The Society for Useful Knowledge (13 page)

Collinson's directives to Bartram were always very precise, but he was uncharacteristically vague about the terms of this royal appointment, in particular the formal title—if any—that may have accompanied Bartram's court stipend of fifty pounds a year. Collinson initially had referred to his American friend as “King's Botanist,” but a later note cautioned Bartram against exploiting such a title without the court's explicit permission. This suggests the entire arrangement may have been more of a private affair.
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And he readily admitted that the British monarch paid no real attention to Bartram's painstaking deliveries of rare New World flora, although the promised stipend would continue all the same. “I wish the King had any taste in flowers and plants; but as he has none,
there are no hopes of encouragement from him, for his talent is architecture.”
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The arrangement with the court, brokered by Collinson over many months through his extensive network of powerful contacts, was the source of sniping within America's small coterie of naturalists. In Charleston, South Carolina, the Scottish physician Alexander Garden—an avid botanist for whom Linnaeus named the gardenia flower—could not believe the news. Surely, the king had agreed only to underwrite Bartram's expenses and perhaps a small stipend rather than to offer the self-taught American a true royal appointment, a nonplussed Garden groused to a British colleague.
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With the establishment of a regular salary came increasing requests from London, including a detailed commission for Bartram to carry out a search for the headwaters of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. Collinson oversaw each of these trips in the most minute detail, leaving little to chance and virtually nothing to the American's own initiative, experience, or local knowledge. He demanded Bartram maintain a daily journal and outfit his horse with special specimen boxes, and he even sent along a new suit of clothes to wear when visiting the Royal Society's contacts in Virginia. “Virginians are a very gentle, well-dressed people—and look, perhaps more at a man's outside than his inside,” wrote Collinson, worried that Bartram's homespun jacket and plain ways might offend his hosts.
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From time to time, Collinson called on Bartram to provide evidence that might shed light on some of the scientific controversies debated back in London. How did the beaver fashion his dam? Did the rattlesnake simply bite and poison its prey? Or was there an element of “power it has over creatures, by
charming
them into its very jaws?” Similarly, members of the Royal Society had heard reports from New England of periodic outbreaks of locusts. “Pray has thee heard, or observed, that a certain species of locust returns every fifteenth year?”
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By all accounts, Bartram bore up remarkably well under such exacting demands, ranging far and wide and enduring numerous hardships in the wilderness to fulfill his missions. On an expedition to the Cedar Swamp of New Jersey to collect pine cones for the Duke of Norfolk, Bartram struggled against the elements. “I climbed the trees in the rain … and lopped off the boughs, then must stand up to the knees in snow, to pluck off the cones,” he informed Collinson.
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On another trip, Bartram devoted two weeks of “painstaking effort” to tracking down the rare willow-leafed oak, only to have most of its treasured acorns “devoured by the squirrels and hogs.”
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No request was, it seems, too demanding or too daunting. The American furnished muskrat skins, a hornet's nest, samples of native ginseng for a proposed export scheme to China, even live turtle eggs that Collinson received just in time to see one hatch.

The grateful virtuosi began to sing Bartram's praise. Linnaeus celebrated the self-taught Bartram as “the greatest natural botanist in the world.” Gardening and its more exacting cousin botany were then all the rage in Europe, fueled in large part by the sudden availability of exotic plants from America, and many of the wealthy and powerful competed with one another to populate their private gardens with the rarest of New World specimens. In Linnaeus's native Sweden, Queen Ulrika, herself an avid gardener, wrote a warm letter to Bartram, and the Royal Academy of Science of Stockholm made him a member in 1769.
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Collinson was always careful to fill his letters to Bartram with praise and encouragement, and the two men—linked by their shared Quaker faith and enthusiasm for plants—appear to have established a personal bond over their decades of correspondence, even as they bickered over expenses, missed shipments, or lost letters. In less guarded moments, however, Collinson allows his condescension, and that of the European virtuosi in general, toward his stalwart American partner to peek through.

