Res Botanica Technical Report 2019-09-08

The Correspondence of George W. Clinton (1807–1885) and Jeanne C. Smith Carr (1842–1903)

P. M. Eckel Missouri Botanical Garden 4344 Shaw Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63110 and Research Associate Buffalo Museum of Science September 8, 2019

In January of 1865, Judge George W. Clinton of Buffalo, New York, was busy about his winter routine, writing in his combination day book and botanical journal, archiving or logging his day-to-day activities, contacts and experiences—a volume now archived in the Research Library of the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Clinton was a Judge of Buffalo’s Superior Court and member of the Board of Regents presiding over the University of the State of New York and its Education Department. He was President of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, which had been founded only three years previously in 1862. He was also one of the sons of New York State Governor DeWitt Clinton, who had presided over the building of the famous Erie Canal.

He was also busy about his correspondence, mailing packages of botanical specimens to his various correspondents in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Michigan, Maine, with “a letter of advice to each.” He had prepared, and perhaps edited, the botanical manuscript of a young and promising friend, John Paine Jr., soon to be published in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents. Clinton left by train from Buffalo for Albany, New York, to attend a Regent’s of the New York State University meeting. He continued his correspondences upon arrival in Albany where he found a letter from Professor Asa Gray “asking me to come in” to visit Gray in Boston. The New York State Herbarium was in the midst of transformation into a collection of national significance.

In January Clinton took a train to Boston and on the train chatted about botany and agriculture with a man associated with The Boston Cultivator, a farm journal. In Boston, he was directed to a streetcar stop, thence to Old Cambridge Station and, after a walk of 3/4 mile, reached Gray’s house on Garden Street. The next day was Sunday: Clinton went to the Episcopal Church and no work was performed in the Gray household. “Like a true man, he has family prayer in the morning, & says grace” (Clinton’s botanical journal).

In addition to visiting Gray’s herbarium, Clinton visited the Boston Society of Natural History, founded in 1830.

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Returning to Albany a week later, he attended morning worship at St. Peter’s Church, and later the Regent’s Meeting to, among other things, consider “Senator Cornell's offer to endow an Agricultural College &c. at Ithaca, with 300 acres of land & $500,000” (Clinton’s botanical journal).

That year, 1865, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White would found Cornell University. In that same year, Purdue University in Indiana, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Maine and the University of Kentucky would also be founded (Grun 1979).

Upon returning to Buffalo, Clinton continued to keep a brisk correspondence with botanists, people with botanical interests, exchange of specimens, and the identification of problem species.

In February, Clinton again attended a Regents meeting in Albany concerning complications regarding the Cornell proposition of the earlier month. Upon returning to Buffalo he continued his visits, recommendations, identifications and general correspondence, sending a packet of specimens off to Asa Gray.

Then, on March 8, Clinton wrote in his journal: “Mrs. Ezra R. Carr (wife of Prof. Carr) of Madison, Wis. left her card, at my house, in the afternoon, while I was in Court, with this endorsement: "Mrs. Carr introduces herself as a botanical friend of Miss Mary Clark of A. Arbor, Mr. Lapham of Wis., and Col. Jewett, who wishes to make some botanical exchanges with Judge C. Is at Rev. Mr. Smith's, 70 Niagara. Called & had a pleasant chat with the lady.”

Jeanne C. Carr

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The next month, that April, the American Civil War would draw to a close. The Confederate States of America “formally surrender at Appomattox on April 9th.” Five days later, Abraham Lincoln would be assassinated. Jefferson Davis, who had been President of the southern Confederacy, would be captured and imprisoned (Grun 1979).

Mary Clark

Throughout the ensuing summer, Clinton would botanically scour the bogs and marshes of western New York, the environs of Buffalo, nearby Ontario in Canada, the islands in the Niagara River, Niagara Falls, sending mosses and fungi to his protégé, Charles H. Peck at the State Museum in Albany, New York, and putting up specimens for identification, sorting, and expressing off to his correspondents over the winter of 1866.

But Jeanne Carr did not return to Buffalo and never visited Clinton again.

