by Eric Rutkow
At the same time that Michaux was struggling financially, Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state and a member of the APS, began vigorously lobbying his colleagues to finance an excursion past the western limits of the new nation. Such a mission had enormous potential for future trade and natural history. Jefferson, best remembered as a statesman, was also a leading natural historian and botanist, with an especial love for trees. He once wrote, “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is, to add an useful plant to its culture.” The only book he published, Notes on the State of Virginia, thoroughly described the territory’s natural history and vigorously counterattacked a pernicious but popular European theory of “cultural degeneracy,” which claimed that inherent inferiorities in the climate and soil of North America degraded the quality of all plant and animal life.
Jefferson’s idea of western exploration was a familiar one. Explorers since the days of Hakluyt had sought the fabled western passage to Cathay. In 1763, Bartram had even contemplated a western trip in a letter to Collinson, but dismissed it out of hand as impractical: “Before this scheme can be executed, the Indians must be subdued or drove about a thousand miles back. No treaty will make discovery safe.” Jefferson himself had first attempted to organize an ill-fated trip in 1786. But none of these endeavors came especially close to being realized.
By 1792, Jefferson, in conjunction with the APS, was actively seeking qualified men to lead his proposed western excursion. His preference was for natural historians, specifically botanists, whose scientific and field expertise made them best equipped to handle such an ambitious journey. In June, Caspar Wistar, on Jefferson’s behalf, reached out to Moses Marshall, a botanist who worked closely with his uncle, Humphry. Wistar’s letter stated that “Jefferson and several other gentlemen are much interested, and think they can procure a subscription sufficient . . . as a compensation to any one who undertakes the journey . . . to have our continent explored in a western direction.” Marshall, however, passed on the opportunity. Meriwether Lewis, a young Virginian with a promising future in exploration, applied for the spot but was rejected.
In December, Michaux of his own initiative contacted the APS and Jefferson, who had thus far been unable to find any worthy explorers. According to the botanist’s journal, “I proposed to several members of the Philosophy Society the advantages to the United States in having geographic information west of the Mississippi. I asked for the sum of 3,600 francs” to undertake such a mission. If the APS agreed, it would be the first journey of its kind to push west beyond any known settlements. It would also resolve Michaux’s financial difficulties. And the Frenchman was explicit in his priorities: “Bound by all manner of consideration to my country, I owe to her my services, and the primary objective of my researches on natural history is to fulfill my obligations in this regard; the second objective is to be useful to America.” In other words, Michaux’s foremost concern was seeking out useful trees for his homeland.
Shortly after receiving the French botanist’s request, the members and affiliates of the APS—effectively the leaders of the new republic—seized on the proposal. Michaux’s reputation matched or exceeded that of any other botanist in the colonies. He appeared to be an ideal candidate to lead the previously unachievable mission. In early 1793, the society produced a document endorsing Michaux’s proposal and guaranteeing funds. The signatories included Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and seven other members of the Constitutional Convention.
The trip was about to begin when Michaux had the misfortune of crossing paths with a French ambassador named Edmond-Charles Genêt. Better remembered as Citizen Genêt, the ambassador had been sent to America to garner official support for France’s war against Spain and Britain, but he immediately proved impossible to control. One of his subversive acts was an unauthorized campaign to free Spanish Florida and Louisiana, and Michaux was solicited for this doomed conspiracy plot. Torn between his love for botany and his love for his country, Michaux chose the latter. His landmark western excursion collapsed once authorities learned of his involvement in the Citizen Genêt Affair.
After Michaux’s western expedition was aborted, the idea of transcontinental exploration idled for another decade until Jefferson, now president of the country and the APS, revived his long-standing dream once more. In January 1803, he sent a confidential message to Congress recommending another western exploring party, and the legislature eventually appropriated five thousand dollars for its execution. Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis, now a captain in the army, to lead the mission, with William Clark as his second in command. The language authorizing this new expedition was practically identical to the instructions Jefferson had earlier sent to Michaux—the Lewis and Clark trip was essentially a repackaging of the 1793 proposal. In fact, one of Jefferson’s greatest concerns was that while Lewis had “a remarkable store of accurate observation” he was “no regular botanist.” Consequently, the president insisted that Lewis spend several months before his departure in Philadelphia with Benjamin Smith Barton, a botanical professor, physician, and member of the APS, who had recently published Elements of Botany, the nation’s first botanical textbook.
On August 31, 1803, Lewis and Clark set out from Pittsburgh and embarked on an adventure more than two centuries in the making. They spent three years exploring the western limits of the continent, collecting geographical, anthropological, and botanical information. Though the mission is best remembered for its symbolic, almost spiritual, importance in the formation of the idea of a continent-spanning nation, it was also a major scientific triumph. Lewis and Clark sent back numerous specimens, including the Osage Orange tree, which later became a staple of natural hedges throughout the prairie states.
