Chiara Cillerai
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin published a broadside entitled “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America.” The broadside was the blueprint for the American Philosophical Society that he officially founded almost 30 years later in 1769. At the opening of the discussion, Franklin gives several reasons to justify the need for a North American society independent from the British. Among them are economic prosperity and the creation of what can be called a leisure class of citizens, whom he describes as the “many in every Province in Circumstances that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common Stock of Knowledge.” Franklin explains that the society should be formed so that “Men of Speculation […] might produce Discoveries to the Advantage of some or all the British Plantations, or to the Benefit of Mankind in general.” An American Philosophical Society, he concludes, would prevent many of these discoveries from “[dying] with the Discoverers” and therefore being “lost to Mankind” (Franklin 1959, vol. 2: 380). His words throughout this proposal reflect the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its faith in natural philosophy and scientific inquiry, its reliance on communities of learned men to foster knowledge, and a firm belief that exchanging and circulating knowledge is an important component of the welfare of all mankind.
With enlightening humanity as the ultimate goal of learned societies, Franklin’s words also show that the project of enlightenment, such as the one an American Philosophical Society would sustain, can only be successful when its purpose goes beyond national and cultural borders. Like the work of a citizen of an unbounded world, the work of a member of such a society is to look beyond personal and local interests for the benefit of all mankind. The American philosopher, as Franklin’s contemporaries called intellectuals with a variety of interests and expertise, needs to disengage from a home country and engage in a transnational exchange of knowledge with other individuals with similar interests and concerns. Cosmopolitan notions of universal friendship, cooperation, understanding, and exchange of ideas supported the network that Franklin’s proposal envisions and reflected the general purpose of the “republic of letters,” an eclectic association of erudite people interested in a variety of literary and scientific disciplines. The republic of letters’ origins date back to the Renaissance and precede discipline‐oriented associations that started to develop in the nineteenth century. As historian Dena Goodman (1994) has shown, the citizens of this republic saw its purpose as universal, transnational, and independent from political and religious institutions (15–22). The community Franklin represented in his proposal was based on these principles and depended on an exchange and open commerce of letters and goods that the infrastructures of the British empire and the culture of the time sustained.
The colonial system generated a cosmopolitan space with porous borders across which people and ideas freely circulated, forming the platform for writing and exchanging ideas that Franklin and his American contemporaries needed. The ancient Greeks’ coining of the term “cosmopolitanism” by combining the words κόσμος (cosmos) and πόλις (polis) described interest in and tolerance for different peoples and cultures outside the boundaries of one’s own community. At the same time, by the time the Western world had reached early modernity, the reality of these encounters was accompanied by, or the result of, conflict over territorial and cultural dominance (Anderson 1998: 272) This co‐dependence between cosmopolitanism and territorial expansion has produced in cosmopolitanism an “emancipatory” character that aims at generating independence from the economic and ideological forces that made it possible (Mignolo 2002: 158–159). Franklin’s proposal for the society is dependent on the imperial infrastructure of exchange and movement that the British empire provided. This infrastructure, in fact, allows for American thinkers’ entrance into the international community of science and letters and for the valuing of their contributions. The words of Franklin’s fellow philosopher and admirer David Hume describe this co‐dependence:
America has sent us many good things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo &c.: But you are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden to her: it is our own Fault, that we have not kept him: Whence it appears, that we do not agree with Solomon, that Wisdom is above Gold: for we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter, which we once lay our Fingers upon.
(Franklin 1959, vol. 10: 81–82)
Hume’s words bring to the forefront elements that are constitutive of the Enlightenment, such as knowledge and its exchange and improvement. They also speak of empire and reflect a cosmopolitan attitude toward the world. Franklin’s return to the colonies after his time in England prompts a fear in Hume that mankind might not benefit from Franklin’s wisdom and knowledge. In the Encyclopédie (1751), the text that can be seen as the manifesto of the eighteenth‐century culture of Enlightenment, for example, Denis Diderot summarized what the concept of cosmopolitanism meant for the international community of men of letters, among which Franklin was to become one of the most prominent members. Diderot described the cosmopolitan man of letters as “A man who does not have a permanent home, or rather a man who is not a stranger anywhere. It comes from […] κόσμος and πόλις. […] When asked, an old philosopher since dead answered: I am cosmopolite, which means, citizen of the universe. I prefer said another, my family to myself, my country [patrie] to my family. And humankind to my country” (4: 297, my translation). This representation of a man who feels at home within and outside boundaries aptly fits individuals whom, like Franklin, resided in the marginal spaces of the colonies. Universal ideals of humanity and the contingencies of colonial life define the American men of letters who represent the Enlightenment.
