“‘The neighborhood would be very interesting for a Botanist to visit,’ or André Michaux, French Botanist in the American Field”
Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University
On 20 July 1804, the City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, a Charleston, South Carolina newspaper, printed the first of three installments of “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux, a Celebrated French Botanist.” The author, J.P.F. Deleuze, had originally written it for the Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle as a tribute to André Michaux, who had died in 1802 in Madagascar.1 Michaux had spent so many years during the late 1780s and early 1790s in Charleston, however, that the editors of the newspaper assumed their readership would be interested. Deleuze began his celebration with an argument for the value of Michaux’s work and spelled out the global botanical mission of the botanist, his superiors, and his predecessors. “The vegetables which enrich our fields,” he wrote, “are nearly all the conquests of industry [“Industry” here referring to human intervention and labor in the Natural world]. Our Legumes, and our fruits,” he continued, “come from different countries, and in their wild state they were inferior to what they are in our gardens. Observation has successively discovered them in their native countries, culture has perfected them, and commerce has passed them from one country to another. After different trials we have made choice of the most productive species of these, which suit each country best, and in those districts where the inhabitants could scarcely find nourishment, afford abundant crops to a numerous population.”2 Deleuze was quick to credit this process for enriching France: “Of about 250 kinds of trees which at this day cover the soil of France, more than three-fourths are of foreign origin,”3 including species from Greece, Persia, China, and India. European contact with America merited additional praise. “America,” he wrote, “has procured for us the [sic]4 maize, which has become the principal nourishment of many people on our
1 Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze was a naturalist who was employed as a librarian at the Museum national d'histoire naturelle. He translated a range of international botanical works into French. 2 DeLeuze, “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux, a Celebrated French Botanist. Translated from the original of M. De Leuze,” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 20 July 1804. 3 DeLeuze, “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux.” 4 This article preserves the original 1804 translation of Deleuze. 25 Hyde
continent, and the potatoes which has augmented the population of Ireland and Switzerland, and which in the north of Europe affords so great a supply of nourishment and we are also indebted to it for a number of useful trees, such as the Acacia, the tulip tree, the satin, the maple, & c.” But as valuable as these natural resources had proved, it would take more than market forces to bring them to Europe: “These riches may be increased continually but to procure them it is not sufficient,” he cautioned, “to rely upon commerce which only sends what is found upon the coasts: it requires naturalists who penetrate the interior of countries, and who know how to distinguish and chuse what may be useful.” He then defended his lengthy introduction to the memoir writing, “I have gone more fully into these reflections to make us feel how much gratitude is due to those courageous men who, to serve society, renounce its comforts, and go to seek the unknown treasures of nature in desert and savage countries.” Global market forces and selective breeding carried out by farmers and botanists were vital, but also limited. To make the most of the agri-business potential, scientists—or “naturalists” in eighteenth-century terms—needed to trek deep into unexplored territories, and governments needed to fund their work: It was an argument for the “colonial machine,” and the colonial botany machine, in particular.5 The courageous man at the heart of this part of the colonial machine (and memoir) was André Michaux, a botanist whom Louis XVI commissioned with finding North American trees that could contribute to the rejuvenation of French
5 The term “colonial machine” has been used by historians James McClellan and François Regourd to describe the eighteenth-century system developed by the French government to gather knowledge and resources from its colonial ventures. They describe a system that is both centralized and diffuse in typical ancien regime fashion. It is a machine serving the interests of the king, but necessarily involving multiple bureaucracies. The machine most importantly concerned the Maison du Roi and Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, the Maison du Roi representing direct interests and concerns of the king, the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies having the bureaucratic tentacles to carry it out. Yet the two bureaucracies did not necessarily work seamlessly or smoothly together; redundancies seem to be inherent in the system. The “machine” as represented by the two great bureaucracies at the top was felt “on the ground” by a range of institutions and peoples including, under the Maison du Roi, the Bâtiments du Roi, the royal press, a range of other (less involved but still important) ministries together with trading companies (the Compagnie des Indes), French religious orders, and private individuals who participated in the work of the machine, or who contributed their knowledge to the working of the machine. As McClellan and Regourd write, “The key here is the institutionalization of expertise. . . .” See James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Brespols), 50, 57. Importantly, as I have explored elsewhere, Michaux’s mission both intersected with these efforts, but differed from them in that North America was not a French colony. Instead, Michaux had to engage with the new American government in carrying out his work.
