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CHAPTER ONE
The two inventions—the development of latent heat, which produced the steam engine, the modern lever of mechanical power, and especially of navigation by water and transportation by land,—and the development of galvanism, which produced the magnetic telegraph—seem to have been designed mainly for our country. A population spread over an immense extent, and migratory in habit and tendency, is enabled to hold immediate intercourse in one shape from the remotest distances, and personally to visit and become familiarly acquainted through the length and breadth of the land without loss of time, material expense or fatigue. ... A new world expands in wealth and wisdom, over regions newly redeemed from the hunter and his game, and shares with more advanced civilization in distant regions, its own exhaustless and invaluable resources.
—^JOSEPH R. INGERSOLL, 1848
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHES
St. George Tucker, being a virtuous eighteenth-century Jeffersonian, suffered not a few pangs of conscience at having brought forth an edition of Blackstone; but in one emphatic respect he could feel his guilt assuaged. Despite all Blackstone’s antidemocratic quirks, on one point the great man had been firm, that wherever knowledge is the monopoly of the few, tyranny will usurp the prerogative. This ringing affirmation provided Tucker with a welcome sanction for expounding the scientific rationalism of Virginia: science discloses all the operations of “the machine," from which it followed, since the diffusion of letters among the populations of the West, that “those nations which have been most eminent in science, have been most distinguished by freedom." At the very beginning of the century, this foremost legal spokesman for the democratic faith could thus commit the cause of
freedom to scientific progress. Whether or not Tucker knew in 1803 precisely what he was doing, he was in fact prophesying what then doubtless presented itself as a gradual ascent to American felicity, but which, in the next sixty years, became a torrential rush of progress that subjected the young Republic to an ordeal of intellectual adaptation beyond any conceived by revivalists or imagined by legal theorists.
Tucker could still happily use “science" and “letters" as interchangeable terms. Both were activities of philosophy, and the great “philosophes," to the extent that they were known in America, had conclusively shown that “natural philosophy" comprised all the pursuits of disinterested leisure. So far, in spite of the political involvements of a Jefferson or a Franklin, the Americans had sustained the posture of disinterestedness.
So, while the transformation of colonial America into a nation commences with the shout of the Revival and then proceeds apace through a greedy appropriation of legal science to suit the native circumstances, for some time there lingered among the most self-conscious intellects a calm of spirit which was still of the eighteenth century. Henry Adams composed a dramatic paragraph on the landing, in the New York of 1867, of his father and John Lothrop Motley, describing them as bric-a-brac of the eighteenth century, hideously out of place in the America of business and the ghetto. Actually, by that time the tone and manner of the Enlightenment had long since vanished from the society, and Adams was stretching his rhetoric to score a sentimental point; yet it is true that in the first decades of the new century words were frequently spoken and printed which please us by exhibiting an utter innocence of the calendar. For instance, in 1813 William Barton published a eulogy of Rittenhouse, making much of the circumstance that the natural scientist—“equally with the teacher of religion and morals"—extends the benefits of his researches beyond the frontiers of his own country. Truth, he pleaded, is everywhere the same, wherefore the philosopher must pre-eminently be considered a citizen of the world; at the same time this need never detract in the slightest degree “from that spirit of patriotism which ever stimulates a good man to contribute his primary and most important services to his own country." Thus could Barton justify his writing about a scientist who happened also to be an American.
It followed that a philosophe in America need not sacrifice his cosmopolitan breadth when he dealt with the flora and fauna of this continent. In Barton’s view, as in Benjamin Franklin's, there could be no question of producing some uniquely American scientific doctrine. In science, as compared with religion and law, such distinctions simply
did not exist. American discoveries would be contributions to the international Enlightenment. A physician, Edward Miller, felt no sense in 1805 that he was betraying the national honor by congratulating the country for coming into being in an “inquisitive" age. The present period, he could say, is one of those distinguished eras to which posterity will look back with profound interest, “and of which it will expect a just account from all such as have it in their power to assist and accelerate the progress of discovery and improvement."
This sense of the epoch inspired one of the major productions of the early Republic, the Reverend Samuel Miller's A Brief Retro^ect of the Eighteenth Century, which was anything but brief, consisting of two large volumes which were published in New York in 1803. Miller's aim was to acquaint the democracy with the immensity of the “mass of improvement" wrought in the preceding century. He expresses a proper American, and ministerial, disapproval of certain tendencies in speculative philosophy and in fiction, but he himself. Calvinist product of the epoch, takes immeasurable delight in reporting, at remorseless length, the triumphs of “Mechanical Philosophy," under which rubric he enumerates chemistry, natural history, medicine, agriculture, geography. Though Miller is careful never to praise the licentious freedom of France, he actually manages to combine a righteous censure of Voltaire with an approbation of an age in which the elements of literature and science “descended from the higher classes of society, and from universities, to the middle, and, in some instances, to the lower orders of men.” In fact, he adds, even to femalesl As Charles Caldwell would say, at Louisville, Kentucky, when asked in 1832 to celebrate the birthday of Washington, the biography of Washington, important though it be, is of less consequence than the scientific advances made within his lifetime: that was “an aggregate into which most that enters belongs to the sublime."
