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Knowing in America: the Enlightenment, Science, and the Early Republic

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Knowing in America: the Enlightenment, Science, and the Early Republic University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2015 Knowing in America: The nliE ghtenment, Science, and the Early Republic Timothy K. Minella University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Minella, T. K.(2015). Knowing in America: The Enlightenment, Science, and the Early Republic. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3660 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Knowing in America: The Enlightenment, Science, and the Early Republic by Timothy K. Minella Bachelor of Arts Hamilton College, 2009 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2015 Accepted by: Ann Johnson, Major Professor Mark M. Smith, Committee Member Carol E. Harrison, Committee Member Joyce E. Chaplin, Committee Member Lacy Ford, Senior Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Timothy K. Minella, 2015 All Rights Reserved. ii DEDICATION For my parents. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the many people and institutions that have contributed to the completion of this dissertation. First, I must thank several groups that have supported my research with fellowships and awards. These include the Graduate School at the University of South Carolina, the Department of History at USC, the Alexander Hamilton Institute, and the Huntington Library. I will be forever grateful for the generosity of the many people who fund awards for research. The Department of History has supported me since the first day I entered the program. I must give special thanks to faculty members Ann Johnson, Mark M. Smith, Carol E. Harrison, Allison Marsh, Joseph November, and Thomas J. Brown for their generosity of time and spirit. I am grateful that Joyce E. Chaplin agreed to serve as an outside reader for the dissertation. I must also express my appreciation for the friendship of fellow graduate students David Prior, David Dangerfield, Edward Allen Driggers, Caroline Peyton, Sarah Scripps, Andrew Kettler, and Evan Kutzler. At Hamilton College, I was privileged to receive mentoring from Robert Paquette and Douglas Ambrose, both professors of history. They have continued to provide me with assistance and advice during my graduate career. Finally, I must extend my eternal gratitude towards those closest to me who have patiently endured the process of completing this project. I thank my parents, Megan and Louis Minella, and the rest of my wonderful family for their love and support. For the same reasons, my thanks go to the extraordinary Shorus Manning. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes practices of science and technology in the early United States as windows onto the American Enlightenment. Although scholars have emphasized the important impact of Enlightenment thought on the American founding, the historiography tends to argue for the decreasing influence of the Enlightenment on American culture as the nineteenth century progressed. In addition, scholars tend to see a decline in American science after Benjamin Franklin as nineteenth-century Americans began to focus primarily on the practical problems of everyday life. I question these interpretations by connecting scientific practice in the Early Republic with transatlantic Enlightenment thought and analyzing American conversations about knowledge creation in practical pursuits such as agriculture. I place American science in the context of Enlightenment debates about how human beings could create knowledge, or epistemology. This part of the dissertation involves a review of American exposure to such Enlightenment thinkers as John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. Then, I conduct several case studies of different kinds of science in America, including agriculture and natural history, and I analyze how Enlightenment epistemology informed the practice of these sciences. Finally, I consider how Enlightenment epistemology and American scientific practice shaped American discourse about political economy and political philosophy. In books and pamphlets that discussed political topics, American writers attempted to support their arguments by applying what they saw as proper epistemological methods. Through discussion of these aspects of science, I show that the v Enlightenment continued to make its mark on American culture throughout the early nineteenth century. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION........................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................iv ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: REPUBLICS OF KNOWING: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES................................................16 CHAPTER 3: A PATTERN FOR IMPROVEMENT: PATTERN FARMS AND SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY....................................................................................68 CHAPTER 4: GEORGE BLACKBURN, CELESTIAL TRAVELER.............................................100 CHAPTER 5: THE ENSLAVED ANTS AND THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION..............................124 CHAPTER 6: INDIAN CORN, METEORS, AND RACIAL HAIR: THE SCIENCE OF PETER A. BROWNE......................................................................148 CHAPTER 7: POLITICAL REASONING................................................................................172 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION................................................................................................205 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................210 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In the historical imagination of western civilization, few developments loom larger than the Enlightenment of the long eighteenth century. Few concepts, however, have inspired such diverse interpretations. For some scholars, the Enlightenment constituted a definitive break from the mysticism and religiosity of previous ages and led to the rise of religious toleration and objective science. For others, the Enlightenment enshrined a narrow rationalism that culminated in the development of racist and genocidal ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still others have defined the Enlightenment as an explosion of print culture and commerce that created transnational networks of people through the exchange of goods and the written word. The diffusion of the Enlightenment presents another contentious issue. To what extent did the style, attitudes, and ideas of the Enlightenment extend beyond savants in the salons and learned societies of London and Paris? Did the common people experience the same Enlightenment as the philosophes, or any Enlightenment at all? Historian Robert Darnton reflected on these differing interpretations by characterizing two approaches for studying the Enlightenment. The first, epitomized by the synthetic work of intellectual historian Peter Gay, took the philosophical writings of major thinkers as the main source for investigating the Enlightenment. In Gay’s Enlightenment, Darnton argued, the disciples of reason ushered in modernity by 1 questioning the foundations of religious belief. The second approach, led by French historians of the Annales school, “[located] the Enlightenment by not looking for it,” as Darnton put it.1 These historians went to more mundane sources; they reviewed cheap pamphlets and almanacs rather than philosophical treatises. Considering the ideas contained in these less prominent sources, Darnton explained, resulted in a more complicated portrait of the eighteenth century that questioned its status as the “Age of Reason.” Darnton thus called for a reconsideration of the Enlightenment that produced a new social history of ideas; no longer could historians understand the Enlightenment only by analyzing the great books of the long eighteenth century. Around the same time as Darnton’s challenge to produce this social history of ideas, historians of early America were writing new interpretations of the American Enlightenment. Henry F. May and Donald H. Meyer both produced monographs published in 1976 that attempted to define and describe the American Enlightenment. Reflecting Darnton’s call for a more nuanced interpretation of the Enlightenment, both authors eschewed defining the Enlightenment as a unitary phenomenon. Both, however, made the tension between religion and Enlightenment a key element of their analysis. May defined Enlightenment thinkers as those who contended that, through the proper use of the human faculties, mankind could achieve progress in many pursuits. This definition thus excluded from the enlightened category those persons who turned to “revelation, tradition, or illumination” as the primary sources of truth. Very few people outside of the colonial and early national elite, May stated, could be considered enlightened under this definition because
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