The Nation's Nature

How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America

James D. Drake

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780813931395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In one of Common Sense's most ringing phrases, Thomas Paine declared it "absurd" for "a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." Such powerful words, coupled with powerful ideas, helped spur the United States to independence.

In The Nation's Nature, James D. Drake examines how a relatively small number of inhabitants of the Americas, huddled along North America's east coast, came to mentally appropriate the entire continent and to think of their nation as America. Drake demonstrates how British North American colonists' participation in scientific debates and imperial contests shaped their notions of global geography. These ideas, in turn, solidified American nationalism, spurred a revolution, and shaped the ratification of the Constitution.

Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth–century studies

PART 1 CONTINENTAL PRECONDITIONS TO AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

CHAPTER 1 SCIENTIFIC TRENDS, CONTINENTAL CONCEPTIONS, REVOLUTIONARY IMPLICATIONS

Of the founding generation, George Washington would not rank at the top of anybody’s list for his abilities as a scientist. Benjamin Franklin’s scientific experiments assured him of an honored place in the pantheon of Enlightenment scientists, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) put him among those select savants. Nor did Washington think of himself as a scientist. Though an accomplished surveyor, he sometimes fretted about lagging behind many of his contemporaries in formal education.¹ Still, Washington, like so many colonists, took an interest in scientific debate, at least when it related to one of his core concerns: the nature and fate of his continent.

Washington revealed his interest on a number of occasions. Just before Christmas in 1780, the general and several of his officers took a break from the war to enjoy a sleigh ride from their winter headquarters to a farm in New Windsor, New York, where the Reverend Robert Annan had unearthed fossil remains. Two-pound teeth, from what we now know to be a mastodon, drew Washington’s attention. He explained to Annan that at Mount Vernon he had some similar specimens found in the Ohio River valley. In another instance, during a relatively quiet period in Washington’s life, after he chaired the Constitutional Convention and while he awaited news of the resulting document’s fate in the hands of the states, he wrote a letter in which he explained what prospective immigrants to America might profitably read: “As to the European Publications respecting the United States, they are commonly very defective.” Among the most misinformed, in Washington’s opinion, was the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique, des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770), which denigrated Americans and their natural environment. Better, Washington argued, to consult “Mr. Jefferson’s ‘Notes on Virginia,’ ” which “will give the best idea of this part of the Continent to a Foreigner.”²

In examining prehistoric remains and in dismissing Raynal, Washington became a minor participant in what one historian has called the “Dispute of the New World.”³ For more than a century, a group of leading European thinkers had been trying to explain the Americas’ human history in light of their natural history, an effort that was part of a larger attempt to build a comprehensive and systemic knowledge of the world. Through the second half of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals, including not just the Abbé Raynal but also Cornelius de Pauw, William Robertson, and others influenced by the great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, took jabs at the Americas. Based on their reading of natural history, they posited the region was either a new continent or one that had undergone a geologic catastrophe. As a result, its environment was putrid, filled with dangerous miasmas, and colder and wetter than other parts of the world. The noxiousness of the “New World” made its species, including humans, degenerate and effete. If those conclusions were true, the grandiose aspirations of the colonists and the subsequent new nation would be for naught. The nature of the continent would prevent them from ever rivaling Europe on the world stage. Like the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik in 1957, almost two centuries later, the doubts raised by Buffon, Raynal, and others cast a worrisome shadow over Americans and their geopolitical visions. Science and national pride had become intertwined, and scientists in the late-eighteenth-century British colonies worked vigorously to disprove the aspersions cast on their continent, just as those of the twentieth century committed their energy to the space race.

This “Dispute of the New World” may seem almost amusing today. After all, one might easily confound Buffon by sending him on a trek across the hot, arid portions of the American West. Yet contemporaries took Buffon’s theories seriously. Books on American degeneracy made for good reading. They sold well, and they were reprinted in a number of languages and excerpted in newspapers. Even many of Buffon’s critics made similarly sweeping generalizations about the Americas and the other continents. Scientific trends in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led inhabitants of the British mainland colonies to comprehend their world through a continental filter. Colonists came to assume that continents—and their people—had inherent traits because they were natural geographic phenomena. A continent constituted an interdependent system (a popular term in eighteenth-century science) of creatures and environments that formed a complex unity. A continent could comprise pockets of variation, but these nested within the larger assemblage and shared traits that ran throughout the whole. This view meshed with a general Enlightenment quest to harmonize politics with nature. In Britain’s North American colonies, debates over the continent’s nature—and scientific discourse in general—helped foster widespread rhetoric to defend the American landmass and the colonists’ place in the world and in human history. Science provided some of the grammar and habits of the mind necessary for these colonists to view themselves as a people who shared a naturally unified land.