All men of letters of the Enlightenment were, to one extent or another, cosmopolitan, yet the cosmopolitanism of American men of letters was unique in that it served two purposes. On the one hand, it reflected the faith in the transnational aim of their work as enlightened philosophers and members of an international community of intellectuals. On the other hand, they needed that faith to overcome the marginalization colonies experienced within European empires. As cultural historian Walter Mignolo (2002) has argued, the transnational and universalist appeal of the cosmopolitan not only accompanies empire building, but also forms the basis of the rhetoric that resists imperial expansion. In the case of the American representatives of the Enlightenment, however, it is not always a critique of empire that we see expressed; indeed, empire and its structures are essential to American cosmopolitanism. The language of the cosmopolitan ideal was a useful tool for defining an emerging American community that had been culturally and socially produced by migration and transplantation. We thus often see American thinkers attempting to reshape representations of centers and margins in order to allow for the Enlightenment world to include them.
Although the common foundation of American, British, and continental European forms of Enlightenment thought is obvious, writings like Franklin’s proposal also reveal the deep connection between Enlightenment thought and the geography of the empires to which its representatives belonged. The geographical location of the text’s author affects the way movements of both goods and ideas are perceived. This is made clear by Hume’s reference to the commerce of goods and his sense of the trajectory followed by goods and ideas produced in the colonial world. For Franklin, and for colonial Americans, the perception of how ideas circulate and can bring change has a multidirectional and dialogic form that reflects the way they perceived their identity as members of the British empire and as residents of its peripheries. The dependence of much Enlightenment thinking on the multidirectional movement of ideas is important to understanding how the Enlightenment manifested itself in the North American colonial environment and how continental European and British versions of the Enlightenment connected to and conversed with it.
The argument being advanced in this essay – that Enlightenment thought manifested itself in the North American colonial environment by assuming that American expressions of Enlightenment thought are linked to the multidirectional modes of communication – moves scholarship in several new directions. Such an approach reflects a turn from two dominant scholarly narratives. One saw the Enlightenment as a phenomenon and a way of thinking that started in Europe and eventually spilled into the American context and either replicated itself or transformed itself according to various contingencies (Baiylin 1967/1992; Gay 1966–1969). The second associated Enlightenment ideas in North America primarily with the American Revolution and the consequent process of national formation, thus emphasizing outcomes rather than the process by which ideas formed themselves and circulated (Ferguson 1997: 22). Beginning in the 1990s, scholarship began to bring into focus the dialectical aspects of the phenomenon and the need to consider its American manifestation as both a form of disruption of the colonial/imperial order and progression toward an age of reason that produced a variety of different responses and had different causes (Ferguson 1997: 24–25). More recent scholarship has moved from a unidirectional model and acknowledged that we need to think of multiple American enlightenments “that more accurately reflect the multiple strands of conversation that cohered around the conviction that human reason might be applied to better the human condition” (Winterer 2016: 7). Such an acknowledgment reflects the change in the approach to the study of the American Enlightenment, which, rather than projecting a view of what Enlightenment means onto the texts and the figures who represented it, recovers its meaning from the processes that formed it and the non‐linear and circumatlantic trajectories people and their ideas followed (Armitage 2003: 16). This type of approach ultimately has required that scholars reconsider how objects, people, and events affected forms of thought and the literary forms that expressed them in different ways and at different levels. The sense that American Enlightenment had a complexity determined by the circumstances and the environment of its manifestation has become central to the scholarship on enlightenment in the American context that has been produced in the last two and half decades.
Understanding enlightenment in America as a dialogic phenomenon that reflected and depended on the circularity of the routes of goods, people, and their ideas within the circumatlantic world means an understanding that Enlightenment thought developed through conversation and exchanges that allowed for intersections and cross‐pollination, influences, and transformations. This shift has revealed how the networks had different shapes and originated in places other than the European centers. As a historian has recently explained, “many [ideas] traveled back and forth numerous times, mutating unpredictably” (Winterer 2016: 36). The infrastructures that European empires had put into place provided a frame for individuals to identify themselves within the large geographical spaces of the imperial territories and the attitudes that cosmopolitans embraced: interest in and tolerance for different peoples and cultures outside the boundaries of one’s own community. Consequently distances, differences, and boundaries became malleable. Looking at the colonial space and its culture from this perspective also means that we consider that centers and margins for those who inhabited this space might have meant something other than what scholars have thought. The following sections of this essay will analyze what being enlightened meant to three authors engaged in the cosmopolitan exchanges, intersections, and transformations they produced as colonial Americans and as participants in the transatlantic world of letters: Thomas Jefferson, Philip Mazzei, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson.