If, then, the glory of the century could be so sanctioned, and a new America be received into the community of sublimity, it seemed obvious that science in America would be similar to, even hopefully someday might rival in profundity or extent, the science of Europe. Just as the Connecticut poets dreamed of an American Milton—or, at their most extravagant, of an American Watts—^John Coxe told the Philadelphia Medical Society in 1800: “Let me hope, that many whom I now address, are destined to attain an eminence, as great as Newton, Bacon, Boyle, and all those other illustrious characters, who rank so high in the annals of science."
Inevitably, while aspirations of this sort were consoling provincial inferiority, the question arose in the proud national mind as to why
America had not already produced Newtons and Bacons. A lyceum lecturer in 1820 might valiantly remind the people of the obstacles against which their fathers had contended—the necessities of subduing the soil, inducements to trade, Indian wars, the dissimilarity of the colonies—but he gingerly came round, though protesting he intended no offense, to the statement that the colonial culture had been so dominated by the clergy, who suffered themselves “to be often led astray with a propensity for jejune and useless disquisitions, and a zeal for theological controversy,” that the best intellects among the laity were rendered “unable to cultivate, with any considerable prospect of success,'the field of general study.” By “the field of general study” he specifically meant the array of sciences listed by Samuel Miller. Because we have been obsessed by theology, he further ventured, our most creative minds, from whom we ought to have received “bold and vigorous excursions into the paths of literature and science,” who were fully qualified to have reached “some of the loftier recesses of intellectual discovery,” have instead been forced to follow “in the eccentric steps of their predecessors.”
As late as 1820 there survived just enough of the spirit of the Enlightenment still to inspire a few such anticlerical jibes. Shortly thereafter they were to be silenced, and those champions of science who still nourished hostile feelings toward the clergy found it wiser, as evangelical orthodoxy came to dominate the intellectual scene, to place the blame simply on colonial conditions—the forest, Indian wars, and “foreign” tyranny. Not unnaturally, said the first issue of The Ameri' can Journal of Science in 1818, purely intellectual and speculative sciences, which required only books, teachers, and study, had been cultivated rather than those which demand physical demonstrations, instruments of research, material specimens. Hence we have done respectable work in theology, jurisprudence, civil policy, but we have yet to make any mark “in the sciences relating to material things.”
Recently scholarship has sought to determine the amount of scientific knowledge that actually was current in the colonies. This tender documentation has made much not only, for instance, of Cotton Mather’s awareness of inoculation but of fragmentary explanations of Newtonian physics in the simple language of the almanacs. I. Bernard Cohen declares that in eighteenth-century America the sciences “flourished,” and that in the declension of the early nineteenth century this fact was obscured. Yet for many years into the latter period, a litany of self-congratulation regularly was run through on ceremonial occasions which conventionally acknowledged that the founders, though hindered by physical difficulties, had none the less included names pre-
cious to science: “FRANKLIN, RITTENHOUSE, JEFFERSON, BOWDITCH." To this incantation was frequently added the name of Godfrey, robbed by English jealousy of all credit for his discovery of the quadrant I
Yet it was rapidly becoming evident that this recital could sustain national self-respect for only a short time. Samuel Miller confessed that the spirit of the American people had already shown itself ominously “commercial/' and predicted that men of science should here expect “little reward either of honour or emolument.” The bleak prospect for emolument quickly became not so much a worry as an enforced recognition of the fact, which Simon Newcomb was to sum up in Henry Adams’s monumental review of the century of American independence (The North American Review, January, 1876) by asking “why the growth of the tree planted by Franklin was so slow and stunted.” In 1814, DeWitt Clinton—thus early displaying the courage which deserves more than the ritualistic veneration occasionally afforded him in the State of- New York—bluntly informed his constituents that when Americans stumble into the fields of science, “the master spirits, who preside over transatlantic literature, view us with a sneer of supercilious contempt,” and consider our few productions—even those of Franklin and Rittenhouse—“as Oases in the regions of Africa; deriving their merit less from intrinsic beauty and excellence, than from their contrast with the surrounding deserts.”