America, by the early nineteenth century, had shifted from a botanical curiosity for European scientists into an increasingly independent scientific nation, especially in the realm of natural history. Americans began to produce important manuscripts across a wide range of scientific topics, building on the tradition that Marshall started in 1785. The nation was now adjusting to a new political and cultural paradigm in which science and discovery progressed, even in the absence of European assistance.
The Founding Gardener
IN THE HISTORY of America, few anecdotes are more familiar than one involving a young George Washington and an ill-fated cherry tree. The original version was first published in a popular biography of the president from the early nineteenth century. In it, six-year-old George received a hatchet and quickly used it to dispatch an English cherry tree. His father confronted him, and George hesitated but soon produced perhaps the most famous admission in the history of America: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” The moral of the story, which millions of schoolchildren subsequently internalized, was that the nation’s founding father was an honest man, one obliged to admit his wrongs, a model worth emulating. The problem, of course, was that this incident never took place. Washington’s biographer invented the story, along with many others, to help boost sales and humanize a man often perceived as cold and distant.
The irony in this famous fabrication was that Washington, like several of the Founding Fathers, spent much of his domestic life planting trees. He would no more have needlessly destroyed a fine English cherry than he would have disbanded the Continental Army at Valley Forge. A proper introduction to the young Washington was not the apocryphal cherry tree tale, but a snippet from the journal he kept at sixteen, his earliest writing: “[W]e went through the most beautiful Groves of Sugar trees and spent the best part of the Day admiring the Trees and the richness of the Land.” This was the true disposition of the nation’s first president. He was a man enraptured by the aesthetic beauty and utility of trees, always content to pass a day among them, something he did often during his early years as a surveyor in Virginia.
As with many of the Founding Fathers, especially those from the southern states, Was
hington was a planter, meaning that he owned more than twenty slaves and earned his living from the cash crops he grew. Southern planters, who composed the top 1 or 2 percent of the white population in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia, used slaves to handle the majority of farming’s pedestrian tasks, which left them time to pursue creative endeavors. Washington devoted much of his domestic energy to beautifying and cultivating his Virginia estate, Mount Vernon, which he had inherited in 1752. The same landscape gardening fad that had swept England in the mid-eighteenth century was beginning to captivate the Virginian planter class, and Washington was at the movement’s forefront. He, along with Jefferson and several other Founding Fathers, displayed a passion for tree planting equal to that of British aristocrats like the Duke of Richmond, the Prince of Wales, and Lord Petre.
In 1783, shortly after the Treaty of Paris had been signed and officially ended the Revolutionary War, Washington, having guided the Continental Army to victory and riding a wave of popular approval, announced that he wished to return to his farm. King George III, disbelieving that any leader would yield power so easily, reportedly said of Washington: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” George III may have been justified in his claim, but he failed to understand that Washington was a planter by disposition. Warcraft was a public responsibility that he had performed grudgingly. Washington’s greatness in walking away from the temptations of power stemmed largely from a desire to retreat into the pleasures of rural life. Shortly after returning to Mount Vernon, he wrote:
I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments. . . . I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself; and shall be able to view the solitary walk, and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction.
Now free to pursue his own interests, Washington devoted himself entirely to landscape gardening. In January 1785, he wrote to a friend, “Plantations . . . are now become my amusement and I should be glad to know where I could obtain a supply of such sorts of trees as would diversify the scene.” For the next two years, the selection and transplanting of ornamental and shade trees became a quotidian affair, his primary leisure activity. Washington would mount his horse and ride through his properties, spotting potential specimens with the practiced eye of a surveyor and general. His journal read like an inventory of native specimens: “thriving ash trees,” “very fine young Poplars—Locusts—Sasafras and Dogwood,” “thriving plants of the Magnolio,” and “young Crabtrees of all sizes & handsome.” By February 1785, according to his journal, he was “[e]mployed all day in marking the ground for the reception of my Shrubs.” The following month, he was spending “the greatest part of the day in pruning and shaping the young plantation of Trees & Shrubs.” Washington persevered throughout 1785 and 1786, overseeing Mount Vernon’s transformation into a sylvan paradise. By 1787, the developed portion of his estate included two groves, two wildernesses, shrubberies, a mount, a deer park, serpentine drives, a bowling green, a botanical garden, and symmetrical flower and vegetable gardens. At this point, however, national affairs reclaimed Washington, first as president of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and then as president of the United States from 1789 to 1797.
