NATURAL HISTORY

Natural history—encompassing a suite of subjects now considered distinct, including botany and zoology, paleontology, geology, mineralogy, and ethnography—was the most American of sciences during the early national period and the first in which American scientists other than Benjamin Franklin attained international stature. It also served as a means for European Americans to conceptualize racial differences.

European gardeners and botanists were eager for specimens of the flora and fauna from exotic North America, and some American botanists exploited this opportunity for tidy profits from the wilderness. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Quaker botanists John Bartram (1699–1777) and his cousin Humphry Marshall (1722–1801) were scouring the colonies from Florida to New York for rare plants for use in agriculture, gardening, and science; were studying Indian uses of plants for new uses in medicine; and were using religious, commercial, and social networks to distribute plants and seeds abroad. Though initially viewed as little more than merchants, Bartram gained respect for his acuity in introducing and describing new species, and Marshall for employing the high science of Linnaean systematics (the Linnaean system of classification) in his Arbustrum Americanum (1785), the first treatise on American trees written by an American. Indeed, for most practitioners in early national America, natural history was largely a utilitarian exercise, with taxonomy (rarely systematics) enjoying the greatest prestige but economic utility providing the impetus.

As a result of the influence of Bartram and Marshall, Philadelphia became a center of botanical interest and education. In 1789 the University of Pennsylvania appointed Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815) as professor of materia medica and later professor of botany, becoming the first American institution of higher learning to dedicate a position to the natural sciences. Barton's students and peers created an extensive network of researchers based on correspondence and exchange of specimens, and supported by the botanical gardens founded by David Hosack (1769–1835) in New York and André Michaux (1746–1802) in New Jersey and South Carolina, as well as by private collections such as William Hamilton's in Philadelphia. Natural history continued to attract Americans. According to many practitioners, natural history offered peculiar advantages over other sciences, requiring little in the way of complex apparatus or theoretical acuity. Moreover, Americans enjoyed a proximity to nature unavailable in settled Europe, and these scientists took the botanical description of America as a national project and point of national pride. Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838), naturalists as well as explorers, collected some of the most distinctly American plants of all, yet ironically and to the dismay of American botanists, the German botanist Frederick Pursh (1774–1820) absconded with some of Lewis's specimens and published descriptions of them in London, scooping his American colleagues.

The wilderness exerted a formative, though not always positive, influence on the American character. Americans' daily lives brought them into contact with both American Indians and Africans—a situation made possible by slavery and continental conquest and providing a unique empirical basis from which to explore racial biology. Indeed, by the 1790s, race had become a central concern of American natural history. Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), Samuel Stanhope Smith (1750–1819), Charles Caldwell (1772–1853), and Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) systematically delineated how and why different racial types differed, and they used anatomy and behavior to order the races on a linear gradient of social and cultural "development." In the generations of natural historians extending from Rush to Morton, the center of gravity of scientific opinion shifted from viewing phenotypic differences as a product of the environment to viewing them as an innate and unalterable division marked in body, mind, and character.

See alsoBotany; Environment, Environmental History, and Nature; Lewis and Clark Expedition; Medicine; Patent Medicines .

bibliography

Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995.

Gamez, Alicia M. "Making American Nature: Scientific Narratives of Origin and Order in Visual and Literary Conceptions of Race in the Early American Republic." Dissertation, Stanford University, 2000.

Porter, Charlotte M. The Eagle's Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812–1842. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982.

Welch, Margaret. The Book of Nature: Natural History in the United States, 1825–1875. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Robert S. Cox