by Andrea Wulf
Notes on the State of Virginia was much more than a description of Virginia. It was a celebration of the whole of North America through its flora and fauna, because Jefferson believed that there was “nothing so charming as our own country.” Not only was the United States of America magnificent, it was also “made on an improved plan,” for Europe was only “a first idea, a crude production, before the maker knew his trade,” Jefferson wrote. Adams agreed, insisting that the French scientists had conjured up “despicable dreams,” and praising Jefferson in public for having “exposed the mistakes.” Adams so thoroughly approved of the Notes that when he had his portrait painted he posed with a copy of it.5
In Jefferson’s book the flora and fauna of the continent became the foot soldiers of a patriotic battle to prove that America was vigorous and strong. Under the banner of the-bigger-the-better, he listed the weights of bears, buffalos and panthers to prove his point. Even the weasel, he wrote, courtesy of Madison’s measurements, was “larger in America than in Europe.” The Scandinavian reindeer was so small, Jefferson was reported to have boasted to Buffon, that it “could walk under the belly of our moose.” Best of all, however, was the American “mammoth”—the mastodon—which according to Jefferson was the largest of all animals. Though only bones had been found of this relative of modern elephants, Jefferson included it in his list because he believed that it was still roaming somewhere in the unexplored West. Its gargantuan proportions made it the perfect symbol for the powerful and independent nation. Jefferson also added a long catalogue of native plants, dividing them into four categories—medicinal, edible, useful and ornamental—at the same time demonstrating his impeccable botanical knowledge by recording all plants by both their common and Latin names.6
None of the ornamental plants that Jefferson listed were small wildflowers. Instead his line-up included magnificent trees such as tulip poplar, flowering shrubs such as eastern redbud and climbers such as trumpet honeysuckle. The only exception in this list was Spanish moss, which, though neither a tree, shrub nor climber, added to the majestic appearance of trees such as live oak in the South. But there were no lady’s slipper orchids with their pouchlike blossom or bloodroot, which grew like carpets of white petals across all thirteen states. Pretty as they might have been, delicate forest flowers had no place in Jefferson’s portrayal of this mighty nation.
In the Notes Jefferson was also the first to provide a botanical description of the stately pecan tree. Today it is one of the most valuable cultivated native trees, but British and French botanists knew little about it and had not been able to describe it accurately because only the nuts were known. Jefferson was desperate to parade it in France and asked Madison to “procure and send me an hundred or two” of the nuts. Native to the mainly unsettled Mississippi Valley, it was almost impossible to obtain—even Bartram did not grow them in his nursery. For months Madison tried to find a supplier and the amount he finally received was only a fraction of what Jefferson had wanted. Madison sent them on to Jefferson via Adams in London but continued his search. On 15 May, just as the first delegates were arriving in Philadelphia, Madison finally received another box of nuts, which he immediately dispatched to France. The news of the arrival of the horticultural treasure spread quickly among the delegates and ten days later Washington sent some pecans to Mount Vernon, advising his new estate manager and nephew George Augustine Washington to “plant as soon as you can.”7
The delegates’ interest in new plants was not surprising because, unlike other farmers in the thirteen states, many of them experimented with new agricultural methods, exchanged seeds and created fashionable gardens. Franklin might have called them “une assemblée des notables” for their political clout, but he could equally have been referring to their progressive attitude to agriculture and gardening. Several were members of the two (brand-new) agricultural societies in the United States of America that had been founded specifically to improve agricultural methods—a “purely patriotic” goal, as one of the members explained. Washington had been elected to both societies and wished that “every State in the Union would institute similar ones.” Of the representatives for Pennsylvania, four were members of the Philadelphia society, including Franklin and George Clymer, another signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Two of the delegates from South Carolina were founding members of the South Carolina Agricultural Society, and Caleb Strong, a delegate from Massachusetts, would become the president of the future Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture.
Other delegates with a keen interest in plants and agriculture were George Mason from Virginia and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer from Maryland, who both had large gardens at their plantations and had sent trees to Washington after the Mount Vernon conference in spring 1785. There was also the lawyer and Virginia plantation owner George Wythe, Jefferson’s old teacher and friend, who swapped fruits and crops with him and John Dickinson, a wealthy plantation owner and the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Adams had admired Dickinson’s “fine Gardens” at Fairhill, just outside Philadelphia, before they had been destroyed during the War of Independence. Even Robert Morris, the “financier” of the American Revolution, had switched his interest to agriculture and horticulture, dispatching Bartram’s seed boxes to Jefferson in France and redesigning his estate, The Hills.
As the Constitutional Convention got under way, many of the delegates seized the opportunity to exchange horticultural tips—Mason from Virginia, for example, quizzed Hugh Williamson from North Carolina about the price of crop seeds in the South. Studious and comprehensive as always, Madison approached it more systematically and after a quick survey among the delegates was delighted to report back to his father at their plantation Montpelier that “as far as I can learn,” the crops in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the thirteen states “have been remarkably fine,” while Robert Morris asked Washington for a model of the latest plough in Mount Vernon.
