Copyright by Cameron Blair Strang 2013
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Copyright by Cameron Blair Strang 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Cameron Blair Strang Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Entangled Knowledge, Expanding Nation: Science and the United States Empire in the Southeast Borderlands, 1783-1842 Committee: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Supervisor James Sidbury, Co-Supervisor Bruce Hunt Robert Olwell Christopher Morris Entangled Knowledge, Expanding Nation: Science and the United States Empire in the Southeast Borderlands, 1783-1842 by Cameron Blair Strang, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2013 Acknowledgements I have worked hard to finish this dissertation and earn a Ph.D. But mostly I’ve just been really lucky. I’ve been lucky to work with wonderful supervisors in a wonderful department. Jorge Cañizares and Jim Sidbury have challenged and supported me since my first semester at the University of Texas. Their generosity, knowledge, and wisdom have made me a far better historian and, I’d bet, a better human being. I simply can’t thank them enough, and I hope they know how proud I am to be their student. Many thanks as well to the other members of my dissertation committee—Bruce Hunt, Robert Olwell, and Christopher Morris—for devoting their time and expertise to this project. Jim Sidbury and Jackie Jones never let me down in their capacities as departmental Graduate Advisers, and Dr. Jones helped support me financially by hiring me as a graduate assistant right after we both arrived at UT in 2008. Julie Hardwick also gave me a plum job as graduate coordinator at the Institute for Historical Studies, an institution that has added so much to the department and, in a few different capacities, my own graduate school experience. I spent enough time around the IHS to know just how important Courtney Meador is to it and the department more generally, and I am also happy to thank Marilyn Lehman, who handled all issues with her typical cool grace. Alan Tully acted as department chair during my five years at UT and his tireless efforts to raise money for the department and push the graduate program forward despite a crappy economy warrant special thanks. Many faculty members have, in class and beyond, helped shape my work and my development as a historian, especially Erika Bsumek, Bruce Hunt, Lina del Castillo, and Neil Kamil. iv I have also been lucky to be surrounded by a great set of friends, colleagues, and institutions. Chris Heaney, Ben Breen, Renata Keller, Kyle Shelton, and Brian Jones have been great, and ridiculously smart, friends: they have fundamentally shaped my scholarship and helped make my years at UT some of the best of my life. While I spent most of my time at UT flexing my brain alone, I’m grateful for the chances I had to sweat with friends. Publish or Perish, The Stakhanovites, and, most of all, The Subalterns kept me sane and passably fit. Hasta la victoria siempre. The Institute for Historical Studies, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, and the History of Science Colloquium offered conversation, venues to share my work, and many free meals. Applause is also in order for Becca Havens, Matt Childs, Jim Sweet, Paul Conrad, Jason Jackson, Juandrea Bates, Felipe Cruz, James Delbourgo, Sara Gronim, Laurie Wood, Rachel Herrmann, James Jenkins, Josh Noll, Ann Fabian, Dan Richter, Samantha Seeley, Julia Ogden, Adam Lewis, and (with an extra ovation) Chris Parsons. While all of these people deserve thanks for making me better at the scholarly things I do, I would not be doing these things at all without the encouragement of historians at the University of New Hampshire: my deep thanks to Jeffrey Bolster, Eliga Gould, Julia Rodriguez, and Nicoletta Gullace. I’ve been lucky to work in a lot of archives and libraries and am glad to thank the scholars and staff who facilitated my research at these institutions. I send my gratitude to the good people at the P.K. Yonge Library, especially the incredibly generous James Cusick; the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; the American Philosophical Society; the Historic New Orleans Collection; Tulane University’s Special Collections Library; the New Orleans Public Library; the Louisiana State Museum Historical Center; Louisiana State University’s Special Collections Libraries; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Jefferson Library at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, v especially Andrew O’Shaughnessy; the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales; Archivo del Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid; Archivo del Museo Naval; Biblioteca Nacional de España; the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History; the Benson Latin American Collection; the Perry-Castañeda Library; the South Caroliniana Library; and the Huntington Library. I’ve also been lucky to share my research with audiences at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Southern