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forests. In particular, it was hoped that French forests, sufficiently re-invigorated with American arboreal introductions, could be persuaded to yield the sort of timber desperately needed to build a French navy capable of competing with the British. Michaux’s credentials made him ideal for the task: he had trained in botany at Versailles and recently returned to Paris from a royal expedition to Persia. He arrived in New York City in the late fall of 1785. He would spend the next ten years systematically exploring North America as far north as Canada into the Hudson Bay, and as far south as Florida and the Bahamas, and as far west as the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.6 Over the course of his North American mission, Michaux maintained a journal in which he recorded the distance and details of his travels, the plants and trees that he found and identified, the people with whom he met and stayed. The journals are sometimes cursory, other times detailed. The relative uniformity in ink color and hand-writing displayed in sections of the journal suggest that while sometimes he recorded events on a daily basis, at other times he described the activities of multiple days at a single sitting. Not all of volumes of his journal survive: the volumes covering his early years in North America when he explored the mid-Atlantic region were lost in a shipwreck on his voyage back to Europe. But those that do survive offer a rich window into the world of eighteenth-century colonial botany. In recent years, scholars have turned their focus increasingly to the examination of the relationship between the work being conducted in the field—and therefore on the “periphery,” to the “metropole” where their work was received. 7 Scholars have sought to understand how botanists in the field generated
6 For more on Michaux, see the following: Elizabeth Hyde, “André Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the 'Injunction of Science,'" Special Issue: “Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (forthcoming 2020); Elizabeth Hyde, “Of Monarchical Climates and Republican Soil: French Plants and American Gardens in the Revolutionary Era,” in Foreign Trends on American Soil, edited by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017); Elizabeth Hyde, “André Michaux and French Botanical Diplomacy in the Cultural Construction of Natural History in the Atlantic World” in Of Elephants and Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790-1830,” edited by Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Museum, 2013), Elizabeth Hyde, “Arboreal Negotiations, or the Cultural Politics of André Michaux’s Mid-Atlantic Mission.” In Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660-1830, edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2012:08. 7 For the French example, see James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Brespols). For Spanish, English, North American, and Caribbean American examples, see Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008).
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knowledge: did they rely open local or indigenous populations?8 or could they only see their work through a “metropolitan” lens?9 And then did they seek to impose “metropolitan” frameworks on what they found?10 Others have explored the means by which knowledge was communicated: how did botanists use the powers of observation in the field to translate information into knowledge? Did they gather and send specimens? Live or dried? Did they record their observations in paintings or drawings executed in the field? And how did they process the information once they returned from the field?11 Finally, scholars have examined the physical, linguistic, and logistical challenges of exploring vast expanses of dangerous wilderness. Michaux’s journal illuminates many of these questions central to contemporary analysis of eighteenth-century botanical methods in the field at a historical moment when Enlightenment possibility infused botany with a sense of potential, when environmental concerns were only beginning to burgeon, and when the botanist/explorer was a respected curiosity, but not quite yet a media personality. Deleuze memorialized the late botanist’s exploration of North America in heroic terms. “I will not stop to describe,” he wrote somewhat disingenuously, “the dangers which our traveler ran in these solitudes where he had constantly to climb the sharp rocks, wade through torrents, walk on the bodies of rotten trees which sunk under his steps, where a frightful obscurity reigns in the forrest [sic], an obscurity produced by the thickness of the trees and by the vines and briars which unite their branches, and still more by an almost continual fog which hangs over these humid mountains.” “When Michaux came to an agreeable place,” the intrepid botanist “would cut branches from trees and construct a little cabin, and
8 See Natalie Zemon Davis on Maria Sibylla Merian’s experience in Surinam: Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 9 For the most provocative examination of these questions, see Samir Boumediene, La Colonisation Du Savoir: Une Histoire Des Plantes Medicinaleś Du "nouveau Monde" (1492-1750) (Paris: Des Mondes à faire, 2016). 10 See Boumediene. For another interesting approach, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, “Weeping Willows and Dwarfed Trees: Plants in Chinese Gardens under Western Eyes,” in The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited byYota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, Anatole Tchikine (Dumbarton Oaks Symposia and Colloquia) (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017). 11 For these questions considered in a range of different geographical and cultural contexts, see noted anthologies including Yota Batsaki (Editor), Sarah Burke Cahalan (Editor), Anatole Tchikine (Editor), The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dumbarton Oaks Symposia and Colloquia) (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017); Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, editors, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
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after making small journies [sic] round it, he would there pass the night and deposit what he had collected.”12 Deleuze painted a picture of botanist as eighteenth-century action hero— the “Indiana Jones” of the natural world. And indeed, Michaux’s journals in many ways bear this out. He shot bears in Appalachia, killed snakes in South Carolina, and battled alligators in Florida. Though even after many years of experience gleaned in the field, his journals narrate as much misery and suffering as heroics. In August 1795, by which time he had become a seasoned explorer of America, while traveling west through Kentucky on his way to Illinois, he recorded,
C’est de tous les Voyages que j’aye fait en Amerique depuis 10 ans un des plus penibles par la multitude d’Arbres renversés, par les ouragans, par les broussiaille épaisses que l’on est oblige de traverser ; par la quantité de Tiques dont est dévoré & c. Le 14, le 15 et le Dimanche 16 Aoust je fus obligé de me reposer étant arrive Presque malade. Mon cheval est santant pour passer sur de tronc d’un gros arbre renversé, tomba et me jeta à une grande distance et je fus pendant plusi. [sic] jours incommodé d’une blessure au pas de la Poitrine vers la coté gauche parce que la batterie de mon fusil avait porté sur cette partie.”13
In one particularly difficult spell in January 1796, as he traveled east from St. Louis to Virginia, he reported that his horse fell lame and he
[. . . fu[t] oblige d’aller a pied je fis 12 miles. Il me fut impossible de faire du feu les arbres et les bois étoient tout en verglas: Je passé toute la nuit Presque gelé. A peu pres vers les 2 heurs la Lune étant levee je pris la parti de retourner chez Mac Faddin; j’y arrivary du Matin.