Thomas Jefferson’s only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), has been taken as a founding text of the discourse of nation formation in early America. Christopher Looby (1987), for example, argued that, with the categorization of Virginia’s natural order, Jefferson was organizing and categorizing the raw material of American social and political order during and in the aftermath of the War of Independence (260–261). Susan Manning (1996) described the book as a “patriotic discovery of the emergent nation and a means of personifying one of the voices of what his correspondent Hector St. John Crèvecoeur characterized as ‘the American, this new man’” (348–349). And most often, Jefferson’s portrayal of Virginia was taken as a founding text of American exceptionalism (Jehlen 1989). While concern with issues of nation formation and its representation are unquestionably central to this text, they present themselves differently when looked at through the lens of Jefferson’s engagement with Enlightenment thought and in a way that reflects its multidirectionality and dialogic nature. From this perspective, we can see the extent to which Jefferson’s interest in developing ideas of America stemmed from a dialogue with the ideas of other members of the republic of letters. We can see this dialogue unfold in a relatively short section entitled “Animals” in the book’s sixth chapter. By the end of the section, Jefferson portrays a powerful image of an American cosmopolis that exists because of its status as a part of the eighteenth‐century republic of letters. Yet within this larger entity, America stands out for its exceptional characteristics in a peculiar way, namely as the most naturally progressive product of an Enlightenment culture whose center is not fixed. The cosmopolis Jefferson places at the foundation of his idea of America is not just the fulfillment of an Enlightenment ideal, but a reflection of the imperial connections and conversations that made possible the world in which he lives. The republic of letters has for Jefferson the same shape as the colonial world and depends on it for its existence. It is continuous with Europe, because it is part of the same cosmopolitan environment, and exceptional, because it embodies and perfects Enlightenment principles of reason and scientific empiricism.
The segment openly engages with contemporary debates over natural science, philosophy, and empiricism, with a particular focus on speculations about the argument that the climate of the New World was the cause of the physical decay of humans, animals, and plants. Although the main author whose work Jefferson discusses and criticizes is Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s Historie Naturelle (1749), the group of natural philosophers who theorized about the natural state of the Americas was much larger and involved a number of intellectuals from a variety of European countries, including the Dutch Cornelius de Pauw, the Scottish David Hume, the French Guillaume Raynal and the Baron de Montesquieu, to name a few. All of these writers developed theories about the climate, natural environments, animals, and people of the Americas. They exchanged ideas and argued over the transformations, or the lack thereof, that took place once similar species developed in one or another place (Gerbi 1973: 13–34). Jefferson’s response addresses them both directly and indirectly.
Jefferson’s open, yet subtle, criticism works its way throughout the section until its ending parts where he suggests that Buffon’s theory is a literary construction in which rhetorical manipulation replaces the exposition of facts. The criticism unfolds through a series of parallels that begins with the introduction to Jefferson’s two scientific sources, Carl Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon himself, who, Jefferson explains, provided the information about American quadrupeds: “Our quadrupeds have been mostly described by Linnæus and Mons. De Buffon.” Immediately following the reference to the two European scientists, Jefferson brings up a second source, a delegation of Delaware Native Americans he had met during a meeting as governor of Virginia. According to Jefferson, when asked about the mammoth and its existence, “their chief speaker [had] immediately put himself into an attitude of oratory, and with a pomp suited to what he conceived the elevation of his subject, informed him that it was a tradition handed down from their fathers.” The story the “chief speaker” tells contains geographical and mythical details. In ancient times, the “tremendous animals” had started a “universal destruction” in the northern Kentucky area where mammoths’ fossils had been found. As a punishment, “the Great Man above” killed them all except for the “big bull” that “bounded over the Ohio, over the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the great lakes, where he is living at this day” (Jefferson 1982: 43). With these introductory words, Jefferson pairs the words of the Delaware leader and those of the founding fathers of Enlightenment science, Buffon and Linnaeus. In the following discussion, Jefferson cites empirical data regarding the size of the bones, their geographical location, and physical qualities and then combines the information with the words of the Native speaker. Through this process, Jefferson appropriates the language of the Delaware who now speaks the same idiom as the two scientists and the community that they represent – an idiom that reaches above particular interests and to a scientific community that declares itself as the speaker for humankind and its development (Onuf 2000: 18–52). Like them, the man who tells the story about the mammoth speaks a transnational language that Jefferson’s European audience understood because they had developed it. It is to his British and European peers that Jefferson wants to speak about Buffon’s incompetence (Cillerai 2006: 71).
By the time the discussion nears its conclusion, Jefferson openly charges the French naturalist with having failed to rely on reason and empirical evidence, while claiming the evidence the Delaware speaker has given Jefferson is reliable and valuable. Jefferson concludes with another comparison that aims at questioning the premises of Buffon’s argument:
As if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun; as if a soil of the same chemical composition, was less capable of elaboration into animal nutriment; as if the fruits and grains from that soil and sun, […] gave less extension to the solids and fluids of the body, or produced sooner in the cartilages, membranes, and fibres, that rigidity which restrains all further extension, and terminates animal growth.
