The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  THE LOST WORLD OF JAMES SMITHSON

  Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian

  Heather Ewing

  BLOOMSBURY

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps: The Journey to Staffa

  The Grand Tour 1791-1797

  Prologue 1865

  1. Descended from Kings

  2. Oxford: The Lure of Novelty, 1782-1784

  3. Staffa: The Cathedral of the Sea, 1784

  4. London: Science Like Fire, 1784-1788

  5. Science and Revolution, 1788-1791

  6. Grand Tour, 1791-1797

  7. London: Citizen of the World, 1797-1803

  8. The Hurricane of War, 1803-1807

  9. Vibrating between Existence and the Tomb, 1807-1810

  10. London: A New Race of Chemists, 1810-1814

  11. Paris: Private Vices, Publick Benefits, 1814-1825

  12. London: The Will, 1825-1829

  13. America: The Finger of Providence

  Acknowledgments

  Epilogue 1832

  Appendix: Genealogy Chart

  Notes

  Picture Credits

  A Note on the Author

  Imprint

  for Chico

  and

  to the memory of Gene R. White

  in token of gratitude

  "Has Mr. what's his Name? been with you at Money hill? Mr Macie or Masy, originally written (I suspect) Mazy—a noun adjective from the Verb to amaze or make wonder!"

  —Dr. William Drew to Lady Webster, 1797

  PROLOGUE

  1865

  The best blood of England runs through my veins. On my father's side I am a Northumberland, on my mother's I am related to kings, but this avails me not; my name will live on in the memory of men when the titles of the Northumberlands and Percys are extinct or forgotten.

  —James Smithson, undated

  THE MORNING OF January 24, 1865, dawned bitterly cold in Washington. Nearly four years into the Civil War, the nation's capital—encircled with forts and filled with makeshift hospitals—was also battling a brutal winter. Business in the stores and counting rooms of Georgetown had come to a virtual standstill, customers unable to navigate roads buried in a deep frozen slush. The Potomac River bristled with ice, wreaking havoc with the transport steamers and delaying the mail boats. Near Indian Head a steamer carrying a load of mules sank after being cut through; by Jones Lighthouse the steamer Sewanee had run aground, the tugs unable to rescue her; and down at the city wharf the U.S. Transport Manhattan lay taking water, badly damaged after its tussle with the river. At the new Smithsonian Institution, the water kept in buckets and barrels throughout the building as a precaution against fire was frozen solid.1

  The crisp turreted silhouette of the Smithsonian's red sandstone castle had formed a part of Washington's cityscape for scarcely a decade in 1865. Sitting alone in the marshy bottomlands of the monument grounds, halfway between the Capitol and the forlorn stump of the unfinished Washington Monument, the Smithsonian was nevertheless rapidly becoming the pride of the city—and well on its way, too, to becoming a showcase of the nation. Since its founding it had quickly assumed a leading role in America's fledgling scientific community. Its scientists, fitted out with instruments and collecting instructions, were attached to government surveys and expeditions, and the specimens they amassed made their way by the thousands back to Washington. Already the museum was hailed as the "most complete of any in existence in several branches of the natural history of North America."2 A cadre of volunteers across the United States, comprising one of the Smithsonian's first research programs, collected daily meteorological data, and the institution had enlisted the country's private telegraph companies to transmit these weather reports across their wires—resulting in the world's first system of storm warnings.3 A steady stream of publications issued from the institution, including the aptly titled Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. These journals began to fill the shelves of the academies of Europe, and the Smithsonian, as host of the government collections and promoter of knowledge, became the voice of a new nation's progress, rapidly raising the profile of American science.

  On this grey January day the Smithsonian, despite the cold, was alive with activity. Secretary Joseph Henry, the head of the institution and the man who had ordered the buckets of water stationed throughout the building, sat in his office dictating to his chief clerk the voluminous annual report of the institution. It was due at the printers in a week's time. His family, assailed more than occasionally by the stench of drying animal skins from the adjacent museum offices, were at home in their quarters in the east wing. The young bachelor naturalists who lived in the towers that rose over Henry's office were employed in the museum, packing specimens on the balconies overlooking the building's cavernous central hall. The low–vaulted basement, too, was humming with workmen wheeling out ashes and refuse and others busily crating the institution's publications for distribution.