12 DeLeuze, “A Brief Narrative of the Life and Travels of Andrew Michaux, a Celebrated French Botanist. Translated from the original of M. De Leuze,” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 21 July 1804. 13 Michaux’s journals, which are housed in the American Philosophical Society, were published by the American Philosophical Society in 1889. André Michaux and C.S. Sprague, “Journal of André Michaux, 1793-1796” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 1889, 121. Quotations from the journal are from the 1889 edition. Portions of his journal were translated into English in 1904 for inclusion in a series of early American travel narratives: André Michaux and Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Journal of André Michaux. Englished from the original French, appearing in American Philosophical Society. Proceedings, 1889, [Cleveland, Ohio : The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904]. However, my own English translations can be found in the footnotes.
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Le 27 étant accablé de froid et de lassitude, ayant marche a pied, nayant pas mange depuis la veille au matin et nayant pas dormi pendant la nuit: . . . survint une inflammation aux doigts du pied droit. Je trompay mes pieds dans de l’eaux froide pendant tout la nuit suivante a plusi. Reprises et il ne resulte pas de playes mais pendant plusieurs les doigts des pieds furent . . .et comme privé de sensation..”14
Having averted a serious case of frostbite, he made his way to the plantation of George Madison, second cousin of James Madison and future first governor of Kentucky:
Son epouse encherit à me procurer tout les services de l’hospitalité qui est très rare à rencontrer en Amerique, excepté chez les personnes d’une education sup. À celle du commun des habitans. Cette Dame me proposa de faire usage de chausson de laine grossière par dessus les souliers. Elle me tailla elle même une paire et je fus tellement surprise des avantages q. j’éprouvay les jo. Suivans q. je resolus de ne plus voyager au temps des neiges et des gelées sans être précautionné d’une paire dans mon Porte Manteau.15
Several days later, he happily recorded in his journal that he “mangeai du pain de Bled po. la première fois q. j’étois parti des Illinois.”16 When not ailing, starving, or battling the elements, he faced continual frustration with eighteenth-century modes of transportation. In entry after entry, Michaux reported difficulties with horses. On the 25th of September 1794 he found
14 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 86-87. “I was obliged to walk. I did 12 miles. I was unable to make a fire because the trees and wood were all icy. I passed all the night nearly frozen. About 2 o’clock the Moon rose and I decided to return to MacFaddin’s [where he had spent the night before]; I arrived at 10 o’clock in the morning. The 27 being overwhelmed with cold and weariness, having walked on foot, having not eaten since the previous morning and having not slept during the night: the toes on my right foot became inflamed. I bathed my feet in cold water several times during the night and no sores developed but for several days the toes were numb and felt deprived of sensation.” 15 Michaux, Journal (1889), 131. « His wife His wife obliged me with all the services of hospitality which is very rare to find in America, except in persons of a superior education. To that of the common people. This lady proposed to me to use coarse wool slippers over [worn] the shoes. She cut for me a pair and I was so surprised by the advantages [of wearing them] that I resolved not to travel in the snow and frost without taking the precaution of [keeping] a pair in my portmanteau. » 16 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 132. He recorded in his journal that he “ate wheat bread for the first time since he left Illinois.”
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that, having stayed at an inn with no stable, his horse had wandered away.17 And on the 15th of May 1795, “Pendant la nuit mon cheval s’est échappé. Le 16, Dimanche 17, 18 employé à chercher mon cheval. Le 19 acheté un autre cheval. . . ”18 In January 1796 he recorded: “Le 15 acheté un cheval au prix de cent Dollars. Le 16 parti; mon cheval m’échappa et je le rattrappay à 6 Miles de Clark’s ville au Moulin, 10 Miles.”19 Michaux’s journal bears witness to the fact that the work of the botanist was physical. It required trekking into sparsely settled wildernesses, with few comforts, little protection from the elements, uneven command of local languages, and dangers of both natural and manmade origin. Though tethered to his “mother country” via the tentacles of the “colonial machine,” field work of the colonial botanist proved a dangerous and largely solo affair: unlike some colonial scientific expeditions like that of Nicolas Baudin, he was not part of a large team. Rather, Michaux arrived in New York City in late 1785 accompanied only by a gardener, Paul Saunier, who cared for the specimens Michaux gathered before they were to be shipped back to France.20 Michaux was joined by his young son, François André Michaux, who would become a noted botanist in his own right. Indeed, his son’s North American Sylva would become one of the most important early books on American trees.21 Navigating “new” worlds meant risking the health and life of himself and his son for the sake of knowledge and curiosity. Local workforces, however, helped him navigate these dangers and gather important information: enslaved Africans labored at his Charleston, South Carolina garden. Native Americans were often hired as guides and porters. In August 1795, for example, he recorded that “Je n’avoir d’autre copagnie qu’un Sauvage et sa femme. J’avois loué le Sauvage po. dix Piatres et je lui promis deux Piastres de plus po. l’engager à porter sur son cheval tout mon baggage.”22 Though Michaux did note Native
17 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 43. 18 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 58. On the 15th of May 1795, “During the night my horse escaped. The 16th, Sunday the 17th, 18th spent searching for my horse. The 19th bought another horse.” 19 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 85. “The 15th bought a horse for one hundred dollars. Departed; my horse escaped from me and I caught him at 6 Miles from Clarksville at the Mill, 10 Miles.” 20 For more on Saunier, see William J Robbins and Mary Christine Howson, "André Michaux's New Jersey Garden and Pierre Paul Saunier, Journeyman Gardener," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102, no. 4 (1958): 351-70. 21 For an exploration of the American adoption of the French study of American trees, see Lisa Ford, “The ‘naturalisation’ of François André Michaux’s North American sylva: patriotism in early American natural history,” in in Invaluable trees: cultures of nature, 1660-1830, edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. SVEC 2012:08. 22 Michaux, Journal (1889), 121. He recorded that “I have no other company but a Native American [« Sauvage » is the word he uses] and his wife. I have paid the Native American
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American plant uses, names, and knowledge, and recorded numerous occasions when he relied upon Native American guides, he never referred to any of them by name in his notes.23 Though Michaux’s journal presents a faithful narrative of the adventures and sufferings of the botanist, it also provides a glimpse into his approach to the work, ultimately revealing the many dimensions of a successful eighteenth- century botanist. Over the course of the decade he spent in North America, Michaux gathered many thousands of specimens that he planted in his two nursery gardens in (now) Hoboken, New Jersey, and Charleston, South Carolina. France further welcomed thousands of his American plants to the royal gardens at Rambouillet and the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Michaux’s journal narrated this botanical work as he trekked across the new United States. In 1793, on his way from Danville to Louisville, Kentucky, he recorded in his journal, “Les environs sont très interessants à etre visité par un Botanist.”24 I have written elsewhere about the irony of the comment, given that Michaux was, himself, a botanist, in context of the political mission he was carrying out at the moment. But the comment also offers an entry into what it meant for Michaux the Botanist to “visit” a neighborhood. Though it might seem simplistic to rely on Michaux’s own words to analyze how he understood his work, his words provide the key to how he “herborized” or “botanized” his way across America.