Clinton took his role as Regent very seriously. He was very interested in not only the establishment of State or Territorial universities in the United States, but in lending his advice and influence to other regents at these young institutions, many of whom struggled against recalcitrant legislatures and sometimes not so honest individuals who interfered with the integrity of these institutions for political or financial reasons. He was also most interested in assisting young or established Natural History Societies in the larger cities of the United States and Canada.

Clinton used his exchanges and personal botanical collections to help found teaching herbaria, as, for example, he did with the young Purdue University (Eckel & Harby 2011). Doubtless Clinton was interested in meeting Jeanne, due to her endorsement by (her husband) Ezra Carr, 4

who was, in 1865, the Chair of Natural Sciences of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, involved with the Wisconsin state historical society, and member of the State Geological Survey. Clinton’s colleague James Hall was also a distinguished American geologist, later head of the New York State Geological Survey and leader of the process of overhauling the New York State Cabinet of Natural History as its Director. Hall himself was actually the state geologist for Wisconsin in 1857-1860 (Wikipedia “James Hall (paleontologist)” Sept. 2019).

Her endorsements, as Clinton noted in his journal, in public support or approval of her claim on Clinton’s attention while in Buffalo, derived from her husband, Ezra S. Carr, as mentioned. The University at Madison had been founded in 1848 in the same year of Wisconsin’s statehood (Wikipedia, “University of Wisconsin—Madison” Sept. 2019). Ezra would be given the Chair of Natural Sciences and to teach a course in agriculture, being the eighth out of eight faculty members. Ezra, like Clinton, would serve as a university regent from 1857–1859 (Wikipedia). Ezra was to abandon his faculty position, however, in 1867, two years after his wife’s visit to Buffalo, when he resigned (Gisel 2001).

Ezra Carr

After losing his position, the Carr’s “made a trip back east to visit friends and family” (Wikipedia, “Ezra S. Carr” Sept. 2019), and perhaps visit individuals in the eastern past of the State and New England. Jeanne Carr, in May of 1868, “decided to spend the summer in Vermont” (Gisel 2001). Jeanne Carr herself, born in Vermont had attended the Castleton Seminary in Castleton, Rutland Co., Vermont when she was nine years old (in 1834) (Gisel 2001). It is to Castleton that she withdrew after Madison, before the Carrs moved to California.

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Ezra’s connection to New York State began with his birth in Stephentown, Rensselaer Co., New York, and his education at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York. Stephentown, as a postal village in 1860, contained 15 houses (French 1860).

There is no record of Ezra Carr being a correspondent to Judge Clinton.

A second endorsement for Jeanne Carr came from Increase Allen Lapham (1811-1875), of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was a correspondent of Clinton’s, considered to be an “early pioneer” in Wisconsin, a scientist and scholar, and was born in New York State (Voss 1978). “He served as President of the State Historical Society and State Geologist” (Social Networks and Archival Context, “Increase Allen Lapham” Sept. 2019). Unlike “the transient explorer, passing through the state [of Wisconsin] and plucking plants along the route,” he was a “pillar of Milwaukee, promoting its growth and investing in real estate (Voss 1978). Lapham, who had been born in Palmyra, New York, was 13 years old when he worked on the Erie Canal out of Lockport in western New York State.

Increase Lapham

It is rather curious that in June, of 1865, after Mrs. Carr’s visit to Buffalo, Clinton received a letter from Lapham, which was a reply to an earlier letter Clinton had sent to him. Apparently Clinton’s earlier letter was one of the few contacts Clinton had made with Lapham, and no subsequent correspondence seems to have occurred. Clinton wrote his botanical journal that on April 19, 1864, Lapham had requested Clinton “to send copies of the circular of the Regents” to him. In the subsequent letter from Lapham, he informed Clinton that, although when younger he had “built up a large herbarium of some 24,000 specimens, both by his own collecting and by his exchanges” (Voss 1978), he no longer could “devote more time to the pursuits of Natural 6

Science, and to respond in a proper manner to all who desire information and specimens from this part of the world” (Lapham letter, June 13th, 1865, archives, Buffalo Museum of Science.

