by Andrea Wulf
This celebration of the American wilderness was entirely different from the roots of European patriotism, where buildings, ancient writings and art played the elemental roles. Centuries of history had given Europeans a sense of belonging and superiority—a lineage to be proud of. In the absence of ruins and antiquity, Americans turned instead to untamed wilderness. Primeval forests, vast plains and imposing waterfalls became invested with patriotism and linked to the national character. The New World’s virgin landscape, fertile, imposing and wild, was untainted by history—by contrast, Europe’s antiquity became synonymous in the American mind with despotism. Why should they admire “the temples which Roman robbers have reared,” one American poet wrote, when the native wilderness was untouched by the blood of tyrants? Cathedrals, another writer insisted, were “monuments of a corrupt religion,” and castles were emblems for a society “in which every thing was barbarous.”
The forest, a magazine article proclaimed in the decades after Lewis’s return, was “one of the principal sources of an ardent and deep-felt patriotism.” The opening of the West made the United States vast, and “every plant appears to partake of this gigantic character.” The wilderness, another writer argued some years later in the mid-nineteenth century, had long confirmed “our destiny as a country.”
As commentators began to celebrate the wilderness as the epitome of the national character, adopting the very same arguments that Jefferson had used in the 1780s to combat Buffon’s theory of degeneracy, so too did the nation’s painters. After the war the most worthy subjects for American art were deemed to have been George Washington and dramatic or historic moments of the revolution. But now painters began to focus on landscapes—Niagara Falls, the Hudson River valley and later the Great Plains. “In no quarter of the globe are the majesty and loveliness of nature more strikingly conspicuous than in America,” the artist Joshua Shaw wrote in 1820. Jefferson became a collector of landscape depictions, buying prints of Niagara Falls as well as of the Natural Bridge and the junction of the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers. The sublime became America’s language of national identity, with artists scrambling up mountains to capture the spectacular sights and poets celebrating landscape. As the writer Washington Irving declared in 1820, “never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and the beautiful of natural scenery.”
As the wilderness became embedded in the American consciousness, tourists began to travel in search of it. Instead of delighting in the pastoral beauty of well-maintained fields, as before, they began to enthuse about the “magnitude” of the rugged mountains and untouched forests. The veneration for the American landscape became so popular that foreigners grumbled that Americans suffered from a “habit of exalting their own things”—to find scenes like this, one Englishman snidely remarked, “it would be needless to go farther than Wales.”
By the 1820s, the first tourist shelters were built in the Catskills to accommodate the growing numbers of revelers. “Our lofty mountains and almost boundless prairies, our broad and magnificent rivers, the unexampled magnitude of our cataracts, the wild grandeur of our western forests, and the rich and variegated tints of our autumnal landscapes, are unsurpassed,” the painter Joshua Shaw insisted. For those who could not afford to travel to these rugged scenes, portfolios of landscape engravings were also now available, bringing the waterfalls and ancient forests into America’s parlors. As the obsession with the American wilderness spread, poets wrote about the prairies and novelists turned to the frontier for inspiration. So-called backwoods novels popularized the wilderness, including James Fenimore Cooper’s best-selling Leatherstocking Tales, which included The Pioneers (1823) and The Prairie (1827). The wide horizons of the vast continent entered the houses of merchants and farmers, giving them a sense of belonging and pride. The boundless land became the embodiment of their future. “Our seventeen states compose a great and growing nation,” Jefferson wrote with pride, “their children are as the leaves of the trees, which the winds are spreading over the forest.”15
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1 Spain kept its claims to territory along the Pacific Coast and in the Southwest.
2 Jefferson had been the first to announce the discovery of the Megalonyx (or “great-claw” as he also called it) to the scientific world. In spring 1797 he sent his paper on the bones to the American Philosophical Society (published in the Transactions of 1799), and Wistar continued working on them. The symbolism invested in the Megalonyx failed because it was neither a giant lion nor a vicious carnivore, as Jefferson had hoped, but a ground sloth. Rather than attacking his prey with the great claws, the sloth had used them to climb trees.
3 Lewis and Clark knew that Jefferson wanted to turn the Native Americans into farmers and sent a long report about the different tribes of the “Eastern Indians,” including information about the Mandan Indians, who “cultivate corn, beans, squashes and tobacco” as well as other tribes who though nomadic “might easily be induced to become stationary.”
4 Adams thought that the control over the Mississippi and the transport of goods was essential for the union between the Western territories and the Eastern states. Without the Louisiana Purchase the United States would have lost this control and, he believed, the Western territories would have eventually become independent from the United States or united with England, France or Spain.
5 This belief underpinned Jefferson’s scientific and political thinking. Humans were also governed by natural laws—laws that implied natural rights such as freedom and equality.
6 Even in the wilderness, 2,000 miles away from home and many months into his journey, Lewis thought of gardens when he compared the lush grass of the plains with a “beatifull bowlinggreen in fine order.” When he found a low-growing creeping juniper (Juniperus horizontalis), he thought it would “make very handsome edgings to the borders and walks of a garden,” like box hedges only that it “would be much more easily propegated.”