(Jefferson 1982: 47)
And as if Jefferson senses that his rhetorical questions might not be enough to reassure his audience, he concludes with an appeal to the “œconomy of nature” and the “traditionary testimony of the Indians” as possible evidence for the existence of the American mammoth since “those parts still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones” (Jefferson 1982: 53–54).
Nature’s laws (the economy of nature) and their resistance to change (the mammoth that may “as well exist there now”) are proof enough of what is wrong with Buffon’s speculations. Although to twenty‐first‐century readers Jefferson’s argument sounds outlandish, for his audience this claim carried a particular meaning. The established French scientific community, to which Jefferson is indirectly addressing his words here, had harshly criticized Buffon’s theories of natural degeneration as proto‐evolutionary and in sharp conflict with the contemporary idea of the chain of being, to the extent that Buffon’s position of director of the royal gardens in Paris had been in jeopardy (Gerbi 1973: 30–31). Jefferson’s claim and references to the idea of natural immutability reveal the tension between Enlightenment faith in progress and an established, more conservative set of ideas about natural science (Chinard 1947: 28). The irony of Jefferson’s representation of an enlightened science that relies on a mythical story and supports a never‐changing view of nature is obvious. Yet, this strategy enables Jefferson to charge Buffon with a fault that he had already been suspected to be guilty of and thus continue his criticism. Jefferson asks readers to trust the eloquent oratory of the Native American speaker because it depends on unchanging natural laws, while Buffon’s language is eccentric. And in the process, any material evidence of the existence of a mammoth somewhere in the frontier landscape becomes insignificant. Buffon, Jefferson goes on, has represented Native men as feeble, with “small organs of generation,” and doomed to physical and social degeneration: “an afflicting picture” that one “would not honor with the appellation of knowledge” since it is produced by fictions “just as true as the fables of Æsop” (Jefferson 1982: 58–59).
Common‐sense philosophy and a cosmopolitan interest in mankind help Jefferson challenge Buffon at the scientific as well as at the cultural and ideological levels when he adds: “This belief is founded on what I have seen of man, white, red, and black, and what has been written of him by authors, enlightened themselves, and writing amidst an enlightened people” (Jefferson 1982: 59). These sentences sum up all the foundational principles of Enlightenment science and natural philosophy. The empiricist appeal to fact and reason, the staples of common‐sense philosophy, well‐established science, the parallel between Buffon’s ideas and Æsop’s fables, and the appeal to a notion of humankind that goes beyond any form of particularism characterize Jefferson’s approach to his subject matter. The language that Jefferson speaks in this concluding segment is one that his contemporaries and fellow men of letters would have understood. Natural philosophy was the branch of philosophy that studied the natural world. Its method of inquiry was experimental analysis, which consisted of first discovering all the external facts of nature and then giving them an order through which the natural laws underlying them could be reconstructed. Natural philosophy’s companion, natural history, constituted the more descriptive side of the science and aimed at a more general classification of natural data. With his extended list of faults in Buffon’s study, Jefferson both shows how Buffon misapplied the method of study and gives an example of an appropriate philosophical analysis (which ironically is supported by the mythical story of the mammoth that opens Jefferson’s discussion) and of the form that its results should take.
Jefferson depicts himself as speaking from the vantage point of the Enlightenment intellectual, and his final comments about Buffon make this clear:
I only mean to suggest a doubt, whether the bulk and faculties of animals depend on the side of the Atlantic on which their food happens to grow, or which furnishes the elements of which they are compounded? Whether nature has enlisted herself as a Cis or Trans‐Atlantic partisan? I am induced to suspect, there has been more eloquence than sound reasoning displayed in support of this theory; that it is one of those cases where the judgment has been seduced by a glowing pen.
(Jefferson 1982: 63–64)
Jefferson’s transatlanticism is visible in his representation of America’s animals, human inhabitants, and natural environment and his America exists in the cultural and scientific community that we know as the republic of letters. As historian Brian Steele (2015) has argued, Jefferson’s “nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and provincialism are not mutually exclusive, but are of necessity bound up with one another” (3, emphasis in original). The sense of belonging that Jefferson’s representation of unique American quadrupeds reveals is one that depends on locality, participation in the dynamics that the imperial economies generate, and the republic of letters. It depends on his connection with the European intellectual elites as well as his sense of nation as home and as a place that belongs to the larger unit that can be both a nation and the cosmos.