The endorsement of “Miss Mary Clark of A. Arbor” [Michigan], however, must have provoked a stronger reaction in Clinton because Clark was an avid correspondent of his. Clark, Miss Mary H. (1813-1875), Ann Arbor (P.O. Box 169), Michigan, had come to Michigan from New York in the fall of 1837 (Voss 1978). She founded in Ann Arbor, “(with her sister Chloe as vice-principal” The Misses Clark’s School ... “which she served as principal or headmistress.” “Miss Clark carried on an extensive botanical correspondence and exchange” (Voss 1978), she had written to Clinton extensively from October, 1865, to October 1870, and specimens were exchanged throughout this period.

As for Jeanne Carr herself, she was considered, or considered herself a botanist, having begun “to study botany at the age of seven and collected over four hundred species of plants that she pressed into an herbarium” (Gisel 2001). Her botanical studies were formalized when learning at the Castleton Seminary in Vermont, tutored by Dr. William Tully, a professor of the Medical College, although, as noted above, she began her learning there when she was nine years old. Later in Madison, Wisconsin, “she taught botanical science and cultivated plants for study as well as for beauty” (Gisel 2001). “The study of plants was for Carr fertile ground for friendships that harkened back to her experience with Tully in Vermont” (Gisel 2001). Mrs. Carr “was gregarious and gifted and the Carrs had a vast network of influential friends in the east. When [she and her husband] moved to California, they picked right up cultivating important relationships” (Wikipedia “Ezra S. Carr” Aug. 2019).

Her endorsements in Buffalo, and desire to establish a botanical exchange with Judge George Clinton were understandable. Although Jeanne Carr enjoyed the botanical side of nature, she perhaps sought its study primarily as a means to create social contacts. Both Jeanne and her husband were, by this ability, able to advance the career of a certain young man, John Muir, by “nurturing his contact with the elite classes of society in late nineteenth century United States” (Wikipedia “Ezra S. Carr” Aug. 2019), of which Judge Clinton might be considered a member. The Carrs were able to connect up their young man with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Asa Gray. Muir’s wilderness philosophies “resonated strongly among the wealthier classes of society (who were ... the only ones who could afford the expense of wilderness adventures in that era)” (Wikipedia, “Ezra S. Carr” Sept. 2019).

The young man was the environmentalist John Muir (1838–1914), considered to be the Father of the National Parks (Wikipedia “John Muir” Sept. 2019), the father of the environmental movement in the United States, and so on. Muir had a spectacular rise and success in his life which was particularly due to his intense relationship with Ezra and Jeanne Carr beginning in 1861 when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, when he was 22 years old. Muir never graduated, leaving the University in 1863 (Gisel 2001).

Neither of the Carrs was particularly important outside of their fabulous influence on the prodigious talents of the young Scotsman Muir.

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It is a curious coincidence that, in September, 1865, the month of Clinton’s sole letter from Jeanne Carr, printed below, there “began a correspondence [between John Muir and Jeanne Carr] that continued for thirty years” Gisel 2001) and which constituted a major collected work of great inherent literary value and which was to propel Muir into a systematic career of environmental philosophy. This correspondence was a kind of crucible in which Muir developed himself as an “ecological thinker, political spokesman, and religious prophet, whose writings became a personal guide into nature for countless individuals” (Wikipedia “John Muir” Sept. 2019).

It was on September 13, 1865, that Muir sent the first letter of what was to be his collected correspondence to Jeanne Carr from Trout’s Mills, near Meadford in Canada (West).

Also in September, on the 21st, 1865, Jeanne sent her sole letter to George Clinton:

______

NAME: Carr, Mrs. Jeanne C. V1: 1:172 Madison, Wis. [Clinton index Vol. 1] ______

V1: 1:172 [Two sheets of paper: J36 & J37] Madison, Wis. Sept. 21st, [1865]

My dear Sir.

I have not been living all these beautiful months with the sin of ingratitude upon my soul. Your kind letter with the new acquaintance (1) it brought to me found the wreck of a woman who meant to have been a botanist, a speechless, half paralyzed nondescript being whom Diphtheria (2) had stranded on the shores of life. Devotion to science took a new form, i.e. consumption of phospha[tes], and tender attentions to electrical sprites, who returned my caresses only when my patience & faithfulness had been sorely tried.

Restored at last to pen, (and alas to thimble also,) I turn gladly to acknowledge your kindness and shall make an early attempt to fill a list of Desiderata in the University Herbarium.