Herborisé
In his journal, Michaux documents his botanical field work with the verb “herboriser.” The 1694 edition of Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines Herboriser as “Aller dans les champs, dans le bois ou dans les jardins, pour reconnoistre les herbes & les cueillir.” “Il fait beau aller herboriser aujourd’huy.”25
10 piastres and have promised him two piastres more for carrying my baggage on his horse.” 23 There are many examples of Europeans seeking local or “native” knowledge of plants, animals, insects, and geology to build their own. See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis on Maria Sibylla Merian’s experience in Surinam: Natalie Zemon Davis, Women On the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also the work of Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine In the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 2017). For an erudite and challenging exploration of the intellectual engagement of local knowledge by European naturalists and thinkers, see Samir Boumediene, La Colonisation Du Savoir: Une Histoire Des Plantes Medicinaleś Du "nouveau Monde" (1492-1750) (Paris: Des Mondes à faire, 2016). 24 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 96-97. Michaux wrote, “The neighborhood would be very interesting for a Botanist to visit.” 25Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), “herboriser.”
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By the 1762 fourth edition, the definition had become more specific with regard to the purpose of “herborizing”: “Aller dans les champs, dans les bois ou dans les jardins chercher des herbes & des plantes, soit par pure curiosité, soit pour s’en servir aux usages auxquels elles sont propres pour la Médecine.”26 This evolving definition is of course closer to what Michaux was doing. For example, in 1796 he wrote,
“Le 11 [Mars] herborisé sur la rive opposée bordée de roches escarpées couverts de Saxifrage, Ombellifere bulbeux &c.” Le 12 continué à herboriser. . . . E 14 herborisé: vu en fleur, Anemone hepatica; Claytonia Virginica; Sanguinaria.”27
“Herborizing,” or “botanizing,” meant visiting locations, observing the plants there, identifying them, and recording them in his journal. But it was also more than the sum of these activities. In another passage he wrote,
Vu nouveau genre de Plante designé par Linn. Podophyllum diphyllum et découvert il y a q. q. années en Virginie en passant par le Fort Chissel. Cette Plante est moins rare dans les fertiles terreins du Kentuckey et de Cumberland. Elle se trouve aux environs de Knoxville. Le Dr Barton lui a donné le nomme de Jeffersonia dans une description qu’il a donnée de cette Plant après avoir vu la fleur des Plants que j’avois rapporté à Philadelphie chez la Botaniste Bartram. Le temps de la fleur aux environs de Knoxville est vers le 10 Mars.28
Here, he observed a plant he already knew [reconnu]. In identifying it, he connected it to the (by now) definitive Linnaean classification system, placed it geographically in North America, accounted for its scarcity, and reported its
26 Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762), “herboriser.” 27 Michaux, Journal (1889), 136. “The 11“Le 11th [of March] herborized on the opposite bank of the river bordered with steep rocks covered with saxifrage, bulbous Ombelliferous & c. Le 12 continued to herborize. The 14th herborized : saw in bloom, Anemone hepatica; Claytonia Virginica; Sanguinaria.” 28 Michaux, Journal (1889), 136. “Saw a new kind of plant designated by Linnaeus Podophyllum diphyllum and discovered a few years ago in Virginia in passing by Fort Chissel. This plant is less rare in the fertile soils of Kentuckey and Cumberland. It is found in the environs of Knoxville. Dr. Barton gave it the name of Jeffersonia in a description he gave of this Plant after having seen the flower of the plants that I had brought back to Philadelphia at the Botanist Bartram’s. The time it is in flower around Knoxville is around March 10th.”