To be sure, in these misty decades, while men who considered themselves at least amateur philosophes—^Jefferson, Madison, Monroe—presided over the Republic in what they thought an effulgence of light, ceremonial orators could still assert that there were “living Artists” to be added to the venerable list. Jeremiah Van Rensselaer, delivering his public lectures on geology in 1825, chided such self-congratulations by remarking that they could all remember “when the terms of science were scarcely understood among us.” By this time there were several voices penetrating the haze of complacency, although the more they seemed to support the last of the philosophes in the White House, John Quincy Adams, the less seemed the possibility of their ever being noticed by the cohorts of Andrew Jackson. Nevertheless, on November 13, 1826, at the opening of the Medical College in Charleston, South Carolina, Stephen Elliott asked where in all the country, and “more particularly in our section of the United States,” was there a man in any branch of science who could feel himself upon a level with European practitioners? Anger burning through his Ciceronian periods, he declared that Americans scarcely yet lived in the past century, and as for the present: “We stand around this great arena of human enter-
prize and mental exertion rather as spectators than as actors.” We know nothing of firsthand research, we trust to digests in magazines. In a complicated but still-vigorous sentence, Elliott formulated the problem for science in America as it was to be confronted for several decades:
If in the mechanic arts the ingenuity of our country, if in legislation and in commerce the unrivalled freedom of our institutions have given us a high rank and a distinguished name among nations—it would show that the talent of our country only wants opportunity and the means of action to become equally illustrious in the higher walks of science.
Or rather, as high-minded friends of science liked to phrase the problem, America needed only opportunity and means of action to be delivered from enslavement to mechanic arts or to the merely “speculative” sciences. The haunting question, however, which lurked behind this assurance was more troubling: supposing the economy does produce the opportunities and means; is there enough talent in the Republic that can be lured from the countinghouse, let alone from the pulpit and the law office, to then dedicate itself to the creation of a reputable scientific discipline in these states?
The most stirring speeches of the young Republic were resonant with a confidence that the pause between the pioneer age of Franklin and Rittenhouse and the glorious one about to dawn would be brief. The unquenchable Joel Barlow issued at Washington in 1806 a Prospectus for a national institution (dreaming, as so many Jeffersonians then were, of what ultimately emerged as the Smithsonian). “What a range,” he exclaimed, “is open in this country for mineralogy and botanyl” And for the other sciences no less: chemistry, anatomy, mechanics, and hydraulics. The prospect for America was immense; all that was needed was intelligence:
Could the genius of Bacon place itself on the high ground of all the sciences in their present state of advancement, and marshal them before him in so great a country as this, and under a government like ours, he would point out their objects, foretell their successes, and move them on their march, in a manner that should animate their votaries and greatly accelerate their progress.
There could be no question about foretelling the success of science in America; as one journal said in 1812, “Standing, as it were upon the shoulders of our transatlantic rivals, we may hope to catch new views of the prospect before us, which will enable us to shorten the road to ultimate perfection.”
It was not only in the Revival that a doctrine of “perfectionism”
emerged; the revivalistic mentality was sibling to the technological. The Lyceum lecturer of 1820 saluted the new era as America’s emergence from infancy into manhood, when it would no longer be entangled in childish delusions: “The intellect will neither be warped by the subtleties and mystifications of speculative refinement, nor will it grovel in the sensualities of bestial voluptuousness.” (We may pardonably wonder, amid these prognostications, how the reputation of Franklin managed to survive at all.) We must acknowledge that these prophets were inspired by the most exalted of motives. Yet few of them realized how fatally they were committing the nation to so resplendent a vision of the future as to make any falling short of the goal of ultimate perfection seem grievous failure. And they continued to speak of the technological era in terms in which science and literature remained interchangeable. DeWitt Clinton, for all his pragmatic vigor, in 1814 was still speaking the language of St. George Tucker. Our energies have indeed, he said, been directed so far toward wealth rather than knowledge; but how can we ignore the true implication:
Our enterprising spirit, as exhibited in the fisheries, in navigation, and in commerce, is the admiration of the world; and if it had soared to the heavens in pursuit of knowledge, instead of creeping along the earth in the chase of riches, America would have been as illustrious in the rolls of fame as those states where literature has seen her augustan ages.
Clearly, if the United States did not soon produce some such age, it would fail its mission and have to live with a chiding conscience. Here still another wrinkle of doubt could have, or should have, formed on the brows of the prophets: were they quite sure that once American energies were diverted from fisheries, the scientific paradise then achieved would merit the adjective “augustan”?
SCIENCE AS A FORM OF CONTEMPLATION
Colonial Americans who wanted to learn the wonders of the new science, and who themselves had no laboratories and at best only an elementary mastery of mathematics, naturally seized on popular summaries. The vast majority of these were expositions of Newtonian physics, which invariably maintained the tenets of theism from the evidences of design in the solar system. Hence, when the Republic achieved independence, the dominant conception of science enter-
tained by the educated classes was one of passive contemplation of the divine perfection revealed in the order and coherence of Nature. As Frederick Dalcho phrased it before the South Carolina Medical Society in 1805 (his manner of conceiving the subject would continue for several decades to be less affected by later developments in the South than in the North): the pursuit of scientific information, while an honor to the country, is of even greater advantage to individuals.
The human mind, vast and capacious in its resources, is bounded by no limits but the GREAT FIRST CAUSE, and yields to no impediments, but the disorganization of matter. The heart expands with virtue and benevolence, as the mind extends its information.