I regret the loss of the summer (3)—it has been of the most unusual character, and I could have made many valuable additions to our stock for exchanges. Never befell such a season to the Moss family. I meant to have gathered them in Superior regions (4), and such Fungi! When I could not take their portraits—(the plan I had in my mind)—they 8

seemed driven with work. Mr. Lapham (5) sent me Sullivant’s new "Icones Muscorum."—good enough to eat, while other friends were securing snipe and early vegetables for me.

Flowers reached me from all quarters, to serve the purposes of beauty only. Now, gentians (6) are on my table, who has sung gentians? Theodore Parker sent them annually to some lady of his love but I know of no other who has the grace to take the whole family to his heart. They are one of the races which have survived the fall—are in no need of regeneration.

I go tomorrow to the New Rhine Land, on the Wisconsin River, to perfect my recovery with the cure (7). I would like to send you an Eschol cluster (8) in return for your Scirpus (9), but as I shall be too far from the Express, please take this instead, from my private prayer book (10), with the Sincere and grateful esteem of

Your friend, Jeanne C. Carr.

"I thank Thee, O God, for the silent, quiet places on the hills, for the deep haunts of silence in the woods, when thy Spirit broods and rests, and which are full of Thy Presence. I thank thee for the wild luxuriance of the humble plants, which Thou hast created to cover the Nakedness of the Earth, with soft colors and forms of grace, declaring in this the exhaustless fullness of thy creative power and loving goodness.

I thank Thee, most blessed God, for the mosses and the ferns, the creeping vines and the gentle race of flowers, for these declare thine equal tenderness for great and small, and cure the fear of barrenness in the long ages to come, and even more than the vastness of the worlds, assure me of Thy sufficiency for the wants of all Thy creatures."

______

(1) This letter is in response to one sent by Clinton. Jeanne indicated a liason with Clinton to fill, through exchange, the gaps in species representation (i.e. the Desiderata) in the University Herbarium. This was the business she had with Clinton in Buffalo, especially specimens of Wisconsin mosses and fungi (for Mr. Peck in Albany). More particularly, Clinton sent her a botanical specimen with which to initiate a mutual exchange. There is presently no indication that Mrs. Carr sent any corresponding specimen in return.

(2) Diphtheria is a highly contagious disease and much bed rest in isolation is required to recover from it. Physical exertion is to be avoided if the heart has been affected. Jeanne does not refer to the pain and the difficulty swallowing that are symptoms of the disease. “The diphtheria bacterium was first identified in the 1880s by F. Loeffler, and the antitoxin against diphtheria was later developed in the 1890s” [emedicinehealth.com › diphtheria › article_em]. Today, 9

treatment involves the use of antibiotics and antitoxins not in existence in 1865, hence Jeanne’s reference to various nostrums. However, aluminum phosphate is an important part of modern diphtheria vaccines. Perhaps ‘electrical sprites’ refers to a kind of electrostatic .

(3) The loss of summer seems to indicate that Jeanne, due to her serious illness, which she treats as though it were beneath notice, did not collect any botanical specimens for exchange, as perhaps she had promised earlier in Buffalo. John Muir was not in evidence in Madison, being then in Canada, and when Jeanne received his first letter, “in September Carr wished Muir in the kernel of her home” (Gisel 2001).

(4) “Superior regions” is perhaps in reference to the Lake Superior region on the northern boundary of Wisconsin State. In 1850 Louis Agassiz and James Elliot Cabot published a book: Lake Superior: its physical character, vegetation, and animals, compared with those of other and similar regions. Clinton had dealings with Agassiz who had conducted a series of popular lectures in Buffalo, New York. The mosses again, were for the study by Charles H. Peck who would soon, however, turn his scholarly attentions to the fungi. Mrs. Carr perhaps was suggesting she intended to paint the fungi she might have seen, their “portraits.”

(5) Increase Lapham has been discussed above. Jeanne appears to be waited on by the famous while friends provided her with delicacies. She has a copy of William Starling Sullivant’s Icones Muscorum, published the year before in 1864. They are, perhaps, “good enough to eat” due to the 129 beautiful illustrations in an “imperial octavo volume.” Perhaps this volume was seen as an expensive picture-book.