In a well‐known essay composed in 1878, the American expatriate Henry James (2004) wrote that “To be a cosmopolite is not, I think, an ideal; the ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but one must make the best of it” (129). For the Italian émigré Philip Mazzei, cosmopolitanism was both an accident and an attitude that derived from his participation in the Enlightenment culture of his time. The combination of the Enlightenment ideal and the circumstances of his life provided him with the tools to represent himself as an American. Travel and exchange of ideas are at the foundation of the enlightened American that emerges from this writer’s work. Mazzei was a member of the European intellectual elite and possessed an extensive knowledge of European culture, mores, and people. When he moved from London to Albemarle County, Virginia, in 1773, he was an already well‐known intellectual at ease speaking the idiom of the republic of letters.
In an article in the form of a letter published in the Virginia Gazette in January 1775, Mazzei (1983) evokes apprehensions similar to those expressed in Jefferson’s response to Buffon’s theories of degeneration. They also reveal the extent of his participation in the culture of the republic of letters. Mazzei, who signed the letter as “A Citizen of the World,” begins with a reference to common assumptions that living in a particular climate affected the way a people developed certain common cultural and sociological traits: “Nothing indicates more strongly an illiberal mode of thinking than a propension to throw reflections on individuals because they happen to have first drawn breath in such and such countries.” In fact, he continues, it is often “asserted by the dealers out of such stuff that certain bad qualities are annexed to certain climates, and that every person born under them must necessarily inhale, and be infected with, what it would appear from those characterizers of nations, is incorporated with the very atmosphere” (vol. 1: 72). Here Mazzei draws from the writings of Buffon and the Marquis de Montesquieu, whose ideas had then been applied and elaborated by many European writers and popularized through other literary forms that included pamphlets and newspaper articles. And although these might be the “greatest names of the literary world,” Mazzei continues,
if we attempt to assign other causes of this diversity in the human character, which wear the appearance of reason, we may at least be admitted to a hearing. […] but surely in essential mankind will be the same every where, and, according to a position of Mr. Yorick’s, a balance of good and evil will still be found in all countries.
(vol. 1: 73)
Mr. Yorick, the protagonist of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), the travel narrative that represented national characters through the lens of manners, morals, and reason, represents the literary men who do understand and do not project prejudice onto their representations of national characters.
Like Mr. Yorick, whose perspective on mankind is founded on travel experience and comparison, Mazzei’s alternative to the projection of pre‐constructed views (the “reflections” that he says are “thrown” on individuals) is an enlightened dialogue and correspondence of ideas. In fact, for transplanted European members of the republic of letters like Mazzei, the ideas of exchange and comparison embodied in epistolary correspondence – the material means sustaining the exchange of ideas among its members – are fundamental components of what it meant to be American in the late eighteenth century. The notion of correspondence in all its multiplicity of meanings was essential for the Enlightenment intellectual. The use of the idea of correspondence to talk about oneself, one’s career, and the relationships between the various aspects of one’s life was a peculiar feature of the eighteenth‐century realm of letters. Different forms and concepts of correspondence permeated this culture. The philosophical concept of analogy between impressions and mental ideas under empiricism, for example, was understood as correspondence, and it also shaped the way in which the man of letters perceived himself in his environment. Correspondence between parts defined the way natural philosophy represented the world’s organization. The concept of sympathy rested on the idea that people were connecting with one another, and as a consequence, the idea of correspondence defined social interactions. In addition, epistolary exchanges joined people and minds and produced social relations. Contemporary economic theory was based on the notion of exchange of goods and information (Christensen 1987: 7–17). And as literary scholar Eve Tavor Bannet has shown, epistolary writings “contributed to forging the nation and the first British Empire as much as improved roads and transportation, the institution of the post office and of regular shipping routes, the periodical press, and national days of celebration and commemoration” (Bannet 2006: x).
Individuals like Mazzei, who lived in the extended world of the colonial empire, integrated notions of correspondence with a sense of identity that depended on ties and allegiances defined by mobile mediums of exchange, rather than fixed notions of geographical belonging. The eighteenth‐century definition of the cosmopolitan as a state of mind allowed Mazzei to think of community, particularly national community, as he became involved in the revolutionary movement that went beyond national borders, national loyalties, and their limitations, and intertwined with various models of correspondence. Epistolary correspondences and the epistolary genre were the main means of communication and expression for eighteenth‐century expatriates and colonials like Mazzei. Mazzei’s representation of his world and of the individuals who inhabit it is embodied in the letter form and in the ideas that it carried.
