Bartram, John

Bartram, John

(b. Marple, Pennsylvania, 23 May 1699; d. Kingsessing, Pennsylvania, 22 September 1777)

botany.

The eldest child of William Bartram and his first wife, Elizabeth Hunt, both members of the Society of Friends, John Bartram was born on his father’s farm near Darby, Pennsylvania. He had only a common country schooling; but, from the age of twelve, as he later said, he had “a great inclination to Botany and Natural History,” although for a time medicine and surgery were his “chief study.” On reaching manhood, Bartram inherited from an uncle a farm on which he established himself and his young family; he sold it in 1728 and bought another, of 102 acres, on the banks of the Schuylkill River at Kingsessing, four miles from Philadelphia. Here he converted the marshy lands into productive meadows by draining them; and, through intelligent use of fertilizer and crop rotation, he was soon reaping more abundant crops than most of his neighbors. By 1730 he had laid out a small garden where he cultivated plants, shrubs, and trees from different parts of America. As Bartram’s interest in scientific botany grew, James Logan, chief justice of the province and a learned amateur of science, encouraged him with loans and gifts of books. About 1734 Bartram was introduced to the London mercer and enthusiast of science Peter Collinson as “a very proper person” to provide specimens of the products of American fields and forests; and thus his career was launched.

Collinson ordered seeds, plants, and shrubs; got Bartram other customers; advised him on what would sell in England; and instructed him how to pack and ship the specimens and even how to behave toward his patrons. The dukes of Richmond, Norfolk, Argyll, and Bedford; Lord Petre; Philip Miller, author of The Gardener’s Dictionary; Sir Hans Sloane; and Thomas Penn all enriched their gardens and greenhouses with plants obtained from Bartram. In this way Bartram introduced more than a hundred American species into Europe. Collinson and his friends annually raised a fund to pay for their purchases and thus to underwrite Bartram’s collecting. Sometimes they sent him botanical works as gifts so that he could identify the plants he found, and Collinson persuaded the Library Company of Philadelphia to give Bartram a membership so that he might use its collections. In addition, Collinson introduced Bartram by letter to Linnaeus, Gronovius, G. L. Buffon, and other European naturalists, and also to Americans who shared his interests.

With a market for his plants thus assured, Bartram began to make a series of botanical journeys to distant parts of the country. The first, in 1736, was to the sources of the Schuylkill River. In 1738 he traveled to Virginia and the Blue Ridge, covering 1,100 miles in five weeks and spending but a single night in any town. He made shorter expeditions to the New Jersey coast and pine barrens and to the cedar swamps of southern Delaware. The yield to science from these explorations was so great that in 1742 Benjamin Franklin and other Philadelphians opened a subscription to enable Bartram “wholly to spend his Time and exert himself” in discovering and collecting plants, trees, flowers, and other natural products. The subscription was abandoned when Logan opposed it, and Bartram never had the kind of financial independence he repeatedly sought. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1742 he tramped over the Catskill Mountains, and in 1743, with Conrad Weiser, the province interpreter, and the cartographer Lewis Evans, he traveled through Pennsylvania into the Indian country of New York as far as Oswego and Lake George. “Our way... lay over rich level ground,” Bartram wrote of one day’s journey, in a good example of both his life in the woods and his prose style.

... but when we left it, we enter’d a miserable thicket of spruce, opulus, and dwarf yew, then over a branch of Susquehannah, big enough to turn a mill, came to ground as good as that on the other side of the thicket; well cloathed with tall timber of sugar birch, sugar maple, and elm. In the afternoon it thunder’d hard pretty near us, but rained little: We observed the tops of the trees to be so close to one another for many miles together, that there is no seeing which way the clouds drive, nor which way the wind sets: and it seems almost as if the sun had never shone on the ground since the creation.

By 1750 Bartram was famous. Copies of his journals circulated in manuscript in London, and that of the trip to Onondago was published there in 1751. Such American naturalists as Dr. John Mitchell of Virginia and such philosophers as Cadwallader Colden of New York sought him out. Peter Kalm spent so much time at Kingsessing that Logan complained that during an eight-month visit to Philadelphia the Swedish botanist had seen no one but Franklin and Bartram. Dr. Alexander Garden of Charleston wrote of a visit to Bartram in 1754:

His garden is a perfect portraiture of himself, here you meet with a row of rare plants almost covered over with weeds, here with a Beautifull Shrub, even Luxuriant Amongst Briars, and in another corner an Elegant & Lofty tree lost in common thicket. On our way from town to his house he carried me to severall rocks & Dens where he spewed me some of his rare plants, which he had brought from the Mountains &c. In a word he disclaims to have a garden less than Pensylvania & Every den is an Arbour, Every run of water, a Canal, & every small level Spot a Parterre, where he nurses up some of his Idol Flowers & cultivates his darling productions. He had many plants whose names he did not know, most or all of which I had seen & knew them. On the other hand he had several I had not seen & some I never heard of [Earnest, p. 21].

Bartram’s observations were not limited to things botanical. He collected shells, insects, hummingbirds, terrapin, and wild pigeons. He described the mussels of the Delaware River, rattlesnakes, wasps, and the seventeen-year locust; and from his letters about them Collinson fashioned communications that were printed in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Except for the introduction and notes for a Philadelphia edition of Thomas Short’s Medicina Britannica and two short pieces on snakeroot and red cedar for Poor Richard’s Almanack, Bartram wrote almost nothing for publication; even the Onondago journal, in Kalm’s estimate, contained not “a thousandth part of the great knowledge which he has acquired in natural philosophy and history.”