History tends to separate Washington’s life at Mount Vernon from his roles as general or president, but in truth they were never far apart. The statesman could be taken out of the farm, but not the farm out of the statesman. For example, in August 1776, as Washington was days away from the Battle of Long Island, the first and largest fight of the war, he wrote to his estate manager with great specificity about the way that new trees were to be distributed in Mount Vernon:
[T]hese Trees [are] to be Planted without any order or regularity (but pretty thick, as they can at any time be thin’d) and to consist that at the North End, of locusts altogether. & that at the South, of all the clever kind of Trees (especially flowering ones) that can be got, such as Crab apple, Poplar, Dogwood, Sasafras, Lawrel, Willow (especially yellow & Weeping Willow, twigs of which may be got from Philadelphia) and many others which I do not recollect at present—these to be interspersed here and there with ever greens such as Holly, Pine, and Cedar, also Ivy—to these may be added the Wild flowering Shrubs of the larger kind, such as the fringe Tree & several other kinds that might be mentioned.
A decade later, during the summer of 1787 that Washington spent in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, he made two trips to Bartram’s famous garden, noting that the site, “tho’ stored with many curious plants, shrubs and trees, many of which are exotics, was not laid off with much taste, nor was it large.” As president, he traveled to Flushing, Long Island, to see Prince Nurseries, the oldest commercial nursery in the country. Washington wrote that the outfit “did not answer my expectations. The shrubs were trifling, and the flowers not numerous.” Perhaps it was difficult to impress a man whose own estate was fast becoming the national sanctuary of tree culture.
Washington had company among the Founding Fathers in mixing political culture with plant culture. Many of them, including Jefferson and James Madison, possessed great estates. Washington was certainly not the only one who snuck off to Bartram’s garden during the Constitutional Convention; Jefferson, another avid horticulturist and landscape gardener, visited frequently, as did many others. Questions of statecraft for these men routinely blended with discussions of seeds, grafting, and landscape gardening. Recall, for example, that Benjamin Franklin, while in France on a diplomatic mission, acted to protect the seed trade even though his mandate was to acquire French support for the cause of independence. Subsequently, Jefferson, during his own diplomatic turn in France, spent significant time visiting farms and gardens in search of domesticated plants to introduce to America.
When people sought to curry goodwill or political favor with Washington and Jefferson, they customarily sent a choice tree specimen as a gift. Washington received grafts and seedlings from political cohorts, including fellow participants in the Constitutional Convention, such as Governor George Clinton of New York and Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, the governor of Virginia and father to General Robert E. Lee. This practice of gifting plants was also common for visiting foreign dignitaries. When Michaux arrived in America, he stopped at Mount Vernon with a phenomenal cache of rare specimens that included seventy-five pyramidal cypresses and four Ramnus trees, a type of evergreen. The head gardener of the Jardin Royal in Paris sent Jefferson an annual tree offering for several decades.
In 1797, Washington, after finishing his second term as president, again walked away from public life. Few could believe that once more he ceded power so easily, but Washington desired a return to the pastoral existence that history so frequently denied him. His Virginia estate had finally matured into a sylvan oasis, with mighty tulip poplars lining the entry path and more than sixty native species spread throughout. After arriving at Mount Vernon for this final stay, he wrote: “I am once more seated under my own Vine and fig tree, and hope to spend the remainder of my days . . . in peaceful retirement, making political pursuits yield to the more rational amusement of cultivating the Earth.”
It was fitting, perhaps, that for a nation cut from among the trees, dependent on their abundance, its first hero was their champion and benefactor. As Washington once wrote to a friend, “[T]hose trees which my hands have planted . . . by their rapid growth, at once indicate a knowledge of my declining years, and their disposition to spread their mantles over me before I go hence to return no more. For this, their gratitude, I will nurture them while I stay.”
Johnny Appleseed and the Old Northwest
ONE MIDAUTUMN DAY in 1797, twenty-three-year-old John Chapman was hiking west across the Allegheny Plateau in north central Pennsylvania when an early-winter storm overtook him. Lacking all but the most basic provisions, he quick
ly selected a sheltered site and made his camp. The snow piled up until it was knee deep and impassable, but the young man, who was no stranger to the wilderness, gathered a supply of beech tree switches and moosewood bark and set about constructing snowshoes. These proved sturdy enough to sustain him the rest of his way, and around the first of December he arrived in the town of Warren, Pennsylvania, which had been founded two years earlier. The knapsack he’d been carrying contained a cargo of apple seeds, and the following spring he used them to plant a small nursery about six miles south of the frontier outpost. This, history or tradition suggests, was the first link in a chain of apple nurseries that soon blanketed the Old Northwest.
According to those who claimed to have met Chapman, his physical appearance reflected the simple, almost primitive, way he conducted his life. He stood about five feet nine inches tall, with a wiry frame, long unkempt hair, and a scraggly beard. His dress was often little more than the cast-off articles he received, and in later life nothing more than a coffee sack with arm and neck holes. Most days he went barefoot, even in the coldest weather. His hat was, at one point, an upturned tin vessel and later a homemade swatch of pasteboard with an immense brim to protect his eyes.