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history (part of which he had written) in context of the “larger” scientific community. So here (in Tennessee), he found another example of a plant that he had first discovered in Virginia, given to the preeminent American botanist Bartram, who had shown it to Benjamin Barton, who, among other things, was affiliated with the American Philosophical Society.29 Botanizing [herborizing] was, therefore, connecting a plant to a larger scientific community. But doing so also required that botanizing [herborizing] be conducted between cultures: In October 1795, Michaux noted:
Arbres et Plantes aux environs sur les Rives de l’Ohio. Plantanus occidentalis par les Americains Sycamore, et par les françs-Illinois cotonnier; Populus par les Am. Coton tree et par les français-Illinois Liard: Celtis occid. Par les Am. Hackberry tree et par les françs. Bois inconnu; Liquidambar styraciflua par les français de la Louisiane Copalm et par les Am . . .
He wrote further, “Un François qui commerçoit chez les Sauvages Cheroquis s’est gueri de la Galle en buvant pendant dix jours la decoction des Copeaux de cet arbre qu’il nommoit Copalm et qui est le vrai Liquidambar. . . .”30 Here, Michaux accounted for the plants’ Linnaean name, offered up a cross cultural comparison by recording American, and regional French-North American names, and then recorded a Cherokee use of the tree that had been adapted or adopted by a French trader. As Michaux, the French botanist, gathered plants for his country, he recorded the ethnobotany of a North America in cultural, agricultural, and geopolitical flux. Sometimes botanizing meant testing: “Le Dimanche 3 Grand vent: Nyssa montana est nommé par les Cr. Franç [French Creoles] Olivier Sauvage et par les Americains Kentuckiens Black Gum tree et par les Americaines Pensylavaniens Tupelo: N’ayant pas d’occupation, j’ai fait de l’encre avec des noix de galle que je recueillis sur les Chênes dans les environs du lieu ou nous étions campé; celle-ci
29 Bartram was of course a member of the vaunted Bartram family of Philadelphia, whose collections served as the North American hub of botany in the Atlantic world. Benjamin Barton refers to Benjamin Smith Barton, Philadelphia medical doctor and botanist who authored the first American botanical textbook. He was an officer in the American Philosophical Society. 30 Michaux, Journal (1889), 125-126. “Trees and plants in the vicinity of the Ohio River banks. [Called] Plantanus occidentalis by the Americains Sycamore, and by the French- Illinois cotonnier; Populus by the Americans Coton tree and by the French-Illinois Liard: Celtis occid. by the Americans Hackberry tree and by the French. Wood unknown ; Bois inconnu; Liquidambar styraciflua by the French in Louisiana Copalm par les français de la Louisiane Copalm et par les Americans [the same thing]. He wrote further, “A Frenchman who traded with the Cherokee has been cured of Galle by drinking for ten days a concoction of the chips of this tree which he named Copalm and which is the real Liquidambar. . . . »
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fut faite en moins de cinq minutes et me servira d’échantillon.”31 The gathering, observing, and testing in the field was manual work, but it always meant analyzing and establishing a plant in a larger scientific framework and cultural environment. Even when working in solitude in the wilderness, botanizing was done in conversation with a larger community, even if that conversation was supplied by books, which Michaux carried into the field, despite often difficult conditions. On the 28th of August 1795 he wrote, “Je souhaitois d’autant plus d’avancer qu’il pleuvoit tous les jours. J’avois deja été oblige de faire secher au feu, une fois mon baggage qui avoit été complettement mouillé particulièremt quatre livres de Botanique, Minerologie qui j’avois avec moi, n’ayant pas voulu les exposer au hazard de la Rivièrre, ayant envoyé par les Mississippi deux Malles, contenant Papier gris, Poudre, Plumb, Alum, Bôites à recueillir des Insectes et tous les objets necessaires à faire des Collections de Plantes, d’Animaux, d’Insectes et de Mineraux.”32 The necessity of books demonstrates the necessity of placing the plants he studied in larger context.
Visité
The dialogue further extended to personal encounters, networking, and “visiting” to the generation of botanical knowledge. In a sequences of entries from 1794 he wrote,
Le 3 j’ay été informé de me preparer au voyage de la Caroline et j’ay ete prevenir Bartram le Botaniste de me donner la liste des Plantes qu’il desire. Le 4 Janvier 1794 j’ay visité le Dr. Barton et il m’a preté le Systema Naturae de Linn. Le 7 j’ay continue l’Extrait du Systema Naturae. Le 8 et le 9 j’ay continue le même ouvrage.33
31 Michaux, Journal (1889), 129. “Sunday the 3rd Great Wind: Nyssa montana is named by Creole. French Olivier Sauvage and the American Kentuckians Black Gum tree and the American Pennsylvanians Tupelo: Having no occupation, I made ink with gall nuts that I collected on the Oaks in the surroundings of the place where we were encamped; it was done in less than five minutes and will serve me as a sample.” 32 Michaux, Journal (1889), 122. “I hoped all the more to proceed as it rained every day. I had already been obliged to dry by the fire, my baggage that was thoroughly wet particularly four books of Botany, Mineralogy that I had with me, as I had not wanted to expose them to the hazard of the river, having sent by the Mississippi two trunks, containing gray Paper, Powder, Lead, Alum, Boxes for collecting Insects and all the objects necessary to make Collections of Plants, Animals, Insects, and Minerals.” 33 Michaux Journal, (1889), 102. The 3rd I was informed to prepare to travel to Carolina and I was informed by Bartram the Botanist of the list of Plants that he desired.