  The great hall of the Smithsonian building, with the museum collections, c. 1867.

  A number of visitors had appeared that morning to see the new building. On the ground floor they admired the towering gothic cases of the museum, and they perused the contents of the chapel-like library. Upstairs they were shown the lecture hall, one of the finest in the country. A few even made the chilly climb to see the view from the top of the tall north tower, where President Lincoln had come earlier in the war to study the Confederate troops massing in Virginia. They also peeked into the regents' room, one of the most elegant spaces in the building. It was here that the institution's impressive governing board, consisting of the Vice President of the

  The regents' room, where the Smithsonian's governing board met and where James Smithson's effects were kept.

  United States, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the mayor of Washington, six members of Congress and six appointed citizens, convened, sitting in muscular throne-like chairs under the soaring ribs of the gothic ceiling.

  In the picture gallery two workmen were arranging the collection of Indian paintings by John Mix Stanley. At the beginning of the week, to brace themselves against the cold, the two men had brought a stove from the apparatus room at the other side of the lecture hall. All week the stove labored to keep the chill from the room as the men hung the paintings. The room was an immensely tall one, and the cold pushed across it between the enormous mullioned round-arched windows. Displayed on a pedestal in the center of the room was one lone statue, far from its classical siblings in the sculpture gallery downstairs. It was a marble copy of the antique figure The Dying Gaul—placed, apparently, to encourage visitors to draw an analogy between an ancient vanquished people and these "noble savages" now being extinguished across the West.4

  Secretary Joseph Henry's office sat behind the great rose window between the two front towers of the building, on the third floor. A garrulous visitor had just settled down on the couch when a sharp crackling sound overhead startled them all. The chief clerk William Jones Rhees—the man who would pen the first biography of James Smithson—imagined it was simply a giant piece of ice sliding off the roof, but as the noise continued and grew louder, the men rushed to the door overlooking the lecture hall. All was gloomy and dark. Dense clouds of smoke billowing over the building could be seen through the oculus in the ceiling. "The house is on fire! Sound the alarm!" Henry cried, as he ran off down the stairs.5

  All through the building men at their desks, working by natural light, noticed the sudden darkness that fell as the winter wind blew the black smoke over the building. There were rapid steps, doors opening, and ever
ywhere the news being passed from one to another. Each man raced to the heart of the building, the giant shell-shaped lecture hall in the center of the second floor, to see for himself. Just beneath the ceiling of the west wall, that which gave onto the picture gallery, the fire could be glimpsed gleaming through the ventilators. In the picture gallery itself a gaping hole in the ceiling where the plaster had fallen away showed the full extent of the blaze. The attic had been completely engulfed by roaring flames, and choking black smoke began to fill the tower offices.

  Word of the fire spread rapidly through the city. The Senate adjourned at the news, as did the Supreme Court. Two steam fire engines responded immediately, but, impotent without water, they stood idly by. No water could be obtained for over an hour. Thousands of people moved south to the Smithsonian, crossing over the canal—that mephitic, sludgy stream Washington's founders had grandly named the Tiber—to reach the grounds of the institution. They stood in the snow, watching the conflagration, kept back by a large force of Union soldiers who had arrived on the scene. Stones from the top of the building began to rain down, and flames, brilliant and crimson, emitted a heat so intense the huge picture gallery windows exploded out of the building. High atop the main tower the institution's anemometer whirled furiously, recording the direction and force of the wind as it had always done. The crowd watched it, mesmerized, as a column of flames engulfed the tower; finally, it disappeared, swallowed up when the tower floors shuddered to the ground with a deafening crash.