Much of their time, however, was spent in the East Room of the State House—the room in which some of them had declared independence eleven years previously. They sat for at least five hours a day, six days a week, at small tables that were arranged like an opening fan around Washington, who had been unanimously voted as presiding president of the Convention. Madison had secured himself a table in the front row that oversaw the whole room so that he could see and hear everything, for he had decided to take notes of every argument, discussion and vote. Every night he transcribed the lengthy notes from these convoluted meetings, an arduous task that “almost killed” him, he admitted, but nothing would stop him from recording this historic moment. Madison, a fellow delegate observed, was “the best informed Man of any point in debate.”
The delegates were sworn to secrecy. Guards were posted outside, and despite the summer heat the windows were kept shut so that no one could eavesdrop. The stakes were high—success would breathe new life into the ailing body politic, but failure would lead to a schism in the Union before it had even set foot upon the world stage. As Franklin wrote to Jefferson in Paris, failure to revise the Articles of Confederation “will show that we have not Wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves.” Behind sealed doors, the delegates began to discuss America’s future, and the particular issue of how power should be shared and exercised within the Union.
If there was to be a strong government, most agreed, it should be controlled by a separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judiciary branches. Adams had already carved it into the constitution of Massachusetts, and many of the delegates, if not all, were reading Adams’s A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which had been published in London in January 1787 and had just arrived to the booksellers in Philadelphia. The Defence advocated a system of checks and balances to keep the forces of power in equilibrium—a notion that had its roots in nature and physics. Tellingly, the epigraph that Adams chose for the title page of the book was a quote from Alexander Pope: “All Nature’
s difference keeps all Nature’s peace.”
Adams’s inspiration for the political architecture of America came not only from the political philosophers whose work he admired and the lessons he had taken from ancient republics but also from the insights he had gained from his life as a husbandman. A farmer who had to drive a heavy wagon down a steep hill, he wrote in the Defence, would place one pair of oxen in front of the cart and one pair behind to counterbalance the pull from the load. Just as the farmer divided the forces of the oxen—“checking one power by another”—so the forces of the legislature had to be divided into two assemblies. The balance of nature, Adams insisted, was a model from which a people could learn.
In Philadelphia the delegates were discussing similar issues, and within days of their first meeting they voted that the national government was to be divided into legislative, judiciary and executive branches and that the legislature should consist of two houses (later called the House of Representatives and Senate). Yet many delegates opposed Madison’s idea of a strong government for fear that too much centralized power would stop the individual states controlling their own state matters. The discussions raged on for weeks, with one of the most controversial points being how power should be distributed between the larger and smaller states. The Articles of Confederation had given each state one vote regardless of size or population, but Madison and other delegates from the larger states favored a proportional representation that would give them greater leverage in Congress. Unsurprisingly, the smaller states, such as Delaware and New Jersey, wanted to keep the one-state-one-vote system.
Some delegates believed that the representation of the states should be based on their wealth (and contribution to the Union), while others felt the determining factor should be population. Both arguments centered around the question of whether slaves were to be counted as property or as inhabitants, or not at all. As a compromise, one delegate suggested a proportional representation according to the number of free citizens to which slaves should be added, with each one counting as three-fifths of a person. This did not mean that delegates believed that slaves were only three-fifths human—instead this ratio was proposed as a measurement of the wealth that a slave brought to the economy of the different states, thus reducing them to mere numbers in the calculation of political power.
Over the next weeks the debates became more heated and with everybody at loggerheads, some state delegations were even split internally. One by one, each of the several proposals on the table was rejected. Previous decisions were overturned and debates collapsed into dead-end arguments. There were speeches that lasted a day or longer, and by the end of June everyone was complaining about the lack of progress.
“We move slowly in our business,” one delegate mused, “it is indeed a work of great delicacy and difficulty, impeded at every step by jealousies and jarring interests.” Another wrote that they were “still in such a stage as to render the Result very dubious.” Locked up in the airless room, the delegates found the process grinding. Even the noise of the carriages passing in front of the State House seemed too much, and so the city’s street commissioners were asked to put gravel down to muffle the sound. On 28 June, Franklin even suggested opening the Convention every morning with a prayer because of the lack of progress and the disagreements “on almost every Question.”
Sometimes a group of delegates met at Franklin’s garden, only a few blocks from the State House, to talk in private and in the fresh air. On his return from Paris in 1785 Franklin had transformed the vegetable plots behind his town house into a small walled ornamental garden consisting of a lawn surrounded by trees and flowering shrubs and gravel walks. With his retirement from the diplomatic duties in France, Franklin now had time for his “private Amusements,” he said—“Conversation, Books, my Garden, and Cribbidge.” Natural history and botany were his favorite subjects, he told a visitor during the summer of the convention. He was particularly proud of his botanical books and enjoyed showing them to visitors. For his garden Franklin had used the same gardener who had worked in the recently designed State House Yard, ensuring that the work would be executed according to the most fashionable standard. The previous summer workmen had delivered many loads of gravel, earth and sod to transform the small garden into a green oasis. Franklin had also bought seeds from Bartram’s nursery and a garden roller to keep the paths and lawn perfectly smooth. Here, in the shade of the mulberry trees, the delegates found respite from the sheer tedium of constitutional debate in the State House.