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In this sequence he reported first visiting Dr. Barton. And from Dr. Barton, he was able to engage with a copy of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae.34 Michaux was therefore in dialogue with American and European botanists, his scientific peers, as he conducted his work. The French had encouraged Michaux’s predecessors in search of North American botanical knowledge to befriend American elites, as they assumed that landowning went hand in hand with botanical curiosity and familiarity. D’Angiviller, director of the Batiments du Roi, instructed Louis Guillaume Otto, French secretary to La Luzerne in Philadelphia, and then chargé d’affaires in New York, to reach out to “large landowners” in America who might be presumed to be botanically knowledgeable about North American plant life.35 To a certain extent, the French were right, and Michaux also “visited” with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, as well as the more botanically rigorous Bartrams and Bartons. In fact, he visited George Washington in his first year in North America. His arrival at Mount Vernon on June 19, 1786 had been preceded by a letter of introduction to Washington from Washington’s dear friend, the Marquis de
The 4th of Januayr 1794 I visited Dr. Barton and he gave me the Systema Naturae of Linneaus. 7th I continued [to copy] an excerpt of Systema Naturae.” The 8th and 9th I continued the same work. ». 34 Michaux’s work incorporated Linnaean classification. James Reveal and James Pringle assess Michaux’s use of Linnaeus: “Michaux's book used a modification of the Linnaean and Jussieu styles as promoted by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778--1841) in his revision of [Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de]Lamarck's Flore Françoise... (ed. 3, 5 vols., Paris, 1805). Michaux illustrated some of his new genera and gave precise habitat information. He did not, however, include keys, the shorthand method for identification that Lamarck had developed in an earlier edition of the Flore. Michaux had talked with Barton and visited his garden. Consequently, unlike the works of Linnaeus that were still in common use, Michaux's was based on firsthand observation and a careful comparison of his specimens against those used by others who had named plants previously. This work prodded Barton to proceed with his flora, a small part of which had been published in London in 1787 as Observations on Some Parts of Natural History..., Part 1. Criticisms of Michaux's work abounded. Barton was not satisfied, and he urged his students and colleagues into the field to collect the new species that he knew existed to the west. [Frederick Traugott] Pursh, then in London, published Flora Americae Septentrionalis... in 1814 (2 vols., London). Similar in format to Michaux's work, this one included the new species collected by Barton, by Pursh for Barton, and by Meriwether Lewis (1774--1809), President Jefferson's personal secretary, who was in the Far West as part of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804--1806.” See James L. Reveal and James S. Pringle, “CHAPTER 7: Taxonomic Botany and Floristics in North America. North of Mexico: A Review,” in Flora of North America, Vol. 1, http://floranorthamerica.org/Volume/V01/Chapter07. 35 Otto to Angiviller, 27 October 1785, New York, Série O12113, Archives Nationales, Paris (microfilm at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia).
Journal of the Western Society for French History André Michaux, French Botanist 36
Lafayette. Washington’s interest in plants was already known: Lafayette had contacted Washington for American seeds on behalf of Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur. Michaux stayed in contact with Washington after the visit, sending him seeds on June 20 (which Washington planted on 29 June and 1 July) from the French king’s garden.36 Wrote Michaux to Washington, “ I will accept of the Offer, that you made me, in Sending to your Care the Collections that I Shall make in the Distant Countries for the use of the King of France.” In other words, Michaux promised to share. Similarly, Michaux “networked” with Thomas Jefferson and other members of the American Philosophical Society, so that in 1793 when it seemed that the new French republican government might not be willing to continue his mission, he negotiated with Jefferson terms by which he would explore the American West, to the Pacific Ocean, on behalf of the American Philosophical Society. Ordinary Americans, who knew the land and used the plants he studied, also dialogued with Michaux. At times, he touted their locally grown expertise: “Il croit dans les environs une plante de la famille des Orchis dont la feuille persiste tout l’hiver. Il y en a rarement deux; la forme est ovale, sillonné, entirère; la racine porte deux à trois bulbes très visqueuses. L’on s’en set dans le Pays pour rejoinder la fayence cassée. Elle est nommée Adam & Eve.”37 And as he trekked further and further into the wilds of North America, he relied upon those who knew the territory: in February 1796, recorded that he “[a] [v]u des voyageurs français qui toute leur viessont occupés au Commerce des Sauvages et demandé les Conditions po. avoir un Guide pour remonter la riv. Missouri. L’un d’eux nommé . . me dit qu’il s’engageroit volontiers p. un an aux prix de 500 piast. en pelteries c.a.d. 1000 p. en argt: un autre me demanda 2000 en argt.”38 But he was not averse to calling out those “locals” and “natives” whom, he believed, made ill use of their natural resources: he would write in his history of American oaks that settlers frequently used black oak in the construction of “zigzag” fences: “La grande consommation de bois qui résulte de cette mauvaise manière d’enclore les terres, ne contribue pas
