type specimens and new species of organisms

140

 

continued to occupy scientists, but the sheer quantity of known species alone made it
more and more rare for one person to be able to master more than one class. The
emphasis for the scientist stopped being Nature per se and started to move toward a
specialty like mycology or embryology. In addition, the greater dependence on
controlled experiments using increasingly sophisticated technology took the work of
science out of settings like the garden. Though the circle at the garden was conducting
some experiments, the rules of scientiﬁc processes were becoming more strict. The very
deﬁnition of science was shifting and it is not a coincidence that during this period
“naturalists” became “scientists.”

Words develop because the need to name something becomes evident. Scientist
as a word entered the English lexicon just at the end of this study. These men and
women were examples of the phenomenon that needed to be named. Contrary to the
common description of eighteenth-century scientists as amateurs, playing at science
without resources or backing, these people were professional (paid for their scientiﬁc
work), peer-reviewed, conducting repeatable experiments. By expanding the view of a
resource and what is scientiﬁc discourse, it becomes clear that they were not playing at
science but practicing science.

In modern biology the essence of an organism cannot be seen. The true identity is
the genotype not the phenotype. All characteristics, those that cannot be seen as well as
those that can, are considered essential to an individual organism. Only the features and
behaviors that could be observed with the naked eye were considered essential to
Bartram’s circle. The categories (species) were developed based on data that was

available to the naked eye. The acceptance of information and conclusions drawn from

141

data we can not see marked a signiﬁcant shift in the sciences. With this shift, the
naturalist, who makes observations of living organisms is no longer doing the science.
The naturalist and the nature writer become the amateurs, before this shift in conception
of species the person who studied the visible characteristics was the scientist.

The strategies and techniques of the science of the period are represented in the
documents published for both specialized and general audiences. They show us that the
period was characterized by the effort to reconcile fundamentally changing notions of
nature. The eighteenth-century notion that nature reﬂects unchanging laws designed
toward an ultimate purpose was shifting toward a theory of irnpermanence in nature that
changes according to the needs of the environment. We also see a search for an
understanding of life much greater than the particular processes of plants. Inextricably
linked to one of the major philosophical and artistic debates of the period, the conclusions
drawn about speciﬁc plant or animal functions contributed to an understanding of the
whole universe of nature.

Modern classiﬁcation of plants reﬂects our acceptance of evolution as the process
of life, the “creation myth” of choice. Plants are divided into categories that include
those with and without vascular systems and plants with and without a seed encasement.
It has been recognized through modern research that these are the fundamental stepping
stones from the least to the most complex forms of plant life. Though not universally
true, generally, the more complex plants are the newer plants and therefore the system of
classiﬁcation mirrors the belief in the evolution and development of more complex life
forms. The classiﬁcation schemes of the late eighteenth century were equally illustrative.

Though still in use, the Linnaean classiﬁcation scheme was falling out of favor. A more

142

“natural” method was demanded. This demand actually conﬁrmed the belief in a reality
of nature that is ordered. They believed in a universe that was created for a purpose by an
all-powerful God. Their belief in type specimens and clearly delineated species reﬂected
that. The criteria for establishing the divisions between species reﬂect the scientists’
perceptions of the rules nature plays by.

The accepted epistemology of the period, the Common Sense philosophy, argued
that people can know that what they see is real. The connection between the data
collected by the senses and a higher truth was ﬁrmly accepted. Though questioned,
especially by the skeptics, the possibility of an understanding of the human mind that
could not recognize truth was not tolerable. The basic processes of Natural History,
identifying type specimens and developing classiﬁcation systems, were dependent on the
scientists’ conception of the capabilities of the mind and the human connection to a
perfect reality. That perfect reality was the higher order which was also God.

Intellectual developments of the nineteenth century opened new doors that
allowed relativism into the understanding of nature. Once the senses were no longer the
path to knowledge of the inﬁnite, then science and religion were no longer linked the way
they had been. With that break, the connection between human understanding of nature
and that of a higher order was lost. With this loss comes the modern split between the
realms of theology and science. Natural phenomena and metaphysical conclusions could
no longer be understood during the same process with the same techniques. The questions
fall into two types rather than one. It is not that the belief in ﬁxed absolutes disappeared

in the mid-nineteenth century, it is that the belief in ﬁxed absolutes and the understanding

143

 

of how nature works could no longer be reconciled. What had once been a single belief
fractured into those held by different people.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment had
started to fade in signiﬁcance on the American intellectual scene. Enlightenment thought
did not disappear however, it evolved and certain aspects of the thought were carried on
in new forms. The Romantic movement did not undermine the Enlightenment but
allowed certain aspects, like the concept of species and the idealism of the
Naturphilosophie, to continue. Romanticism included the quest for primordial or ideal
types. The concept of the ideal being reﬂected in nature connects the eighteenth-century
scientists and their Romantic offspring. Romanticism was not the adversary to the
Enlightenment but the last gasps of an old world view. The Enlightenment ideals lost
their stronghold in the sciences and resurfaced incorporated in the philosophy that
seemed to Oppose all the Enlightenment stood for.