For this grandiose symmetry there were several adjectives regularly employed—majestic, magnificent—but only one was truly adequate: “sublime."
In one sense, all American discourse on the sublimity of science is but a pale reflection of European imports, which continue to be a permanent factor in the background of the American intellect throughout our period. Bishop Paley's Natural Theology, first published in London in 1802, was reprinted endlessly in America, used as the standard text in the colleges, and assiduously conned by the self- educated. In the 1830's, the Bridgewater treatises were extensively republished in this country, and from 1849 on there was a large sale of the Bohn Library translation of Humboldt's Cosmos. To mention only these few, and yet to note with what weight of authority they imposed themselves upon the provincial mind is to underscore the problem that mind faced in summoning itself to its national identity.
George Logan, addressing the Tammany Society of New York City in 1798, told the politicians that the regularity of Nature extended to the smallest particles of matter, and that thus from the most stupendous to the most minute there prevailed “order, proportion, fitness, and congruity." Nicholas Collin had already informed the Philosophical Society, which showed no disposition to argue, that the sagacity by which man traced the intricate path of the moon was "sublime," and asked why he should not now explore the source of the tempest. Edward Cutbush in 1811 spoke still as a man of the previous century when he saluted natural science “as the most sublime and refined species of drama," especially since in it the entertainment is produced “not by fictitious scenery, but by real exhibitions of the operations and changes of nature." Thus we have steadily with us, as a sort of ground-base to the technological progress, a persistent reiteration of this eighteenth-century theme. “The contemplation of the uni-
verse,” said James Leib in 1830, “is the sublimest poetry.” In 1835 Thomas Dick pleaded for a general dissemination of scientific information among the masses by calling the objects of study sublime and, ignoring Pascal, asserting, “The vast and immeasurable spaces . . . convey august and sublime conceptions.”
The almost automatic carry-over into the nineteenth century of this ideal of sublime science is a factor so fundamental to the life of the mind in the nation that today it is generally ignored. Yet if we are to understand the later history of that mind, we must fully appreciate two inheritances from colonial subservience: the Enlightened theory of science, coming to these shores with incalculable prestige, taught Americans to conceive of it as consisting in an aesthetic contemplation of a perfected universe, and then to salute the comprehension of this universe (mainly through a grasp of Newton’s system) as providing an entrance into the cosmopolitan culture of the West. To adore and to understand were first of all an escape from provinciality, and not a patriotic assertion.
And yet it was patriots who made the assertion, children of the Enlightenment who never for a moment supposed that they had to prove their mettle by proclaiming their nationality. Charles Peale, advertising his Museum in 1799, was untroubled by separatist scruples. It was enough for him that “philosophy” should conduct its votaries in America as in Europe “to the temple of religion: contemplate the objects and productions of nature as the great and marvelous works of Almighty God.” Science, being a contemplation of wonders long since expounded, should enable Americans to look upon God “without superstitious terror,” enable them to approach Him “without fanatical familiarity or mystical enthusiasm.” Such was the spirit in which the thrust of modern science was received by the new Republic, and from that time on the rationalization for what we may call a spectator attitude of humble acquiescence has remained a problem for the scientific intelligence.
An interesting sidelight on the power of the concept gleams in the customary treatment throughout the period of Franklin’s kite experiment. Augustus Woodward in 1816 expressed what had become the formula: America has made but one philosophical discovery, yet that “must be admitted to be one of the most important and sublime, which has ever been accomplished by human genius.” From the vast literature of tribute we would gather no notion that Franklin was, in his own phrase, a “leather-aproned” man who tinkered and invented; rather, in the language of Robert C. Winthrop we behold a figure as majestic as Archimedes, or even more so: sending up his kite and
deliberately drawing down upon himself the bolts of heaven, Franklin “presents a picture of even greater and nobler sublimity.” He might incidentally aim at the good of mankind, but primarily he was enacting an “exhibition of moral and physical heroism.”
A basic tenet in this structure of thought was, as John Craig said upon opening a course entitled “Experimental Philosophy” in 1819, “Of all the sciences, astronomy is the most sublime.” Benjamin Sil- liman dedicated himself to becoming the first professional chemist in the country, but prefaced his lectures by saying, “Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the sciences.” Occasionally celebrants of astronomy, as, for example, John Quincy Adams, for whom it was a form of religious worship and who suffered ridicule over his passion for “lighthouses of the sky,” had to take cognizance of popular objections against the inutility of the science. Joel Poinsett, speaking on behalf of the Smithsonian in 1841, reprimanded the utilitarians for calling astronomy mere “star-gazing,” and spelled out its practical effects, that it has carried along in its progress the physical and mathematical sciences, “as well as contributing to the advancement of the mechanic arts, and, in this respect, acting as the pioneer of civilization.” Yet on the whole the American public displayed an astonishing readiness to read, or in the lyceums to listen to, interminable praises of astronomy as the one science sufficient unto itself. It is, said a lecturer in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1837, the queen of the sciences because it is the only “perfect one.’* All others will modify or wholly change the expression of their laws, but, he orated.