“I am persuaded you would have been pleased with him,” Collinson wrote to Cadwallader Colden, a fellow botany enthusiast in New York, after a failed attempt by the two Americans to meet. “You would have found a wonderful natural genius, considering his education, and that he was never out of America, but is an husbandman, and lives on a little estate of his own about five or six miles from Philadelphia.”
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For the most part, Collinson and his colleagues were not particularly interested in what Bartram might think or what firsthand experience might tell him, but only in what he could collect and then send back to Europe for their study and analysis. In fact, Collinson openly discouraged the American from engaging in scientific speculation. “The box of seeds came very safe, and in good order,” he reported in one letter. “Thy remarks on them are very curious, but I think take up too much of thy time and thought. I would not make my correspondence burdensome, but must desire thee to continue the same collections
over again.”
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Later, when Bartram on his own arranged for the publication of a fine edition of one of his expedition journals, Collinson scoffed that he was wasting his time. Clearly, few would “buy so dear a book.”
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Throughout their lengthy correspondence, Collinson is explicit that it is only the opinions of the experts back in Europe that carry any weight, and he dismissed Bartram's own views on the existence of two separate varieties of American cedar, the red and the white, until details of the plants could be examined by the natural philosophers of London, Oxford, Berlin, or Uppsala. “Half a dozen, by way of specimen, will be sufficient;
for though you call it white cedar, we are in doubt
what class it belongs to, until we see its seed-vessels.”
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Collinson regularly forwarded some of Bartram's samples to his expert colleagues, who assigned them Latin names in accordance with the latest thinking on plant classification, and then returned these rulings to Bartram for his own edification. “Send more seed,” Collinson requested in a letter of March 14, 1736. “All the specimens went to Oxford. When they are sent back, with their names, thee shall hear from me.”
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Collinson also provided American specimens for classification by the Dutch botanist Jan Frederik Gronovius, whose publication of the
Flora Virginica
was essentially an uncredited reworking—plagiarism might be a more apt term—of an extensive catalog of Virginia plants carefully compiled by Bartram's fellow American naturalist, John Clayton.

The attitudes of men such as Collinson, Gronovius, and Linnaeus were in keeping with the established view of the colonial naturalists as handmaidens to their own grand scientific work, so it is not surprising that the Europeans fought to maintain their control over useful knowledge. When Bartram proffered the seemingly reasonable suggestion that perhaps the time was at hand for the American colonies to assemble their own scientific infrastructure, in imitation of the Royal Society, Collinson moved to quash the idea.

“As to the Society that thee hints at, had you a set of learned, well-qualified members to set out with, it might draw your neighbors to correspond with you,” Collinson wrote in the summer of 1739. “Your Library Company I take to be an essay towards such a Society. But to draw learned strangers to you, to teach sciences, requires salaries and good encouragement; and this will require public, as well as proprietary assistance—which can't be at present complied with—considering the infancy of your colony.”
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Collinson's initial assessment of the colonials' ability to create and then sustain a scientific organization of their own was not far off the mark, for Franklin's American Philosophical Society, announced publicly several years after Bartram first suggested it, struggled to get off the ground and it lay, essentially moribund, for years. Despite Collinson's early opposition, Bartram had refused to give up on the idea, which he shared with Colden, the patrician politician-cum-scientist from New York, as well as with Franklin and a few other like-minded colleagues in and around Philadelphia. The American naturalist seems to have been the early driving force behind the 1743 manifesto, which appeared under Franklin's name.
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Joined by the Philadelphia physician Thomas Bond, the circle made a number of attempts to spark interest in their venture, including the proposed publication of a scientific journal, the
American Philosophical Miscellany
, which they hoped would serve as a rallying point for participants from around the colonies. Franklin also tapped into his growing network of Europeans, and he offered to use his position as postmaster to assist the colonial members with their scientific correspondence.