  Come dawn, the Smithsonian building stood like a ruined Norman abbey, its roof open clear to the sky. Secretary Henry's daughter Mary and a companion picked their way through the rubble of the upper floor. The apparatus room was completely destroyed, its prized collection of scientific instruments in ruins among the cinders and burnt bricks. In the offices the charred remains of paperwork lay a foot deep. And in the picture gallery the fragments of The Dying Gaul, scattered about the room, crumbled to dust in Mary's fingers.6

  The ground floor housing the museum and the library had survived intact, though water coming down from the floor above had damaged some of the specimens. Some cases had been shattered and a few trays of birds' eggs smashed by overzealous rescuers. The Henry apartments in the east wing had emerged unscathed, but the great monument of Joseph Henry's work—the thirty-five thousand letters and reports, and the fifty thousand letters received by the institution—had been lost, and with it the record of the very founding of the Smithsonian. Mary Henry had watched the papers floating down when the fire finally took the upper room that had housed her father's office; "it was very hard," she wrote, "… to feel that in the space of an hour was thus destroyed the labor of years."7

  In the days that followed an investigation was launched into the fire's origins, which quickly focused on the stove in the picture gallery. It had been inserted into a hole in the wall, one that appeared to be a flue but turned out in fact to be only part of the brick lining of the building. For nearly a week the ashes and embers and smoke had traveled up into the cockloft of the building before finally igniting. The suspicious flue-like hole had been used for a stove pipe before, without apparent mishap, for a meeting of the Mechanics' Institute around the time the building had first been completed, when the empty halls had filled with milling congregants and the jaunty strains of polka dancing. No one, in the end, was blamed for the fire.

  Meanwhile, the men of the Smithsonian offered their testimonials. They recounted where they had been when they learned of the fire and how they'd spent their time in the face of disaster. Mostly the reports were keen averrals of valiant efforts, enumerations of which rooms they had raced between and what things they had saved—a Stanley Indian portrait, a stack of meteorological records, some books from the Secretary's office. But each also tallied the personal items lost: the linen collars, the woolen shirts and drawers, a partly worn frock coat and a pair of gum elastic overshoes, photographs and pictures, bedsteads, chairs, sofas, books and candelabras.8 The towers stood still against the winter sky, charred and vacant. Everything within them had been consumed.

  One of the losses, from the large square south tower, was quite distinct from all the others, reaching back across an ocean to the world of another century. The papers and personal effects of James Smithson, the Smithsonian's mysterious benefactor, had been kept in the regents' room. They had all been destroyed.

  Smithson's trunks had been filled with some two hundred unpublished manuscripts, the record of countless experiments and investigations from the dawn of modern chemistry. They had also contained his correspondence, evidence of the extraordinarily sociable and international network of scientists in which he labored, and the diaries of his travels, which he had kept since adolescence. His extensive mineral collection, lauded as the finest in the United States in the 1840s, had been entirely consumed. Gone, too, were all the tools of his life's work—the thermometers, balances, and blowpipes; as well as his personal belongings, the trappings of his life as an aspiring aristocrat, a man accustomed to fine things: the sword and riding whip, the china service, his smoking pipes and candlesticks.9 With these losses Smithson, along with the story of his life, seemed to have utterly vanished.

  Joseph Henry had once ordered an inventory of Smithson's papers, but in the busy first years of the institution no one had ever found the time. Two or three people had given the papers and diaries a cursory examination. In one of the only lines that had been taken from Smithson's many unpublished manuscripts, Smithson had vowed, "my name will live on in the memory of men…"10 In the years that followed, Smithson's gift to the New World took root and flourished, eventually becoming the largest museum and research complex in the world. But a riddle remained at its very core—the mystery of a man who bequeathed his fortune to a country he had never seen. This undated phrase, plucked from some long-lost manuscript, seemed to be all there was to go on.

  As an architectural historian at the Smithsonian in the early 1990s, I walked past Smithson's tomb at the entrance to the old Castle building almost daily. Like most of the tens of millions of visitors to the museums each year, however, I hardly cast a glance in his direction. So little was known of him, and so colorless were the existing biographical accounts, that he remained remote, imaginable only as a caricature: a periwigged effete with a handsome mineral cabinet and a penchant for gambling. More captivating were the quirky story of Smithson's posthumous arrival in Washington—the famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell and his wife exhumed the body from a condemned Genoa cemetery in a blinding snowstorm on the last day of 1903—and the ensuing debate over how best to memorialize him.