7 Jefferson then decided that the prairie dog and magpie should go to the naturalist, painter and collector Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia.
8 Jefferson received the two grizzly bears from Zebulon Pike, who had captured them at the Rio Grande. The president later passed them on to the naturalist Charles Willson Peale. According to Margaret Bayard Smith, Federalists enjoyed calling the grounds at the White House the “President’s bear-garden.”
9 Sacagawea not only translated for the expedition but also negotiated with tribes and was an invaluable guide. Born Shoshone, she had been kidnapped as a girl, but by chance the party met her brother and the Shoshones almost 800 miles away from the Mandan village. This encounter allowed Lewis to trade for horses and a guide to cross the mountains.
10 Sublime nature was apparently even used for party politics. Jefferson told a fellow Republican that Federalists had ordered the destruction of the rock from where one could see the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains, which he had so rapturously described in the Notes on the State of Virginia. This had been attempted, Jefferson explained, “with the intention of falsifying his account and rendering it incredible.”
11 American scientist Benjamin Silliman said something similar after a tour through New England, noting that “national character often receives its peculiar cast from natural scenery.” Almost one hundred years later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner would argue that the experience of the Western frontier defined Americans, creating a unique people who were stronger and freer than Europeans.
12 Until then Lewis and Clark (and everybody else) had believed that the continent was symmetrical, assuming that a low and easily crossed mountain range mirroring the Appalachians would run along the Western side.
13 A German botanist who spent some time in Philadelphia was paid by Lewis to arrange, describe and paint the collection. When Frederick Pursh left Philadelphia in spring 1809, he took his botanical drawings and also some of the dried specimens from Lewis’s collection (even cutting off some parts of
the plants). In 1814 he published Flora Americae Septentrionalis, in which he described 124 of Lewis’s and Clark’s plants. He named a genus Lewisia and another Clarkia, as well as three species: Linum lewisii, Mimulus lewisii and Philadelphus lewisii.
14 Despite the success of the expedition, Lewis didn’t find much happiness after his return. Jefferson made him governor of the Louisiana Territory, but Lewis failed to make a success and faced financial ruin. In October 1809, only three years after the expedition had arrived back in St. Louis, Lewis was found in a bedroom of a tavern badly injured by several gunshots and died shortly afterward. Though the circumstances of his death remain a mystery, it was most likely that he committed suicide.
15 Vermont had joined the Union in 1791, Kentucky in 1792, Tennessee in 1796 and Ohio in 1803.
8
“THO’ AN OLD MAN, I AM BUT A YOUNG GARDENER”
THOMAS JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO
A LONE RIDER battled through a fierce snowstorm in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The snow was so deep that the roads were almost impassable, and for the last seven hours an ice-cold wind had cut through the rider’s heavy coat. It was mid-March 1809, but instead of the first green flush of spring the forests were hidden under a stark white blanket, while the layers of mountain ridges had all but disappeared in the hypnotizing dance of light flakes. The traveler was sixty-five-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who had left Washington four days earlier after James Madison’s inauguration as the fourth president of the United States. Seventy miles into his journey home he had overtaken his estate manager, Edmund Bacon, who led two wagons’ worth of Jefferson’s belongings from the White House and one filled with shrubs from the capital’s nurseries. Jefferson could have traveled the remaining fifty miles in his carriage but was anxious not to waste any more time—he had waited for this moment for so long, and a snowstorm was not going to stop him.
“Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power,” claimed the third president of the United States, who had described his final years in office as “the most tedious of my life.” Desperately lonely in the capital, even his daily rides in the countryside had started to bore him. Like George Washington before him, Jefferson longed to tend to his plantation and garden, and had made the decision to follow Washington’s example and not run for a third term. Increasingly his letters to friends and family had mentioned this pining to return to “the enjoyments of rural life.” “My views and attentions,” he wrote to fellow gardener William Hamilton in Philadelphia, “are all turned homewards.” He was so excited about his garden in particular, he said to Hamilton, that “the subject runs away with me whenever I get on it.”
His favorite garden correspondents were his eighteen- and twelve-year-old granddaughters, Anne and Ellen. As with his daughters, Martha and Mary, in the early 1790s, Jefferson’s love for his family and his garden became intertwined in playful letters—almost as if nature became the stage on which to play out his feelings. While Jefferson was in Washington, Anne would regularly ride the few miles from her parents’ farm to Monticello to plant, talk to the gardeners and, most important, report back to her doting grandfather. On the rare occasions when she couldn’t go to Monticello, she would always ask the slaves how the flowers were doing. Ellen was too young to be in charge of the garden, but she received potted geraniums from her grandfather and took care of the orange trees. She also mischievously reported any mistakes that Bacon, the estate manager, made—such as covering the entire lawn with charcoal instead of manure.