A year after the publication of this article, while in the midst of his involvement in the revolutionary movement, Mazzei wrote a letter to his friend John Page to ask for help translating another piece for the Virginia Gazette. In the letter, dated 16 June 1776, Mazzei (1983) fears that his written English might not be good enough for the press and explains that translation would improve the original writing so that “Several things, I am confident, will be better out, & several others could be added with great propriety. My composition is [I]talian with [E]nglish words” (vol. 1: 116) The words of Mazzei’s request reveal more than a simple acknowledgment of his linguistic limitations. Mazzei, in fact, proposes a definition of translation that goes beyond the linguistic level. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, translation means conversation, exchange, and mutual improvement. Translation itself initiates a process by which the literal translation of words inserts cultural characteristics and habits into a new realm and allows for exchange and transformation to both parties. Mazzei’s ideas, his words suggest, will be fully developed after having been processed through the filter of another language. Ideas will be exchanged during this conversation and the text will undergo a linguistic and a cultural development. In his request for help, Mazzei talks about having a second reader as a needed tool to help him “digest” ideas and to enable him to establish a conversation with other intellectuals: “I would take it as a great favour from you, Sir, & from any of the Gentlemen,” Mazzei writes, “if I was to see upon the News‐Papers, my sentiments not only put in good [E]nglish, but even corrected & improved” (vol. 1: 116). Translation here allows dialogue, develops new ideas, and enriches perspectives.
The translator’s task, in Mazzei’s request for help, is based on a linguistic, cultural, and geographic relationship that places national differences in conversation with each other. Translation articulates and refines Mazzei’s ideas and may improve both sides. This request for translation reveals the fluidity of Mazzei’s identity as a citizen of the world and as a member of a community of intellectuals who shape and improve each other’s ideas by conversing and translating their thoughts from one language to another and from one context to another. In translation, Mazzei’s composition would acquire the propriety and the “elegance” it lacked in its original Italian form. The translation process, in other words, is not one that would impose “reflections” on the text it reproduces in a different language as the words of the “greatest names of the literary world” had done. It will instead produce another text that converses with its original and makes it better too. Exchange and circularity become part of the substance that constitutes the foundation of what is American and enlightened in Mazzei’s writings.
The intersection of Enlightenment thought and its circulation within the infrastructures of the British empire also meant that, for some writers, the War of Independence put the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan promises of transnational communication, friendship, and intellectual exchange at risk. A significant example of such fear can be found in the work of the Philadelphia salonnière and poet Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, who resorted to Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in order to recreate order from the disorder that the American Revolution had brought to her personal life and to the environment that made her a successful poet and intellectual. Fergusson grew up in cosmopolitan mid‐eighteenth‐century Philadelphia. The daughter of a well‐respected doctor and the step‐granddaughter of Pennsylvania’s governor William Keith, Fergusson was, in the words of her friend Benjamin Rush (1809), known for her “hospitality and refinement of manners” (523). Her Philadelphia and Horsham Park salons made her one of the most respected female intellectuals of her time. Her world, however, fell apart after her marriage to the Scottish Henry Fergusson, whose loyalism and desertion caused her to nearly lose her reputation and her family estate, Graeme Park.
Although after her social and economic disgrace Fergusson withdrew from social life almost completely, her writing and correspondences did not stop. A largely self‐educated poet and scholar, Fergusson had been reading, writing, and translating poetry since her teens. Her literary works were collected in handwritten commonplace books that she compiled, exchanged with friends and family, and continued to compose and transform by adding new poetry or comments until she died in 1801. Fergusson translated the social and intellectual life of her salon into her commonplace books. Her reproduction of poetry in the books replaces the social and cultural exchanges that the events in her life caused to disappear. Fergusson’s writings primarily present two aspects of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. First, her cosmopolitanism reflects the social and cultural environment that formed her when she lived in colonial Philadelphia and was an active member of the republic of letters. As part of this environment, Fergusson’s cosmopolitan attitudes are the product of her membership in the British empire and depend on connections (within and outside of Pennsylvania) that being a member of this empire makes possible. Second, when it emerges as a thematic and structural component of her commonplace books, Enlightenment cosmopolitanism becomes a tool to restore many of the sociocultural ties severed by the revolution. This emergence is both a cause and a consequence of Fergusson’s ambivalent position toward the American revolutionary cause. Her poetry presents cosmopolitanism as a force that resists nationalism, because the latter deprived her of the freedoms colonial America had afforded her. Enlightenment cosmopolitanism curbs the fear of dislocation (physical as well as cultural) brought about by the nationalistic movement for independence, the loss of her husband, and the decline of her estate.