(6) As if to emphasize the image of a languishing Victorian lady, Mrs. Carr suggests bevies of friends lavishing flowers on her, for beauty only, not for scientific purposes, which, presumably, would have been preferable.

Theodore Parker (August 24, 1810 – May 10, 1860) and Jeanne’s reference to “some lady of his love” alludes to an influential American Transcendentalist minister who, like Jeanne’s husband Ezra, was a reformer. Parker’s position during the American Civil War was as an abolitionist. He inspired speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., but Mrs. Carr was more impressed with his unhappy marriage, where “in 1840 he sought emotional release in the company of a neighboring woman, Anna Blake Shaw, who had a similar theology and temperament to his own, but the friendship was by all accounts not sexual. This attachment naturally increased problems at home, where he may have found it difficult to meet the emotional needs of his wife” (Wikipedia, Theodore Parker (Sept. 2019) after Grodzins 2002).

Again, Jeanne Carr seems to be indicating she has an interest and relationship to a scholastic interest in botany by suggesting that the gentians deserve taxonomic study. The purity of the gentians is pre-lapsarian, with intimations of a paradise before the disobedience before God when they lost their innocence. Note that it is in September when Gentians bloom.

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(7) Grape therapy, a form of naturopathic , is called ampelotherapy. At one time a diet heavy with , their seeds, leaves and parts of the vine was thought to cure . In modern times it is thought to have remarkable curative powers, in a cleansing (detox) type of diet.

(8) The Eschol cluster alludes to a Biblical reference: Numbers 13:232-24 and Numbers 32:9, Deuteronomy 1:24 where 12 spies inspected the valley of Eschol, wherein lay a brook, also the ‘grape-mounds’ near Beersheba, where they cut “gigantic clusters of grapes” together with pomegranates and figs, to take back to the camp of Israel “to show how goodly was the land which the Lord had promised for their inheritance." Easton, Matthew George (1897). "Eschol". Easton's Bible Dictionary (New and revised ed.). T. Nelson and Sons

(9) Perhaps intending to impress, Clinton may have sent the rare Scirpus Clintonii (now Trichophorum clintonii) “Clinton’s bulrush,” named for G. W. Clinton by none other than Asa Gray himself.

(10) Jeanne’s “private prayer-book” may be one in which she was the author of her own prayers, i.e. not authored by others, including the prayer presented at the end of her letter. Its loveliness is an example of the kind of transcendentalist sublimation of nature so central to the kind of prose she shared with the young Mr. Muir. In the end, this letter seems to be an exquisite but nevertheless pretentious attempt by a noble lady to make excuses for not doing her homework, i.e., preparing an exchange of specimens with Judge Clinton. There is no reference to Diphtheria, for example, in any of the letters compiled and edited by Bonnie Gisel (2001).

Literature Cited

Clinton, G. W. Botanical Journal. Archives of the Buffalo Museum of Science. 1862–1878.

Dippel, B. 2015, Oct. 25; Sheboygan History: Erie Canal helped Sheboygan. https://www.sheboyganpress.com/story/news/local/2015/10/23/sheboyan-history-eric-canal- helped-sheboygan/74216334/.

Eckel, P. M. and N. Harby. 2011. Correspondence of John Hussey (1831–1888) and George William Clinton (1807–1885). Notes on the early herbarium of Purdue University. Res Botanica, Missouri Botanical Garden Web site. http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/ResBot/hist/corrauth/HusseyClinton/1_HusseyClinton.ht m 2011.

French, J. H. 1860. Gazetteer of the State of New York. Syracuse N.Y. reprinted edition 1986, Heart of the Lakes Publishing, Interlaken, New York 14847.

Gisel, B. J. 2001. Kindred and Related Spirits, the letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr. University of Utah Press. Salt Lake City.

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Grodzins, D. Sept. 9, 2002. Theodore Parker. All material copyright Unitarian Universalist History & Heritage Society (UUHHS) 1999-2019 http://uudb.org/articles/theodoreparker.html

Grun, B. 1979. The Timetables of History, new, updated ed. Simon and Schuster. New York].

Voss, E. G. 1978. Botanical Beachcombers and Explorers: Pioneers of the 19th Century in the Upper Great Lakes. Contributions from the University of Michigan Herbarium Volume 13. Ann Arbor, Michigan. pp. i–v + 1–100.