Bartram was also interested in every scheme to promote scientific inquiry in America, and he offered several of his own. In 1739 he suggested that “ingenious & curious men” be organized into a society or college for “the study of natural secrets arts & syances.” The suggestion was premature, but in 1743 Franklin succeeded in establishing for a few years a less ambitious group, the American Philosophical Society, to which Bartram was especially devoted. In a letter to Garden in 1756 he proposed a kind of geological survey of the mineral resources of the North American continent. Bartram was always ready to become a traveling naturalist, supported by the government or private patrons and reporting his discoveries to his sponsors. As increasing numbers of explorers and collectors uncovered and carried away mammoth fossils from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, in the 1750’s and 1760’s, Bartram expressed the hope that wealthy “curiosos” would “send some person that will take pains to measure every bone exactly, before they are broken and carried away, which they soon will be, by ignorant, careless people, for gain.”

Single-minded and untiring in pursuit of natural history, Bartram grumbled and complained when anything impeded his work. On the other hand, he was friendly and open to those who shared his devotion. Kalm gratefully acknowledged that he owed Bartram much “for he possessed that great quality of communicating everything he knew.” Everyone who knew him was impressed with Bartram’s industry, his capacity for accurate observation and recall, and his independence. When Kalm repeated Mark Catesby’s theory that trees and plants decrease in size and strength when they are taken north, Bartram answered that if the question were “more limited,” Catesby’s answer “would prove more worthwhile”—some trees grow better in the south, others in the north.

This independent turn of mind also showed itself in Bartram’s religious views, which were deeply influenced by his studies of nature. He was contemptuous of ecclesiastical formalities and theological points; he was scornful of Quaker pacifism, which he believed made men hypocrites, “for they can’t banish freedom of thought”; and, unlike his coreligionists, he judged that the only way to establish lasting peace with the Indians was to “bang them stoutly.” He was in fact a deist, and when he persisted in expressions of disbelief in the divinity of Jesus, the Friends disowned him in 1757. He continued to attend Quaker meetings, however—and to express his unorthodox views. “My head runs all upon the works of God, in nature,” he wrote in 1762. “It is through that telescope I see God in the sky.” Over the window of his house in 1770 he carved the words, “’Tis God alone, Almighty Lord,/The Holy One, by me ador’d.” The sentiment, his son William remembered, gave offense to pious neighbors.

The close of the French and Indian War brought Great Britain a vast increase of territory in North America, and Bartram set out to explore it. He traveled in 1761 to the forks of the Ohio River and to the springs of western Virginia, crawling “over many deep wrinkles in the face of our antient mother earth”; and in 1764 he appealed to Collinson to raise funds to send him on an exploration of Florida. In consequence of his friend’s representations, in 1765 Bartram was named king’s botanist with an annual stipend of fifty pounds. Although he complained that it was not enough, Bartram set out all the same, accompanied by his son William. Entertained by governors and other officials, he traveled from Charleston through Georgia into Florida, visiting plantations, noting the quality of the soils, and recording trees, plants, and fossils. During these journeys he discovered the lovely Franklinia altamaha, which has never since been found in its native soils and survives today only in descent from a specimen Bartram brought back to his garden. In Florida, Bartram went up the St. John’s River to Fort Picolata, where he and William witnessed an impressive Indian treaty ceremonial.

This was Bartram’s last trip. He was aging, and his sight was failing. He spent his remaining years at Kingsessing, surrounded by family and friends, tending his garden, visited by the great and the curious. One visitor, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, later published a pleasing, although romanticized, account of Bartram’s life and manner of living. Inevitably honors came to Bartram. The Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden made him a member in 1769, and in 1772 “A Society of Gentlemen in Edinburgh” who were interested in propagating arts and sciences, awarded him a gold medal for his services. Before he died, his fellow citizens and European friends of America had ranked Bartram with Franklin and David Rittenhouse as one of the country’s authentic natural geniuses.

Bartram was married twice: in 1723 to Mary Maris of Chester Monthly Meeting, by whom he had two sons; and in 1729 to Ann Mendenhall, of Concord Monthly Meeting, who bore him five sons and four daughters. His sons Isaac and Moses became apothecaries, John inherited the farm and famous garden, and William achieved lasting fame as a botanical traveler, artist, and author. John Bartram, in William’s words, was “rather above the middle size, and upright,” with a long face and an expression that was at once dignified, animated, and sensitive. A painting by John Wollaston in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington is thought to be a portrait of Bartram.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Bartram’s published writings are Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and Other Matters... From Pensilvania to Onondago, Oswego and the Lake Ontario, in Canada (London, 1751); and “Diary of a Journey Through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida...,” Francis Harper, ed., in American Philosophical Society, Transactions, 33 , part 1 (1942–1944), 1–120.

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Bartram are William Bartram, “Some Account of the Late Mr. John Bartram, of Pennsylvania,” in Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, 1 , part 1 (1804), 115–124; William Darlington, Memorials of John Bartram and Humphry Marshall (Philadelphai, 1849); Ernest Earnest, John and William Bartram: Botanists and Explorers (Philadelphia, 1940); Peter Kalm, Travels in North America, A. B. Benson, ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1937); Leonard W. Larabee et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 1959–), II, 298–299, 355–357, 378–380, et passim; Francis D. West, “John Bartram’s Journey to Pittsburgh in the Fall of 1761,” in Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, 38 (1955), 111–115; “John Bartram and the American Philosophical Society,” in Pennsylvania History, 23 (1956), 463–466; and “The Mystery of the Death of William Bartram, Father of John Bartram the Botanist,” in Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, 20 (1956–1957), 253–255.

Whitfield J. Bell, Jr.