Her cosmopolitanism attitude originated in the socioeconomic environment that formed her as a poet and as an intellectual and was determined by the presence of the British empire in the American colonies. The notion of cosmopolitanism she developed within the environment that formed her as a writer becomes the underlying principle of the books she compiles and gives shape to the poetry they contain. The elements that form the Enlightenment notion of the cosmopolitan – the belief in a universal communication among individuals, the desire to transcend group interests and differences in order to embrace ideals of sympathy, and correspondences among people – emerge in her writings as well as in the way she collected and circulated the texts. Later in life, the cosmopolitanism of Fergusson’s writings functions to regain the world that was gone. In this respect, Fergusson’s cosmopolitanism shares fundamental elements with the cultural and political loyalism she was accused of sharing with her husband after he had formally sworn allegiance to the English monarchy. It can also be called “loyalist” when considered as the organizing principle of her books and their circulation among her friends and acquaintances in the latter part of her life, as it is that environment to which Fergusson was deeply loyal. Throughout Fergusson’s poetry, we find traces of the ideological frame her cultural environment helped develop. In the commonplace books, Fergusson’s commentaries (consisting of references, afterthoughts, and historical clarifications) invite the reader to move in an unbounded space in which past and present are combined and the world of letters and transnational communication that her salons had embodied comes to life again.
A significant example of how the poet recreates an enlightened world of letters by transcending physical and temporal borders appears in a poem entitled “To Memory, Some Lines upon my first being at Graeme Park; after my return from England” (1752–1795, vol. 2). The poem elevates the locality of Fergusson’s country estate in Pennsylvania and transforms it into a place that is at the same time England and the realm of letters, while remaining rooted in its local natural environment. The poem starts as a dialogue with memory:
Oh ye white Moments whither are ye flown?
Hide! Lost forever! Oh forever gone!
Come Memory come; and with Times Pencils show
Each former Pleasure; and each poignant Woe:
Those past Ideas place in strong review,
[…]
And Recollection never let them Die.
The Fairy Landscape let me find pursue
And try the fleeting flowery Scene to view
Produce each Page, your simple Book unfold,
Formd of the Frame of lively Fancys Mold:
Yet spare the Task or blot out half the Hours;
Or arm my Heart Ye bright angelic Bowers!
The process of remembering the loved ones who have died right before and soon after the writer spent time in England is associated with writing and embodied in the pencil that time holds. While spending a year in England and getting ready to travel through Europe in 1765, her mother died suddenly, and Fergusson had to return home. A few months after her return, her sister died as well. What Fergusson writes in this exercise of remembering becomes the reality Graeme Park embodies after all these losses. The poet represents herself as an exile both in America and in England. At the same time, places materialize through the mnemonic act and inscribe this memory in her poetic composition.
As the poem continues, memory and letters become one and memory’s power becomes selective and literary. It is not life that it brings back, but its literary representation formed by “the frame of lively Fancys mold.” And it is a literary representation of her experience in England and its materialization, without spatial boundaries, in Pennsylvania that the rest of the poem produces. The second segment begins with a repudiation of the call to memory that opened the previous one: “Fly Memory fly! And let Oblivion take!” Although the poet asks memory to fly away in order to avoid the return of the pain her loss has caused, it is at the end of the same segment of the poem that memory starts to fly back in. This invocation, in fact, marks the beginning of a process of remembrance that starts with the teachings of her deceased mother and the love for her sister.
As she mourns both losses, Fergusson develops her self‐representation as the poetic analogy of the cosmopolitan traveler. As she observes the familiar scene of Graeme Park she states, “I seem an Exile left, forlorn, alone, / One antient Parent all I claim my own.” The image of the exile prepares the ground for the second part of the segment in which she compares her state of mind while she was in England to Ulysses’ exile from Ithaca:
When I the great Atlantic dreary Main;
Had crossd; the Rosy fingered Health to gain;
The varging Scene that filld the circling year;
As pleasing gliding Phantoms did appear;
All England Joys rushed full upon my View;
And Pleasure trod in Pleasures ever new.
Yet like Ulysses with his darling spot
The much lov’d Ithaca was ne’er forgot;
My ancient Parents rose before my Sight
And distant lay Contentment; and delight.
The poet’s feeling of estrangement is the condition that characterizes both her present and the past that memory brings back. Following this moment Fergusson performs a parallel reading of the British and the American landscapes in an altered form of translatio studii.
Prompted by a reference to her maternal family’s roots in England, Fergusson then recalls how walking through historic places made her feel as if she were walking with Shakespeare, Milton, and her contemporary Thomson, so that “Some favorite Passage of their Work occurd; / Some striking sentence or expressive Word.” Although recalling memories about the artistic and literary greatness of England causes Fergusson to admit the failure of a translatio studii in America, the memory of a memory makes the picture she creates lose clarity as one memory replaces another. Fergusson’s remembrance of what she saw in England reminds her of how those very images had made her remember home. Graeme Park, and the memory she has of it, is the place that enables Fergusson to enjoy and understand the importance of artistic production and so she writes:
Yet all these Treasures freely I resign
For the dear Circle which I boast are mine.