How different is it in ‘physical astronomyl Here our first conclusion is our last. Here particulars have been completely subjected to generals, effects to causes. . . . The only remaining work for future astronomers, is to determine with the extreme of accuracy the consequences of its rules, by the profoundest combinations of mathematics; and the magnitude of its data by the minutest scrupulousness of observation. . . . All the phenomena of this science depend upon a single law.
Passages of this sort, of which there are hundreds, reveal the special satisfaction the multitude found in panegyrics to astronomy. They needed to have no knowledge of their own, or to make the slightest exertion of mind; they could simply sit passively and admire, feel themselves inwardly excited at no cost to themselves. There is no science, as another speaker informed a class of “Young Ladies” in 1833, “more calculated to exalt the soul and fill it with sublime conceptions of the great Author of nature, than Astronomy.” Even John
Quincy Adams usually concluded on this note of mental exhilaration: the sublimest of all contemplations for an energetic mind is “the structure of that universe, of which itself is an imperishable, though an infinitely diminutive atom.” The very fact that astronomy was the perfect form of contemplation made it somehow comfortable—a fixed point in a world of accelerating change. And at the same time, it flattered the intelligence of the simple by telling them that even their intellects were somehow commensurate with the universe. “What, indeed, can be more astonishing," rhetorically asked Alexander Young in his eulogy on Nathaniel Bowditch, “than that a being like one of us, endowed apparently with no higher or different powers, should be able to obtain so minute and accurate a knowledge of those distant planets?" In this way Bowditch, being one of us, vindicated democratic self-respect.
As in so many other areas of the mind, if we wish to discover what the majority of citizens endorsed as profundity of thought, we must consider the orations of Edward Everett. No other orator so elegantly presented platitudes to the populace, because no one else so fervently believed them to be exertions of the brain. He was as true to form on astronomy as on the Battle of Gettysburg, and in 1857 was still expounding at St. Louis the spectator concept of the pageant as though nothing in his own century had in the slightest disturbed the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. While the phenomena of the heavens do indeed tax the highest powers of philosophical research, Everett said, the happy fact remains that they “are also well adapted to arrest the attention of minds barely tinctured with scientific culture, and even to touch the sensibilities of the wholly uninstructed observer." The complexities of chemistry, physiology, geography are lost on the common understanding, “but the unspeakable glories of the rising and the setting sun; the serene majesty of the moon, as she walks in full-orbed brightness through the heavens . . . these are objects which charm and astonish alike the philosopher and the peasant." Everett’s ability, on the slightest provocation, to sing the glorious effects on the human psyche of astronomy—“The soul becomes great by the habitual contemplation of great objects"—and the never-failing readiness of his audiences to absorb this rhetoric speak volumes for what throughout the Republic was the unshakable conviction that this was the perfect science. Against this passivity, this mood of self-congratulation without curiosity or criticism, the aspiring naturalists, chemists, geologists, even the young physicians, had endlessly to contend. And as very quickly the inventor would become a folk hero, those who labored in other sciences had an increasingly difficult task getting a hearing for experi-
ments or speculations which offered no immediate practical benefits nor filled the soul with such caressing emotions as did astronomy.
Yet it must be stressed that the people of the new nation were not unique in their veneration for a science which they could revere without understanding its details. The image of science which the eighteenth century bequeathed to America bespoke an international community and a sense of a rational cultivation superior to the random impulses of untutored nature. Self-respecting citizens of the Republic, though so occupied in farming or in acquiring wealth that they had no time for unproductive meditation, still could, in rare moments of relaxation, assure themselves that in their high estimation of science as sublimity, especially in their nodding agreement to all tributes to astronomy, they too were part of civilization. Every assertion that they, or their spokesmen, were not savages in the forest, that they participated in tlie universal intellect of Europe, was a way of reassuring themselves against their unsettling fear of appearing eccentric. Over and over again they applauded the remark that the Indians had shown themselves incapable of scientific thought, and so nervously agreed with John Fairbanks in 1812 “that the natural state of man is that of civilization; because in this state his dignity is advanced, and his faculties improved, which furnish him with powers the savage cannot possess."
NATIONALITY WITHIN UNIVERSALITY
Happily the scientific creed which eager Americans took from Europe gave them gracious permission to be, within reasonable limits, themselves. It was not incompatible with membership in the concert of Europe for the budding scientist to pay attention to the particulai phenomena of his country or even of his limited locality. The early exhortations suggest that there existed an apprehension among the learned lest, in their pride of military victory, they should become in natural philosophy too chauvinistic and so expose themselves to ridicule. In 1789 Nicholas Collin, after acknowledging to the American Philosophical Society—which body was especially determined that it should not be accounted a merely provincial assembly—that philosophers are citizens of the world, and the fruits of their labors are freely distributed among all nations, went on to affirm it to be their duty, in the highest sense, “to cultivate with peculiar attention those parts of
science, which are most beneficial to that country in which Providence has appointed their earthly stations." The virtuoso was in the most gratifying of positions: where the theologian, the lawyer, and above all the poet were torn between the patriotic urge to be original and caution lest forced straining for particularity should result in grotesque caricatures of the accumulated sagacity of mankind, the scientist had not only the leave but a positive injunction to cultivate his own garden. He alone need not worry about appearing to be a provincial boor.