In a breathless note to Colden, dashed off on April 5, 1744, Franklin reported that the new society “is actually formed, and has had several Meetings to mutual Satisfaction.” Bartram would serve as botanist, with Franklin's old colleague from the Junto, the glazier and inventor Godfrey, in the mathematician's chair. Thomas Bond would fill the post of physician. Correspondent members from New York and New Jersey were also in place, and participants from Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, and New England were expected “as soon as they are acquainted that the Society has begun to form itself,” Franklin reported, ending with a promise of “a short Account of what has been done and proposed at those Meetings.”
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The project, however, was virtually stillborn. The proposed
Miscellany
languished, although Franklin eventually managed to collect enough material to fill several issues, primarily on medical matters.
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The promised update on the Society's progress never appeared, and by the summer of 1745, Franklin had resigned himself to failure. He blamed the habits of his fellow colonials, in particular those from the upper crust whose discipline, he suggested, compared unfavorably to that of the Leather Aprons. “The Members of our Society here are very idle Gentlemen, they will take no Pains,” he conceded in a letter to Colden.
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The dour Bartram agreed but expressed the vague hope that success might yet be attained “if we
could but exchange the time that is spent in the Club, Chess and Coffee House for the Curious amusements of natural observations.”
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More than a century earlier, Francis Bacon had spelled out the necessary conditions for the successful realization of his New Philosophy project, laying the foundation for the Royal Society. These included, among other factors, the notion of science as continuous, collective action and the steady support of both the state and society as a whole. In his initial, discouraging response to Bartram, Collinson had dutifully reiterated Bacon's analysis as well as his own experience as a longtime fellow of the Royal Society, whose ranks included not only those expert in natural philosophy but also vital elements drawn from among the more “curious” of the merchants, artisans, and country gentlemen.

The British Crown, too, had provided important political backing to the virtuosi, many of whose Puritan tendencies might otherwise have been subjected to far more critical scrutiny after the restoration of the monarchy. In Pennsylvania of the 1740s, Bartram and his circle could count on little support from either their fellow citizens or the proprietary family, increasingly at odds with local public opinion—often in the person of the formidable Franklin himself—over the future direction of the province.

Other domestic obstacles plagued the early days of the American Philosophical Society. Despite the advances since the colonies were first settled, Franklin's America still suffered from acute shortages of labor and currency, the lack of great universities, libraries, and other cultural institutions, a dearth of domestic capital, the enormous distance from the mother country, and the absence of significant urban centers that could concentrate intellectual activity into a single, workable space. Philadelphia was by now America's leading city, but it was unable to offer anything like the sophisticated urban society or vast private financial resources that London provided to the Royal Society. Colonial life was still overwhelmingly rural and would remain so for many, many decades.

Meanwhile, the logic of imperial development, with England as the undisputed source of power, ideas, and privilege, meant that the individual colonies naturally directed their attention eastward across the Atlantic rather than toward one another. Meaningful cooperation among the various colonies was virtually nonexistent. The New World's status as supplier of raw materials—whether iron ore, lumber, or foodstuffs—and the mercantilist preference given to finished goods from British manufacturers at the expensive of domestic colonial production further contributed to this centripetal tendency.

Even the torturously slow lines of communication, whether for mail, goods, or personal travel, between the nascent American cities and England were often more reliable than those among the distant colonial settlements themselves. The diary of Alexander Hamilton, the Scottish physician, reveals in detail the challenges he faced throughout a tour of the middle and northern colonies that took four months; in just the first leg, one hundred and thirty miles from his home in Annapolis, Maryland, to Pennsylvania, the good doctor endured lame horses, disreputable travel companions, uncertain ferry service, unmarked roads, and cramped lodgings, including one public house where he was forced to sleep in the same room as the proprietor, his wife, and daughters. Travel and communications were especially important to the eighteenth-century way of doing science, which revolved around the learned society with its regular face-to-face meetings, its complex exchanges of correspondence among members, and its publication and distribution of a journal that could communicate claims to invention and originality and express the organization's collective judgment on all important questions of the day.
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