The reconciliation of eighteenth and nineteenth century views of nature required a
compromise between the concepts of an unchanging and a changing universe. One
solution to that seeming contradiction was the idea of teleology. A universe that is
engineered toward goals allows for change and perfection to coexist. Natural laws of
change and adaptation can be reconciled with a concept of nature in which God plays an
active part. Modem debates about creationism and Darwinism seem to have brought the
debate full circle. How can the universe be governed by the laws of random adaptation
and still have a place for God. One solution that has been offered is the concept of
intelligent design. But the scientiﬁc community has rejected intelligent design as a

possible driving mechanism to nature. Is it because scientists refuse to believe in God?

144

No. The modern debate is as much about method as it is about God. The
community who worked with Bartram and their works offer insight into the modern
debate. One of the central debates at the end of the eighteenth century centered around
the demand for a natural system of classiﬁcation. The Linnaean system with its top-down
methodology was not satisfactory for reﬂecting the complex arrangements of nature. A
natural system utilizing bottom-up thinking was the only acceptable method for
organizing the unending discoveries of nature. The rejection of intelligent design seems
to reﬂect this same debate. Modern Creationists want to ﬁgure out a way to put God
back into the developments of nature. They start with a concept (God in nature) and
mold the theories around it (intelligent design). Scientists, however, insist that any
hypothesis must come ﬁ'om the data itself. Deductive and inductive reasoning are
struggling again. The resistance to the conclusion that God must be somehow involved
in the creation and workings of nature is less than the resistance to the method of getting
there. The methods of science can not be reconciled with the methods of theology. The
origins of the split between these two methodologies goes back farther in time than the
end of the eighteenth century, but that period highlights the division in its modern form.

The division between science and religion, so controversial today, was at the heart
of the shifts that were occurring at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The garden
fell victim these shifts. The intellectual, spiritual and cultural needs of the scientiﬁc
community could not make use of a botanical garden like Bartram’s. The garden is being
restored today. Through careful research and archeology the old beds and paths are being

rediscovered. School children visit to learn about the horticulture and the lives of

145

 

botanists of the past. The uses are new and different, nonetheless, the garden is of use

once again.

146

 

WORKS INCLUDED IN STUDY

Benjamin Smith Barton

“An Account of the most effectual means of preventing the deleterious consequences of
the bite of the Crotalus Horidus, or Rattle-Snake.” American Philosophical
Society Transactions 3 (1793): 100-1 15.

“Additional Facts and Observations, relative to the Extinct Species of American
Elephants. In a letter ﬁom the Editor to Mons. Cuvier, of Paris.” The
Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by
Benjamin Smith Barton 2 (Jul 1807): 166. APS Online.

“Additional Facts and Observations, relative to the American Locust.” The Philadelphia
Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith
Barton 2 (Jul 1807): 181. APS Online.

“A Botanical description of the Podophyllum Diphyllum of Linnaeus, in a letter to
Charles Peter Thunberg, M.D. Knight fo the Order of Wasa, Professor of
Medicine and Botany in the University of Upsal, etc.” American Philosophical
Society Transactions 3 (1793): 334-347.

Collections for an essay towards a materia medica of the United-States. Philadelphia:
Printed for the author, 1798.

A Discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History, and on the best
Means of promoting the Study of this Science, in the United-States. Read before
the Philadelphia Linnean Society, on the 10'” of June, 1807. Philadelphia:
Denham and Town, 1807.

Elements of botany, or, Outlines of the natural history of vegetables. Philadelphia:
Printed for the author, 1803.

“Facts Observations, and Conjectures, relative to the Elephantine Bones (of different
species), that are found in various parts of North-America. In a letter from the
Editor to Mr. G. Cuvier, of Paris.” The Philadelphia Medical and Physical
Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 1 (Mar 1806): 22.
APS Online.

Fragments of the natural history of Pennsylvania, in Selected Works by E ighteenth-
Century Naturalists and Travelers, ed. Keir B. Sterling. New York: Arno Press,
1974.

“Hints relative to the External Employment of the Leaves of the Liriodendron Tulipifer,
or Tuliptree, in cases of Gout and Rheumatism.” The Philadelphia Medical and

147

Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 1, no. 1
(1804): 83-85. APS Online.