In the universe of science, Collin assured Philadelphia, patriotic affections are "conducive to the general happiness of mankind, because we have the best means of investigating those objects, which are most interesting to us." John Ewing lectured for years at the University of Pennsylvania, officially upon Newtonian physics, but in the course of expounding a cosmos in which nationality was an irrelevance he contrived to indicate how he, and such friends as Jefferson and Peale, could conscientiously foster an American science without deserting the attitude of a true philosopher
When you survey the extensive fields of useful knowledge, which are opening to your investigation, through the unexplored deserts of this new world, and the improvements that are daily making by the sons of science, you must naturally feel your hearts swell with an honest and laudable ambition, to distinguish yourselves amongst the most celebrated inventors of those useful arts, which have a tendency to exalt the understanding, alleviate the miseries of human nature, and promote the happiness of mankind.
Where the literary enthusiast appeared presumptuous in calling for an American Milton, Benjamin Shultz in 1795 could temperately venture to predict that in America "a genius equal, if not superior, to a Buffon, a Linnaeus, or a Spallanzi" could plausibly arise when "European habits shall no longer influence our various pursuits." John Coxe obviously exceeded the bounds of sobriety when he dreamed of an American Newton or Bacon, but Shultz’s targets were more attainable.
For, as Benjamin Barton said in 1798, this age was above all one of natural science: "The mind of LINNAEUS has effected more than the combined intellects of all the naturalists of any preceding century." And if there was a science in which the provincial observer could make contributions to universality by concentrating upon his restricted field of vision, it was botany, and to almost the same extent zoology. "Even the nomenclature of our productions is extremely imperfect,” said Barton, and this blank in the history of science gave him pain. But,
already in 1798, “This pain, however, is daily diminished, for something is daily added to the stock of our knowledge.”
Indeed, in this area of exploration the efflorescence of talent in the first five or six decades of independence remains even today a subject to marvel at. The names of the two Bartrams and Audubon are familiar to most students of American history, but few are aware of the monumental works of—to name only a few—^James DeKay with his Zoology of New York; Stephen Elliott and his Sketch of the Botany of South Carolina and Georgia; Lewis R. Gibbs’s Catalogue of the Phae- nogamus Plants of Columbia, South Carolina, and Its Vicinity; John Bachman, a Charleston minister, with his The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America’, Dr. Edmund Ravenel's Echinidae, Recent and Fossil, of South Carolina; Samuel Latham Mitchell’s lectures on a wide range of topics, including a Synopsis of Chemical Nomenclature and Arrangement, and The Present State of Medical Learning in the City of New York; Alexander Wilson and his American Ornithology. John Edwards Holbrook, a Charleston physician whose hobby was zoology, published North American Herpetology in 1836-1838, and lived to be told by Agassiz that he had “first compelled European recognition of American science by the accuracy and originality of his investigations,” and that Europe had “nothing which could compare with it.” That certain Europeans, notably Constantine Rafinesque, could enter freely into the American enterprise, leave it and then return to it, only confirmed the fact that the more nationalistic its motivation the more it secured an American position in the international conference. Chiefly relying upon the acknowledged fame of these naturalists—most of whom were not professionals, but pursued their studies in time taken from their professions—^John Quincy Adams in 1843 permitted himself to glow, as much as an Adams could, with pride:
We have been sensible of our obligation to maintain the character of a civilized, intellectual, and spirited nation. We have been, perhaps, over boastful of our freedom, and over sensitive to the censure of our neighbors. The arts and sciences, which we have pursued with most intense interest, and persevering energy, have been those most adapted to our own condition.
Adams spoke these words on the occasion of laying the cornerstone of an observatory in Cincinnati, being careful at the same time to remind his hearers that the science of the eternal heavens was as much adapted to our condition as that of our plants and birds. He would hardly have spoken with such affected ingenuousness had he not been fully aware that in the science of astronomy the tension between patriotism and universality could not easily be dissipated. Gouverneur Emerson, dedi-
eating a monument to Thomas Godfrey in 1843, openly inviting trouble by his insistence that as a scientist he was a “cosmopolite," ready to honor all who promote useful discoveries: “In relation to such matters, the empire of science should be regarded as universal, and not subject to the restrictions imposed by geographical circumstances." There were gatherings in which an avowal of this sentiment could have been shouted down as treason.