  Smithson's few remaining effects are not kept enshrined, as might be imagined. With each generation's interpretation of Smithson's mandate, the Smithsonian has spread into new buildings up and down the Mall and beyond; the fragments of Smithson's life have scattered, too, to distant corners of the institution. Some portraits of Smithson are at the National Portrait Gallery, others at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A medallion likeness has found its way to the numismatics collection in the National Muséum of American History, and portraits of his brother and nephew are in yet another division of that museum. Smithson's personal collection of books, the only substantial material of his that survived the fire of 1865, sits in a state-of-the-art facility in the basement of the National Muséum of Natural History. The library is at once full of interest and full of mystery, and embodies the challenges of recovering Smithson's life from his slender material legacy. The collection is evidently a working library, with many of the books annotated. Many are still in their original paper wrappers, indicating that Smithson never bothered to have them bound in leather after he bought them—which for an English gentleman, as one historian has noted, was the literary equivalent of serving milk in a carton at a fancy dinner party.11 But the library is also surprisingly limited in size and scope, totaling only 115 volumes. It is missing many of the standard philosophical and scientific works one might expect of someon
e once described as "a gentleman of extensive acquirements and liberal views, derived from a long and intimate acquaintance with the world."12

  The rest of the material is at the Smithsonian Archives: three original letters from Smithson, acquired since the fire, photocopies of about a dozen more from other repositories, and a handful of Smithson's notes, including a few draft catalogues of his mineral collection and some memoranda from experiments. There is a collection of calling cards and signatures of prominent scientists, dating from Smithson's days in Paris, as well as the diary of Smithson's brother and the passport of his nephew. Mostly, the archives contain a record of the search for Smithson, a long trail of dead-end inquiries made by various officials in the years since the fire. As long ago as 1880 the Smithsonian concluded that after "unusual exertions" they had collected "all the information likely to be obtained."13

  In 1973 the Smithsonian exhumed Smithson a second time, in the hopes that the institution's forensic anthropologists might be able to glean some clues from his bones. The exhumation proved something of a comedy of errors, though, and narrowly missed destroying the last tangible evidence of the Smithsonian's benefactor. In the process of opening the tomb, the blowtorches used to unsolder Smithson's coffin ignited the casket's threadbare silk lining. The nearby fire extinguisher could not be used, as it would have ruined the bones for examination. Smithson was saved from absolute extinction only by the workmen racing down the hall to the water fountain, filling their mouths, and running back to put the fire out. The casket was covered with a tablecloth borrowed from the dining room, and Smithson was discreetly, if unceremoniously, carted across the Mall to the laboratory.14 That night a disgruntled staff member put in a call to the local paper to report the tomb disturbance. The next day the Smithsonian found a journalist nosing around, hoping for an interview and a peep at the bones. Told the story of James Smithson—a man with an insatiable curiosity, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland, elected at a mere twenty-two to England's oldest and most prestigious scientific society, who left his entire fortune to a country he had never visited—the reporter went away, satisfied. In the newspaper article that followed, the opening of the tomb was "a moment of high drama"—not, of course, because of the coffin fire (that would remain a secret), but because the Smithsonian had caught a glimpse of its enigmatic founder. It had been able to show its reverence for the generosity of one man, to cradle the skull that had once contained an imagination that hardly knew limits. The story was short and sweet, and ended, "Rest in peace, James Smithson." (Even this was not the end of the drama, however, as the newspaper article alerted D.C. government officials to the event, and they arrived with charges of illegal exhumation.) For all the mishaps, the forensic analysis did produce some interesting information. Smithson, it was learned, had not suffered from syphilis or any other common infectious diseases of the day, and he had a curious "extra flanging" of his right pinkie, perhaps the result of intense application to a musical instrument or some of his scientific apparatus. The report was shelved with the rest of the miscellanea in the archives, material that could not properly be called the makings of a biography.15