“Hints relative to the Stimulant Effects of Camphor upon Vegetables.” American
Philosophical Society Transactions 4 (1799): 232-235.

“An Inquiry into the Question, whether theApis Melliﬁca, or True Honey Bee, is a native
of America.” American Philosophical Society Transactions 3 (1793): 241-261.

“Letter from Doctor Barton to Thomas Jefferson.” The Port-Folio 4, no. 4 (Oct 1810):
340. APS Online. 1

“A memoir concerning the fascinating faculty which has been ascribed to the rattle-
snake, and other American serpents.” American Philosophical Society
Transactions 4 (1799): 74-1 13.

“Memorandum concerning the Use of Indigo in the disease of Cynache Trachealis.” The
Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin
Smith Barton 1, no. 1 (1804): 35-36. APS Online.

“Memorandum of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Clayton, the celebrated Botanist of
Virginia. ” The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and
Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 2 (1806): 139. APS Online.

“Memorandums of the Lives and Literary Labours of Mr. William Vernon and Dr. David
Krieg.” The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and
Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 2 (1806): 139. APS Online.

“Note on the Natural History of the substance called Guano.” The Philadelphia Medical
and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 2
(1806): 66. APS Online.

“Some account of an American Species of Dipus, or J erboa.” American Philosophical
Society Transactions 4 (1799): 114-124.

“Some Account of Mr. John Banister, the Naturalist.” The Philadelphia Medical and
Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 2 (1806):
134. APS Online.

“Some account of the different species and varieties of native American, or Indian Dogs.”
The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by
Benjamin Smith Barton 1 no. 2 (1804): 3-31. APS Online.

“To the Students of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania.” The Philadelphia

Medical and Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith
Barton 2 (1806): iii. APS Online.

148

“Tribute to the memory of Doctor Thomas Walmsey.” The Philadelphia Medical and
Physical Journal. Collected and Arranged by Benjamin Smith Barton 2 (1806):
162. APS Online.

William Bartram

“Account of the Species, Hybrid, and other Varieties of the Vine of North American.”
(with James Mease) Medical Repository 2, no. 1 (1803): 19-24.

“Anecdotes of an American Crow.” Travels and Other Writings. New York: Library of
America, 1996.

“Conjectures Relative to the Scite of Bristol, in Pennsylvania.” Travels and Other
Writings. New York: Library of America, 1996.

“Description of an American Species of Certhia or Creeper.” Travels and Other Writings.
New York: Library of America, 1996.

“Observations on the Pea Fly or Beetle, and Fruit Curculio.” Travels and Other Writings.
New York: Library of America, 1996.

“Preface to A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, and Herbaceous Plants, Indigenous to the
United States of America.” Travels and Other Writings. New York: Library of
America, 1996.

“Some Account of the Late Mr. John Bartram, of Pennsylvania.” Travels and Other
Writings. New York: Library of America, 1996.

John Bartram Carr

“The Diary of a Naturalist. Or Memoranda of the weather; arrival of birds; ﬂowering of
plants, etc for the spring of the year 1830. Kept at the Bartram Botanic Garden,
on the right bank of the river Schuylkill, below the city of Philadelphia.”

Hazard 's Register of Pennsylvania, Devoted to the Preservation of F acts... 8
(July 2, 1831): 13. APS Online.

William Hamilton
“Some Account of the Agave Americana, which ﬂowered at the Woodlands, in the
Summer of 1804 Extracted from a Letter of William Hamilton, Esq. to the Editor,

dated January 13‘”, 1805.” The Philadelphia Medical Museum, Conducted by
John Redman Coxe, MD. 1, no. 3 (1805): 308. APS Online.

149

James Mease

“Account of the Efﬁcacy of the external Application of the Geranium Maculatum, in
stopping Hemorrhage.” The Philadelphia Medical Museum, Conducted by John
Redman Coxe, MD. 3, no 3 (1807): 154. APS Online.

“An Account of the Virtues of some American Trees, Shrubs, and Plants.” The
Philadelphia Medical Museum, Conducted by John Redman Coxe, MD. 2, no. 2
(1806): 157. APS Online.

“Cases of blighted foetuses discharged from the uterus at various ages, living children
still remaining to the full period of Utero-Gestation.” Eclectic Repertory and
Analytical Review, Medical and Philosophical 9, no. 4 (Oct 1819): 531. APS
Online.

“Cases of the Gradual Loss of Muscular Power, without evident cause.” The Philadelphia
Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences 2, no. 4 (1821): 322. APS Online.

“Cases of the Successﬁrl Use of Mercury in Typhus; with Observations on its Use in
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Thomas Nuttall

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151

 

Alexander Wilson
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