To the wise World my hasty Course I bear
When simple Nature claims the largest Share
And imitative Arts display no standards there.
When Stow’s vast Gardens poured their Sweets around
When in those walks my wandring Steps I found
Lost in a wilderness of Bliss I strayd
And Sunk beneath the lovely rural Shade!Another Eden rose before my Eyes,
And struck each Moment with a fresh Surprise,
Where Taste, Art, Fortune, and the calmer Hours,
Pland the retreats of Temples fragrant Bowers.
Here long Canals in mimick Rivers glide;
And vernal Beautys paint their mossy Side;
Where solems Forests, shed a deep brown Shade
And Phylosophick Melancholy aid.
Fergusson performs another rhetorical translation and describes the mnemonic act as a memory when she tells readers how the secluded bowers of Stowe Gardens are reminiscent of Graeme Park, although she admits that arts have failed to be translated in America. The two memories reflect each other so that the physical distance between them is temporarily overcome. The place from which the poem is written and about which it writes are reflected into each other. This poem about memory, in which memory is also remembered, shows how writing produces a form of circularity that allows for space, time, and literary production to be unbounded.
Such ambivalence is sustained by the initial invocation of forgetting in the line “Fly Memory Fly” that introduces the long passage dedicated to the remembrance of her English stay. The poem performs a displacement of the act of remembering and of the place where it happens. Fergusson binds Graeme Park, England, and European traditions together. The literary power of memory has generated the necessary correspondences that allow for Fergusson to create a poetic voice that rises above the literary boundaries she claims America has had no power to overcome. By introducing the act of remembering with an invocation to memory to fly away, and by dislocating the spatial referent, Fergusson performs the translatio studii she had denied existed in America. Translatio studii’s companion, translatio imperii, seems to be at work here as well, but in an interesting way as, by decentering the place of origin of the literary productions that Fergusson remembers and produces at the same time, she also paradoxically decenters the place of origin of the artistic and literary productions she refers to in the poem. The writer sees Graeme Park as a microcosm of the world and Fergusson assigns herself as the poet who remembers the type of world citizenship to which the cosmopolitan subject aspires. As the poem about memory shows, the boundary between present and past, between one poetic act and the other, are made invisible on the page and can be overcome.
In “To Memory,” Fergusson engages in a form of translation that is cultural, temporal, and spatial at the same time. Memory and its workings allow the poet to not only move back and forth in time, but also to pull down walls that would otherwise obstruct her access to knowledge and poetic creativity. This process then translates into recovering and reshaping poems and other writings in her commonplace books and becomes the tool that allows for the cosmopolitanism she integrated in her poetic and social life during the colonial period to be revived after the American Revolution and her social and intellectual exile. Fergusson’s work shows us an essential aspect of the link between cosmopolitanism and the social and cultural infrastructure it had established in early America. Fergusson’s cosmopolitanism and especially the form it takes when she compiles and circulates her commonplace books becomes a form of mourning and longing for imperial structures as a warranty of cultural and intellectual freedoms. Fergusson translates cosmopolitanism into her writings as a poetic trope and a lens to examine her more contained world and bring this world back into the enlightened and transnational one of the republic of letters.
As the examples I have provided here show, the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and American writers who engaged with them was complex and reflected their physical and cultural ties to the places they came from and those in which they found themselves. The approach in this essay demonstrates that American writers identified their community through a dynamic relationship between the local contexts and the larger contexts of the British and European metropolises. From this perspective, we can acknowledge how complex and unstable any sense of cultural identification and belonging was and how the ideas involved in these processes were not developed in uniform and linear ways. Writers like Thomas Jefferson and Philip Mazzei, whom we identify with the nationalistic process of “founding” America in the period that preceded the American Revolution, were deeply engaged with the enlightened ideas of the republic of letters and their dialogues. The writings that embody these ideas show that such thinkers were developing a proto‐national identity that relied on a cosmopolitan sense of community. Similarly, Fergusson’s work shows that looking at the Enlightenment in America from this more dynamic perspective throws a different light on the many paradoxes that emerge when we consider how ambiguously many early American writers treated the idea of separation from the British empire. By engaging in the dialogues that the ideas of the Enlightenment produced and studying the routes along which they circulated, we can unearth the ideological diversity that produced them and possibly tell a more accurate story of how America became enlightened.
See also: chapter 10 (acknowledging early american poetry); chapter 14 (benjamin franklin); chapter 18 (letters in early american manuscript and print cultures); chapter 21 (manuscripts, manufacts, and social authorship); chapter 23 (revolutionary print culture, 1763–1776); chapter 24 (founding documents).