36 Michaux to Washington, 20 June 1786. See Founders.archive.gov. Washington recorded planting “seeds of the Jerusalem thorn and pyramidal cypress, pistachio nuts, evergreen buckthorn trees, phillyrea latifolia shrubs, and golden chain trees.” See George Washington Diaries, 4.354, 5:1. 37 Michaux, Journal (1889), 133. “It is believed that in the vicinity is a plant in the Orchis family whose leaves persist through winter. There are rarely two ; the form is oval, furrowed, whole ; the root bears two to three very viscous bulbs. It us unsed in the Country to repair broken pottery. It is named Adam & Eve.” 38 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 134-5. « Saw French travelers who had spent all of their lives in Trade with Native Americans and inquired the Conditions on which I could have a Guide for taking me up the Missouri river. One of them . . told me he would willingly engage for a year for the price of 500 piastres in furs, that is to say, 1000 piastres in silver ; another demanded 2000 in silver. »
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moins à la destruction des forêts, que les incendies annuels,”39 a Native American practice. While Michaux did not go so far as to critique colonial practices for the destruction of ecosystems as Alexander von Humboldt would do just a few years later, Michaux was conscious of the wasting of natural resources by colonists overwhelmed by their seeming plenty.40
Mettre en ordre
When Michaux was in the field, he also necessarily dedicated time to organizing the seeds and samples he collected:
January 1794: “pour retirer et mettre en Ordre mes Collections.”41 November 1795: “Le 15 mis en ordre mes Collections de grains. Le 16 même occupation.”42
In February 1796 he wrote, “Le 20 occupé toute la journée à réunir et emballer mes collections.”43 This brief description obscures Michaux’s intense preparations, searching for the right material that would preserve his specimens as they crossed the ocean to France—eventually, he wrote excitedly to his superiors that he had discovered a source of moss on Long Island that would do the job.44 He also botanically organized all of his specimens. The examples of pressed leaves and packaged acorns, preserved in the collection of the Museum national d’histoire naturelle, are testimony not only to the care Michaux took to label and package the samples, but also the materiality of the work in the field as a means of “collecting” knowledge of the botanical world. How to make a record of what was found was a constant challenge to Michaux and his contemporaries. Botanists might cultivate their own talents as artists and work to produce accurate drawings and paintings of specimens
39 Michaux, Histoire des Chênes de l’Amérique, ou Descriptions et Figures de toutes les espèces et variétiés de Chênes de l’Amérique Septentrionale, Considérées sous les rapports de la Botanique, de leur culture et de leur usage, 14-15. “The great consumption of wood that results from this bad manner of enclosing the fields, contributes no less to the destruction of the forests, than the annual fires.” 40 For more on Humboldt’s work as it contributed to modern environmentalism, see Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). 41 Michaux, Journal (1889), 102. January 1794: “to remove and put in Order my Collections.” 42 Michaux, Journal, (1889), 126. November 1795: “The 15th put in order my Collection of seeds. The 16th the same occupation.” 43 Michaux, Journal (1889), 134. In February 1796 he wrote, “The 20th occupied all day assembling and packing my collections.” 44 Michaux to Nolin, New York, Série O12113, Archives Nationales, Paris (microfilm at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia).
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as they found them in the field, or engage artists to accompany them on their missions,45 to document what they found. Michaux did neither. His publications would be illustrated by the renowned artist Rédoute in Paris, but with the supervision of François André Michaux. Michaux, like his contemporaries, preserved dried specimens of the plants and collected examples of their fruits and nuts. Unlike his contemporaries, however, the more immediate military goals of his mission, sophistication of the French colonial machine, and relative stability of the new United States led to Michaux’s establishment of nursery gardens in New Jersey and South Carolina where live specimens were cultivated in large numbers for export to France. The “ordering” of the specimens included the botanical description of, but also tips for the successful cultivation of the specimens enclosed in each shipment. This “ordering” for his superiors in Paris was thus a crucial element to his enterprise.46
Écrire:
“Le 11 Janvier 1794 j’ay été occupé toute la journée à écrire.”47 Michaux’s mission had been negotiated at multiple points through the medium of print. Upon his arrival in the United States, Michaux’s establishment of his garden in New Jersey was reported in New Jersey and New York newspapers in overblown accounts, such as one appearing on 27 June 1787 in The New-Jersey Journal, and Political Intelligencer explaining that “An act has been passed by the assembly of this state for naturalizing his majesty the king of France [sic] in this state, as a preliminary to his making a purchase of thirty acres of territory on Bergen creek, nearly opposite the city of New-York, for the purpose of a garden and a fruitery.”48 The account continued with a description of the garden: “Part of this space is at present inclosing with a stone wall, and a universal collection of exotic, as well as domestic plants, trees and flowers, are already begun to be introduced to this
45 See the examples of Ian Glenn’s study of François Le Vaillant and Amy Myers on the Bartrams in Yota Batsaki (Editor), Sarah Burke Cahalan (Editor), Anatole Tchikine (Editor), The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dumbarton Oaks Symposia and Colloquia) (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017). 46 For a discussion of the various goals of his mission, see my work (cited above), as well as Meredith Martin, “Bourbon Renewal at Rambouillet,” in Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature, 1660-1830, edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and Giulia Pacini, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2012:08 and, for the larger institutional context of his mission, E.C. Spary, Utopia's Garden: French Natural History From Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime (Brespols). 47 Michaux .Journal, (1889),102. “The 11th of January 1794 I was occupied all day in writing.” 48 The New-Jersey Journal, and Political Intelligencer, 27 June 1787.