American Revolutionary thought sprang in part out of these intellectual developments. Geographic presumptions, demographic projections, and racial constructions provided British colonists with cogent arguments in support of a grand continental society, initially within and, after 1776, outside the British Empire. British North Americans could conceive of independent nationhood only after they saw several criteria as met. First, North American space had to be suitable for a nation-state: large and coherent enough to hold a viable polity and small, porous, and yielding enough to be manageable and facilitate trade and communication. Second, the inhabitants of such a nation had to have a character well suited to North American space. Third, the continent had to be intellectually separable from its original Indian inhabitants. Finally, the colonists’ population needed to be able to spread over the continent without becoming too diffuse. Land had to be plentiful enough to allow expansion as the population grew so that farmland would be readily available. Otherwise, the society would become increasingly urban and the economy more dependent on manufacturing, trends widely believed to lead to political corruption.⁴ Over the course of the eighteenth century, developments in geography and science created a perception that fulfilled these criteria. Sensing this, many leaders of the Revolutionary era began to create a society, as they saw it, in harmony with geography and nature.

POLITICS, GEOGRAPHY, AND SCIENCE

Educated colonists, like their European counterparts, were fascinated by geography and its relationship to politics. By the mid-eighteenth century, a transatlantic intellectual tradition had developed that posited critical connections linking geographic features, cultural traits, and political organizations. In particular, many Enlightenment thinkers saw ties between natural boundaries and a people’s character. The French philosopher Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, for example, argued that despotism reigned in Asia because it “has broader plains; it is cut into larger parts by seas . . . and its smaller rivers form slighter barriers.” Europe, by contrast, had “natural divisions” that created “many medium-sized states in which the government of laws is not incompatible with the maintenance of the state.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, too, emphasized the importance of nature in shaping the international order: “The lie of the mountains, seas, and rivers, which serve as boundaries of the various nations which people it, seems to have fixed forever their number and size. We may fairly say that the political order of the Continent is in some sense the work of nature.” Other French geographers expressed visions of a future where, should polities be divided along natural boundaries, greater harmony would prevail. The Scotsman David Hume even suggested—in contrast to Montesquieu—the possibility of a non-despotic continental society when he argued that a national character could permeate a large area as long as the people lived contiguously—that is, not divided by impassable mountain ranges, deserts, or rivers. The British author William Doyle perhaps summed up this outpouring of theory best when he argued that it was “geography, on which should ever be built all political systems”—the corollary being that “no man can possibly be qualified for the ministry, who has not the first a considerable knowledge in geography.”⁵

In the mainland colonies, well-to-do men amassed impressive libraries loaded with geographies, travel narratives, and maps. Within William Byrd’s four-thousand-volume library, “History, Voyages, Travels, &c.” filled three and a half bookcases. According to Thomas Jefferson’s own classification system, geographies constituted one of the largest categories in his library, and he subdivided it by continent. George Washington’s relatively modest library included sixty-two volumes of “Geography and Travels” and thirty-five volumes of “Science” at the time of his death. John Adams, known more for his legal and political thought than his scientific inclinations, held numerous atlases and geographies published before the Revolution, as well as at least a dozen volumes by Buffon and men who echoed the Frenchman’s theories. Beyond their libraries, fashionable gentlemen displayed globes or hung maps in their parlors or dining rooms, partly for their guests’ perusal, but also to demonstrate their own familiarity with geography. Sometimes they even carried a trendy fashion accessory: the pocket globe.⁶