Historical Association, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, UT Arlington, the Library of Congress, UT Austin, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Donald D. Harrington Symposium, the Philadelphia Area Center for Historical Analysis, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. The questions, criticisms, and encouragement I received from these audiences have been very helpful. I have, moreover, been lucky to have parts of this dissertation accepted for publication as articles, and I am happy to thank The William and Mary Quarterly for permission to include “Indian Storytelling, Scientific Knowledge, and Power in the Florida Borderlands” (WMQ, 3rd Ser., vol. 70, no. 4 (Oct. 2013)) as chapter one of this project and The Journal of American History for permission to include most of “Violence, Ethnicity, and Human Remains during the Second Seminole War” (JAH, vol. 100, no. 4 (March 2014)) as part of chapter six. I’ve been really lucky in securing funding for this project, and several organizations within and beyond UT deserve special thanks. Around UT, the Department of History, the College of Liberal Arts, the Centennial Graduate Student Support Fund, the Graduate School, the Institute for Historical Studies, and the Donald D. Harrington Foundation overwhelmed me with their generosity. Beyond UT, I am the grateful recipient of a Dianne Woest Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities (Historic New vi Orleans Collection); an Institute for Southern Studies Visiting Research Fellowship (University of South Carolina); a Louisiana Historical Research Fellowship (Louisiana State University Special Collections Libraries); a Monticello-McNeil and Friends of the MCEAS Dissertation fellowship (McNeil Center for Early American Studies); a W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowship (Huntington Library); a Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies short-term fellowship; a Research Fellowship for the Study of the Global South (Tulane University); a Science, Technology, and Society Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (National Science Foundation); a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science; a Cecilia L. Johnson Grant for Visiting Graduate Scholars (University of Florida Special Collections Library); and a Kislak Fellowship in American Studies (John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress). Lastly, I’ve been lucky in love. I am very proud to thank my family—Bill, Karol, Tyson, Tanya, Rose, and Gertrude—for their endless support. A bit more concretely, Bill and Karol set an example that made lifelong learning, love of reading, interest in developing new skills, hard work, commitment, and a belief that success can be achieved parts of me. Thanks mom and dad. Luckily, I am not only loved by my family members, and Renata deserves so much credit for this project and, more importantly, for making life pretty grand: thanks for everything, honey. vii Entangled Knowledge, Expanding Nation: Science and the United States Empire in the Southeast Borderlands, 1783-1842 Cameron Blair Strang, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisors: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and James Sidbury This dissertation is about knowledge, power, and identities in North America. It practices and develops borderlands history of science as a method for exploring the interplay between these factors during the earliest period of the United States’ territorial expansion, the 1780s to the early 1840s. Approaching science in the early United States from a borderlands perspective and decentering the thirteen original states on the nation’s eastern periphery reveals a new picture of the knowledge, practices, individuals, and networks that comprised American culture on the whole during its formative years. Multinational individuals within borderland regions, entanglements with neighboring empires, and the imperial dimensions of the early republic were all constitutive of national science and culture. The southeast borderlands—the Gulf South territories that would become the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—is an ideal region for decentering the history of the United States: it was as much a part of the Caribbean, Spanish, and French worlds as it was of Anglo-North America and it was central to the worlds of Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and other Native groups. Scientific practitioners, ideas, and techniques in the southeast borderlands were integral to the development of both national identity and imperialism in the early United States. U.S. officials and men of science did not simply create the scientific perspectives and viii practices used to dominate the former Spanish, French, and British colonies of the Gulf South. Instead, they incorporated the region’s multinational scientific experts, drew on the examples of other empires, and used the Gulf South as an experimental space in which they could perfect more advanced methods of exploiting the land and its peoples.