The letters from Jefferson’s granddaughters brought the twin joys of Monticello and his family to the White House. “You have a thousand little things to tell me which I am fond to hear,” he told Ellen, adding that he sent kisses by kissing the paper. “I have not much to say, unless I talk about plants,” Ellen wrote, but without fail she would write because her meticulous grandfather ran an “account”—every one of her letters would be “credited” and he would owe her one in return. At the end of February 1809, as he prepared at long last to leave office, Jefferson wrote to Ellen that he would be home three weeks later, “and then we shall properly be devoted to the garden.” Like Washington, who had relished the years of his retirement at Mount Vernon after his presidency until his death in 1799, or Adams, who had spent the past eight years working his fields and garden at Quincy, it was here that Jefferson would find both solace and inspiration.
Jefferson’s longing to retire to Monticello had grown in tandem with the many problems that plagued his last years in office. In his first term he had enjoyed considerable success—he had seen the country grow both geographically and economically in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, and had managed to reduce the national debt by a third. He had also led the Republicans to unprecedented levels of popularity. The last two years of his presidency, by contrast, had seen dramatic economic decline. Once again the United States of America was suffering from events in Europe, as Britain and France were at war and issuing orders that ships trading with the enemy were to be captured. Britain alone, James Monroe estimated, captured one American ship every other day from 1805 onward. Hoping to avoid war and to pressure Britain and France, Jefferson had introduced the Embargo Act in December 1807, banning all foreign trade. But rather than squeezing Britain and France economically, the ban had been disastrous for America. The thriving merchant communities of New England lost their foreign markets, wheat prices plummeted and Southern plantation owners were unable to sell their tobacco and cotton.
Jefferson found it difficult to stay optimistic in the face of such troublesome conditions—his life, he lamented, had become an “unceasing drudgery,” “odious” and “nauseating,” and wasn’t helped by the fact that his excruciating migraines had returned. And so, during those last years of his presidency, his thoughts increasingly turned to his garden at Monticello. He began to rely more and more on his secretary of state, James Madison, and treasury secretary Albert Gallatin, and spent increasing amounts of time doodling, sketching, scribbling and dreaming up myriad gardens and designs, most of which would never make it from his notebook onto the soil. Not only was he discussing planting schemes with the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe at the White House in 1807 and sending detailed instructions to the overseer at Poplar Forest, he also decided—once again—to remodel the gardens at Monticello.
A few years earlier, in 1804, at the height of his presidency and after his landslide election victory over the Federalists, his ideas had been grander than anything he had ever planned before, radiating confidence and self-assuredness—he wanted temples, a grove of the highest trees and a labyrinth of flowering shrubs, more vistas across the sea of mountains that stretched to the West, a shady arbor covered with vines and a cascade on Montalto (the mountain opposite Monticello) to be “visible at Monticello.” He also planned to build a columned classical temple and four other garden buildings including one “model of the Pantheon” and the “Chinese pavilion of Kew gardens” at Monticello. For these changes he had asked a landscape painter (an Englishman who had immigrated to the United States) to “give me some outlines” but had failed to lure him to Monticello.1
Since then, however, his plans had changed. In the light of the general economic situation and the realization that he had run up a personal debt of more than $10,000 during his time in Washington,2 Jefferson abandoned temples and cascades and designed instead a garden that would be an expression of his vision of America—beautiful, sublime, strong, independent and agrarian. Majestic views over the rolling mountains, groves of native trees and shrubs, decorative flowerbeds, experimental vegetable plots, vineyards and crops united into one landscape—an ornamental farm embraced by the American wilderness. The garden that Jefferson designed at Monticello during his last years of the presidency combined his appreciation for beauty and his love for his country with his scientific and agricultural endeavors—it was a celebration of the United States of America and t
he future.
JEFFERSON REACHED Monticello on 15 March 1809, exhausted from the “very fatiquing journey” but not too tired to inspect his farms and gardens the next morning. “Spring is remarkably backward,” he remarked. All the trees were still naked except for the light green veil of the weeping willows and a red flush that tinged the maples. The vegetable plots were unplanted and still covered in snow. In the flowerbeds on the back lawn and at the front of the house the spring bulbs had yet to unfurl their leaves and waxy blossoms. Neither oats nor tobacco had been sown and “little done in the gardens,” Jefferson observed, but he could nonetheless feel his “vis vitae”—his energy of life—returning to him.
“I am constantly in my garden,” he was soon writing to friends with delight, “as exclusively employed out of doors as I was within doors when at Washington.” He talked of droughts, blights, frosts or rains but, as ever, “if the topic changes to politics I meddle little with them.” From early morning to dinnertime Jefferson was either on horseback or striding through his property, instructing and overseeing, always humming and singing. Scribbling into a small ivory notebook he noted ideas, planting and harvest dates, names of species and the amount of seeds planted, all of which could be rubbed off after he had transferred his notes into his Garden Book. He knew every plant in his garden, his estate manager Bacon would later recall, and would instantly spot if a single tree had died or a specimen was missing.