Interest in geography, and in science in general, extended beyond the salons of Europe and the parlors of colonial gentlemen to a wide swath of Britain’s North American colonists, particularly in the urban seaports. Colleges offered courses in geography. Newspapers advertised sales of “maps of the world, and of each quarter, Europe, Asia, Africa and America.” In some cases, they offered estimates of the populations of each of these quarters. Periodicals were rife with inexpensive reprints of maps that most people otherwise would never have seen. Almanacs, newspapers, cartoons, songs, and sermons spread geographic and scientific information among ordinary folk.⁷

Perhaps nowhere was geographical and scientific knowledge more widespread than in Philadelphia. There, Benjamin Franklin and members of the Junto founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, a subscription library in which members jointly owned the books. As the Library Company’s premier historian notes, it had a collection “made by and for a group of merchants, tradesmen, and artisans struggling to gain wealth and position.” The books chosen by the Library Company’s directors departed from the theological bent of early colleges such as Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale. Histories, broadly defined to included geographical books and travel literature, made up roughly a third of the holdings through the eighteenth century, and science made up nearly a fifth.⁸

The Library Company’s subscribers could enjoy large folio geographies, lavishly illustrated atlases, and maps printed in London with copper plates, all by some of England’s premier geographers and engravers, such as Peter Heylyn, Emanuel Bowen, John Senex, and Thomas Jefferys. Subscribers could also leaf through the century’s best selling and relatively inexpensive geography by Patrick Gordon, Geography Anatomiz’d, first published in 1693 and reissued in nineteen more editions by 1754. Or they could learn about the parts of the world by reading articles in periodicals, which increasingly included simpler, woodcut variations of the maps made by England’s master cartographers. The Library Company had complete runs of the London Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine, the most influential English periodicals of the eighteenth century. The Gentleman’s Magazine alone published fifty maps before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. The Library Company thrived because it catered to the tastes of its intellectual yet non-elite membership. Similar libraries sprang up in Albany, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Newport, and Charleston before the Revolution.⁹

Those who were unable or unwilling to pay the fees for one of these subscription libraries—it cost £10 to initially join the Library Company of Philadelphia, followed by small annual fees—could readily access travel literature, geographies, and scientific tracts elsewhere. Circulating libraries—privately held collections from which one rented books—opened in six cities before the Revolution. To be sure, many of these proved short-lived; still, the holdings of these libraries likely indicate what their owners thought customers would want to read. Although works of fiction constituted the largest percentage of books, the number of volumes on geography, travel writing, and science generally exceeded by far those on government and politics. For those who could not afford the annual fee of these circulating libraries (usually around £1), coffeehouses typically provided patrons with access to newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, and occasionally books for the price of their beverage. For Philadelphians, James Logan, who had advised the Library Company of Philadelphia on its selection of books, bequeathed his massive private library of nearly three thousand books to the city at his death. This public library opened in 1760 and remained available to readers until the British occupied the city in 1777.¹⁰

As a newcomer in 1774, Thomas Paine rhapsodized about Philadelphia’s intellectual ferment. His first words written as the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine described “America” as “a country whose reigning character is the love of science.”¹¹ Benjamin Franklin and other colonists of scientific renown constituted only a minuscule portion of the colonies’ population. But their ideas, as the historian Richard Brown argues, “by a trickle-down process, seem to have influenced common belief.” The leading intellectuals of British North America belonged to and helped create a sizeable and expanding learned class that shaped much of the public discussion and brought scientific thought to bear on colonial and imperial politics.¹²

Colonists devoted to science often served as go-betweens, linking curious Europeans to diverse Americans who gathered the specimens and the data that the Europeans craved. To gather bark and beetles and the other stuff of natural history, white elites often relied on Native Americans, African Americans, and women. As the historian Susan Scott Parrish explains, these exchange networks, “though influenced by hierarchies of gender, class, institutional learning, place of birth or residence, and race, were nevertheless accessible to such a range of people in the colonies because they could supply novel information or specimens from the American side of the Atlantic.” Scientific investigation created sinews of communication that wound through Britain’s mainland colonies. Perhaps the best demonstration of the extensive communications networks among scientists in American and in Britain came in 1769 when men from Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Boston coordinated to perform a series of measurements studying the transit of Venus at the behest of astronomers in Englan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Historical Role of an Imagined Place
• Part I: Continental Preconditions to American Independence
• Part II: Creating a Continental Empire
• Epilogue: The Continent from on High
• Notes
• Index