If the tension between nationality and cosmopolitanism in the American mind had been merely the oversensitiveness of a society-in- the-making to the censures of such critics as Marryat, Basil Hall, and Mrs. Trollope, Adams's summary would have subdued the passions. But the truth of the matter is that national pride had been so mobilized as to become insatiable. Compliments to a few naturalists who had observed or portrayed indigenous species were not enough to assuage a vanity only too painfully aware that in general studies America had not lived up to its opportunity. What it should have done, what every moment it had to demand of itself, was to create a science equal in majesty to the colossal expanse of its landscape. A handful of practicing naturalists could possess their souls in patience while identifying and classifying a lonely specimen, but a legion of orators were demanding that the American genius achieve at a single leap a scientific comprehension as much more compendious than that of feudal Europe as the continent was more extended than those congested lands. Into the American eagerness for scientific distinction was injected, bit by bit, the dangerous persuasion that an intellect tutored by nothing more than the grandeurs of Nature could easily dispense with the rigors of Old World discipline. Consequently, the more it became apparent that in the United States there appeared few, if any, whose minds were a match for the professionals of Europe, the more embarrassment grew, and the more a compensatory scorn for the purely contemplative, the traitorously cosmopolitan intellect increased.
It all began innocently enough with the naturalists' persuasion that in America there must exist innumerable plants, birds, insects which no Linnaeus or Buffon had catalogued, and that hence even an amateur would make contributions to the categories. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston commenced operation in 1780, modestly addressing itself to an ample field in which the ingenious might “expatiate" during their leisure. This is, it remarked in the first volume of Academy Memoirs published in i 785 > extensive country, with a rich variety of soils and streams wherein “the citizens have great opportunities and advantages for making useful experiments and improvements," whereby—in the spirit of the Enlighten-
ment—"the interest and happiness of the rising empire may be essentially advanced." The progress from this sober moderation to the thunder of the scientific patriots was rapid, bewildering, and strident.
We may note the beginning of the shift in, for example, Samuel Smith's address on education to the American Philosophical Society in 1797, which probably saw no nationalistic distortion in his concluding that the opportunities for research on this continent "could not fail to elevate the United States far above other nations” on earth. But cosmopolites might have become genuinely perturbed by 1808 when a writer in The Medical Repository, expatiating on the wide field for investigation, said it had too long been fashionable for Americans to seek scientific news from transatlantic regions, that now they are learning "to turn their backs to the east, and direct their views to the inviting and productive regions of interior America." After the Treaty of Ghent, however, such tentative essays at scientific isolationism would come to sound tame indeed, while the atmosphere echoed with the ever-stirring word "sublime." Everything in this nation, asserted a lyceum speaker in 1820, is colossal. Nature here "retains her native and unsophisticated charms, and towers on high in all the picturesque splendour of beauty, and in all the grandeur of sublimity." In that year Dr. Daniel Drake, who was a man of scientific sobriety, was telling Cincinnati that our scientific future should be scaled to the physical expanse of the continent. "Let the architects of our national greatness," he solemnly said, "conform to the dictates of science; and the monuments they construct will rise beautiful as our hills, imperishable as our mountains, as lofty as their summits, which tower sublimely above the clouds."
Though for decade after decade these exhortations had tacitly to confess that the scientific accomplishment of this nation lay still in the futute, this admission seldom inhibited rhetorical grandiloquence. Albert Barnes, speaking on Literature and Science at Hamilton College in 1836, told the enthralled students that the freshness and vastness of Nature in America filled the soul with grand conceptions and so invited it to successful investigations. "It seems," he concluded, "almost as if God, in favor to science and the enlargement of the human mind, had reserved the knowledge of the western world, until almost the last felicitous investigations that could be made had been made in the old world." In so short a time, only ten years after the death of Jefferson, the naive self-satisfaction of America had created this image of its scientific personality.
Assurance was constantly reinforced by a reiterated contention that American society was the one in the world most congenial to scientific
exertion. To modem eyes the voluminous literature upon this theme is the most monotonous as well as the most unfortunate in the era, but we can never understand America without a realization of the terrible power of the argument. A good example—if only for its phrasing of the typical—is a speech by Thomas Jones to the Franklin Institute in 1826, for by then the observation had become stereotyped and could safely be delivered en bloc to the “mechanics." Our institutions, asserted Jones, admit of no degrading distinctions, our disposition is outraged by any attempt to make useful pursuits odious, our country permits the human mind to exert its native energies. Jones spoke of Bacon, Newton, Linnaeus, and summed up his case by noting that these would have been even greater men had they been presented with the opportunities now offered to the rising mechanics of Philadelphia: “How would they have been aided in their progress, and have been relieved from days of toil and nights of vigilance, in attempting to obtain a knowledge of the first principles of science."