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elegant spot, which in time will rival if not exceed the most celebrated gardens of Europe.”49 The New Jersey garden was a purely utilitarian affair, but Americans wanted to imagine something grander would come of it. When Michaux traveled to the Bahamas, Nassau newspapers announced his arrival:
The field offered to the botanist in these islands is extensive, and is [to?] a great degree unexplored. This task has been reserved for the industry of Mons. Michaux, a botanist employed by his most Christian Majesty whose discoveries in the vegetable world, in Persia, Arabia, and America, have placed him high in the estimation of Sir Joseph Banks, and other eminent naturalists of our country, as well as those of France. This gentleman lately arrived here from South-Carolina, and in his researches on this island has already been so successful as to collect about three hundred plants, many of them very inaccurately described by former botanists, and some that had entirely escaped their observation. With the liberality characteristic of men of science, M Michaux has promised to give us, for the information of our readers, whatever may occur to him as new, and usual to be known respecting the properties of the natural productions of the Bahamas.50
In a similar, but a more geo-politically commercial vein, when his botanizing took him across the Appalachian Mountains and into what would become the state of Tennessee, Michaux personally wrote to William Blount, governor of the western territory, to report his discoveries. In his journal, he recorded that on the 2nd of March 1796 that
Le 2 sejourné afin d’arracher des jeunes Plants d’un Sophora nouveau q. j’avois remarqué aux environs de Fleen’s creek à 12 M. à peu près du Fort. La neige couvroit la terre et je ne pus avoir des jeunes Plants, mais le Capit. William, le jeune qui residoit au Fort coupa quelques arbres et je trouvay q. ques bonnes grains. J’ arrachay aussi des raciness de ces arbres afin de les replantes dans mon jardin en Caroline. Le même jour j’eux occasion d’écrire au Gouverneur Blount.51
49 The New-Jersey Journal, and Political Intelligencer, 27 June 1787. 50 “Nassau (N.P. March 21),” The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 28 April 1789, 2. 51 Michaux, Journal (1889), 134-5. “2nd I stayed in order to gather young Plants from a new Sophora I had noticed in the vicinity of Fleen’s creek about 12 Miles from the Fort. The snow covered the ground and I could not have young Plants, but Captain Williams, the young man who resided at eth Fort cut some trees and I found some good seeds. I also tore the roots of these trees to replant them in my garden in Carolina.
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The writing to which he referred was a letter to Blount about this very tree that he identified as a species in the sophora genus, which he compared to “sophors” found in China and Japan. He addressed the governor writing, “Knowing the warm interests you take in all researches relating to the public good—I have the pleasure to announce to you an [sic] useful discovery,” and explaining excitedly that in China and Japan, the sophora was “employed in those countries for dying, and lately introduced into the botanical gardens of Europe.” The letter to Blount made its way into print, appearing in a number of newspapers, including the Columbian Herald or, the New Daily Advertiser in Charleston, South Carolina.52 Michaux therefore intended that his scientific work enter the public sphere, and to be part of the public scientific conversation in the larger Atlantic World. When Michaux was finally recalled to France in 1795, Michaux began the process of writing his two books on North American plant life, Histoires des Chênes de l’Amérique, ou Déscriptions et Figures de Toutes Espèces et Variétés des Chênes de l’Amérique Septentrionale and Flora Boreali-Americana.53 The publication of the volumes in 1801 and 1803, respectively, meant that in printing the fruits of his labors, Michaux made the scientific information available to the reading public. When the Histoire des Chênes de l’Amérique was published, it was announced in American newspapers from Portland, Maine to Charleston, South Carolina. Multiple papers ran the announcement that read:
Andre Michaux has lately published in Paris the Natural History of the Oaks of North America. It contains figure sand descriptions of twenty species and a number of varieties. Citizen Michaux traversed America for 11 years together, from the 27th to the 58th degree of lat. from Bahama Islands and the Capes of Florida to Hudson’s Bay, comprising a space of 750 leagues, and penetrated into the country more than 460 leagues. The French government having nominated him to perform a part in the expedition of Citizen Boudin, he has left to his son the care of publishing his manuscripts, among which is a relation of his Travels and a History of the plants of America.54
The same day I had the opportunity to write to Governor Blount.” 52 Columbian Herald or, the New Daily Advertiser (Charleston, South Carolina), 12 May 1796, 3. 53 See Histoire des chênes de l’Amérique; ou, Descriptions et figures de toutes les espèces et variétés de chênes de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris: De l’Impr. De Crapelet, 1801) and Flora Boreali-Americana, sistens caracteres plantarum quas in America septentrionali collegit et detexit (Paris: Typis Caroli Crapelet; Parisiis [the Latin form is listed in the book] et Argentorati, Apud fratres Levrault, 1805). 54 See, for example, The Universal Gazette (Washington, District of Columbia), 16 December 1802, 1.
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By the time this notice was published, however, Michaux was dead: he succumbed to a fever in 1802 while conducting field work in Madagascar. His death would eventually be reported in French, English, and American newspapers and would lead to the tribute with which this essay began. He was never a celebrity of the sort that Alexander von Humboldt would become just a few years hence, but the journalistic reporting of his publications together with the newspaper announcements of his death speaks to the development of public scientific curiosity—even in the peripheries, and speaks to the continued—and growing— public interest in exploration. His example also, however, showcases the complex interconnectedness of the work on the periphery, even while in the field, to both local networks of knowledge and the networks emanating from the metropole. Michaux had spent almost the entirety of his career on expedition and working in the field, yet his example illuminates the cosmopolitan perspective of the eighteenth-century botanist. Working in the field and on the edge of the settled world, Michaux was simultaneously adventurous, bookish, politically astute, and media savvy, as well as a careful observer of people, and a forward-thinking analyst of natural resources. And it was that cosmopolitan perspective and forward- thinking outlook that allowed him to engage with the geopolitical and botanical needs of his country and his age.
Journal of the Western Society for French History