As for Washington, he relaxed only when he rode into the countryside to explore farms and gardens. He visited a farmer to “see the effect of the plaister of Paris” as manure, which he had tested himself at Mount Vernon, and inspected a vineyard. He questioned so many farmers that he quickly gained a reputation as a “sturdy farmer … more interested in agricultural topics than in matters of strategy or politics.” When the convention came to a complete deadlock over the one-state-one-vote system in the Senate, Washington went to the Agricultural Society in Carpenter’s Hall, where he would have seen a display of all kinds of innovative farming implements including ploughs, hoes and carts, as well as models of mills and other agricultural machinery and buildings.
Despite his daily duty as the president of the Constitutional Convention, Washington continued to run his estate from Philadelphia. He had brought his notes and observations from the previous harvest, and every Sunday he wrote long and detailed instructions to his estate manager (expecting equally extensive reports in return). His obsession with agriculture and plants did not stop at the fields and groves. On 1 July, he wrote from Philadelphia how to finish the new dining room at Mount Vernon. The ceiling and walls of the most elegant room in the house were to be decorated with moldings of fashionable plaster swags and garlands, but instead of the typical Etruscan vases or antique urns, Washington chose wreaths shaped of interwoven wheat stalks and agricultural tools. A marble mantelpiece with carved farming scenes continued the agricultural theme.
The other delegates also found relief in the picturesque surroundings during these fraught negotiations. The city was renowned for its beautiful country estates and pleasure grounds that nestled along the winding Schuylkill River. Having to spend six days a week cooped up in the State House, the delegates of the Constitutional Convention used every opportunity to escape the stifling air. They had tea and cake at Gray’s Ferry tavern on the river, which was set in a beautiful garden. Here they meandered along serpentine walks that wove through irregularly planted groves. This was America’s first public pleasure park and featured shady arbors, waterfalls, artificial grottoes and even several hermitages. It had been designed by Samuel Vaughan, a wealthy London merchant and Jamaican plantation owner, shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia in the early 1780s. Vaughan had also created another garden that the delegates much enjoyed: the new State House garden, laid out just below the windows where the men were shaping the Constitution. Here they delighted in the “pensive wandering through these rural scenes,” starting a tradition that a visitor still observed a few years later, when the members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives used the garden “to compose their thoughts, or refresh themselves after any fatique of business, or confer together and converse.” Washington may have felt reminded of home because, like Mount Vernon, the State House garden was laid out in meandering gravel paths, sinuous clumps and shrubberies, all planted with native species.
Even the frantically busy Madison found time to join his fellow delegates on these garden visits. Together with John Rutledge from South Carolina and Washington, Madison rode to The Woodlands to see William Hamilton’s ornamental garden, which Hamilton had begun after his return from England (where he met Adams and Jefferson before they set off on their garden tour). They also went to Belmont, where the owner, Richard Peters, was experimenting with seed drills, new recipes for manures and other agricultural innovations. Both Madison and Washington corresponded with Peters on agricultural and horticul
tural matters after this visit and even Alexander Hamilton, the most urban of all delegates, was so impressed by Peters that he consulted him years later when laying out a garden at his house The Grange (in today’s Harlem, then just outside New York).8
While Washington, Madison and their fellow delegates were finding solace in their botanical excursions, Jefferson was making sweeping plans for the future of America by fighting Buffon and forensically examining the agricultural landscape of southern Europe. On the same day that Washington instructed his estate manager about the agricultural moldings in Mount Vernon’s dining room, Jefferson wrote from Paris to Adams in London about his tour of France and Italy. His doctors had recommended the waters in Aix-en-Provence to heal his broken wrist—an injury sustained from enthusiastically jumping over a large kettle in someone’s backyard—and the Virginian had used the opportunity to turn the sojourn into a patriotic quest for new crops that might flourish on American farms.
Jefferson believed that every journey should be also educational, and for that purpose had compiled some instructions for American tourists in Europe. This included a list of “Objects of Attention for an American,” with agriculture as number one. Following his own suggestions Jefferson had spent several months questioning farmers and gardeners along the way, trying to learn about their plants and agricultural methods. “I have courted the society of gardeners, vignerons, coopers, farmers & c.,” he wrote to a friend, explaining to another that he had been “examining the culture and cultivator.” After several months in France, Jefferson had gone on a three-week detour across the Alps to find out what kind of rice the Italians were growing, hoping that it would thrive in South Carolina. Under threat of the death penalty, he had smuggled “as much as my coat and surtout pockets would hold.”