Occasionally, we sadly note, even the most sanguine had to lament that so far the “inducements which are held out by commerce" appeared to have temporarily seduced the scientific intellect, but they usually came round to the inspiriting conclusion that once this boundless empire should be populated, “the collateral pursuits of natural sciences, will keep pace with, or follow closely upon, the steps of these improvements, and the golden era of our intellectual history will then have commenced." The important point to be made was that in a republic the mind enjoys an uninterrupted use of its powers—“unallowed by the grossness of superstitious reverence, and unshadowed by the awe of the tyrant’s frown." In this land, then, “we have reason to look for the highest efforts of genius." It might be too much to suppose that the democracy would soon produce a Shakespeare, but what more plausible than that it would astonish degenerate Europe with a Newton or a Laplace? There seemed abundant proof “that the glowing anticipations we form of our meridian glory, are not mere discolourations of youthful fancy.”
In view of what most foreign visitors, especially Tocqueville, charged against the nation, we should note that a few apologists were sufficiently aware of the issue to attempt refutation of the idea that a democracy was inherently suspicious of science. Frances Wright D’Arus- mont, in the month after Jackson’s inauguration, went out of her way at the opening of the Hall of Science in New York to deny that there existed any mood of intellectual cowardice among the populace. “The spirit of enquiry is abroad; the dawn of a brighter day is kindling in the horizon, and the eyes of the people are opening to its observa-
tion.” Madame D'Arusmont did strike, or half strike, a somewhat foreboding note in acknowledging a "common persuasion” that science might be the private preserve of only trained scientists, but she dismissed any such imputation as merely an attempt "by the crafty and the superficial to palm upon society deficiency for skill, or error for truth.” In the security of this confidence, countless American orators announced, as did Richard Harlan at the University of Pennsylvania in 1837:
What may not be expected in a country like our own? where the monstrous forms of superstition and authority, which tend to make ignorance perpetual, by setting bounds to the progress of the mind in its inquiry after physical truths, no longer bar the avenues of science; and where the liberal hand of nature has spread around us in rich profusion, the objects of our research.
Thus Nature and the social order wonderfully jibed together, and made certain that in science, if not in literature, America should advance to a resplendent future. Only a slight question persisted; where and how were the brains to be trained for this performance? Granted that the people were not so suspicious of mathematical ability as they were of skill in the law, still even they had to admit that Newtons could not, like officers in the Revolution, be summoned ready-made from the plow.
The hope seemed to lie not so much in educational institutions as in the societies. These would prove the instruments of a democratic culture, would strike the proper balance between provincial ambition and recognition of the cosmopolitan fraternity. Through them Americans might modestly claim a place which they could eventually justify by actual performance. Benjamin Franklin had pointed the way: the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, had, though contending with initial discouragements, vindicated Franklin’s purpose. In Boston, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1785 could define the aim more precisely. Scientific societies, it pronounced, may bring together persons ready to supply each other with hints of progress, publish their discussions, and excite a spirit of emulation that will enkindle the sparks of genius which otherwise in this America "might forever have been concealed.” Societies could, in short, be both national and international, and lead the Republic into a scientific haven. Through these associations, continued the Boston Academy, "knowledge of various kinds, and greatly useful to mankind, has taken place of the dry and uninteresting speculations of schoolmen.” Through them, "solid learning and philosophy have more increased, than they had done for many centuries before.” Thus adver-
tised as engines of social betterment, and thus blessed by the Philadelphia and Boston precedents, the savants of innumerable localities organized themselves into institutes, societies, academies, and supplied the tumultuous democracy with lanterns of learning, generally more flickering than resolute, but always endeavoring to keep alight even a smoky torch of learning.
One might plausibly argue that the societies did yeoman service for the cause in America not by supporting scientific research (which they could seldom afford) or by encouraging speculation (for they seldom knew enough to recognize worthwhile endeavor), or even by their publications (though many of these were of inestimable value in sustaining lonely workers), but chiefly by bewailing the outcast state of scientific activity in America. By lamenting what the nation lacked in comparison with Europe, the society orators continued to prod the nation to recognition that it belonged to the larger culture. In Europe, Stephen Elliott told the Charleston Literary and Philosophical Society in 1814, “the pursuit of science has long been a cherished and a fashionable occupation." With this reminder Charleston was induced to construct a museum. When Theodoric Beck eulogized the career of Simeon DeWitt before the Albany Institute in 1835, he explained how as against Europe our means of investigation were limited and partial, our men of ability scattered over a large country, that while we have an abundance of talent we have no arsenal of data. His aim was clearly to stimulate, if only for the moment, discontent among the burghers with the inadequacies of Albany’s accommodations. The histories of the several institutions founded in these years have been recited; most of them are poignant, and some are tawdry. Yet among even the most forlorn of them, let alone the Philadelphia and Boston undertakings, there always shines something of that persuasion which DeWitt Clinton imparted to the Literary and Philosophical Society of New York in 1814, that even so humble an association might prove an instrument for paving the way to the “sublime result" of making the United States “the chosen seat, and favourjite abode, of learning and science."