Allegiance, Identities, and National Scientific Communities

Abstract

This chapter studies how individuals in the lower Mississippi Valley fashioned identities as men of science. It focuses on the 1790s to the 1810s, an era when several empires and other groups competed for power in the region. Local experts tried to benefit from circulating information among a variety of actual and potential patrons, and, in the process, they manipulated and blurred the boundaries between the United States’ scientific community and those of other polities competing for the borderlands. The chapter includes case studies of the Spanish naturalist and spy Thomas Power, the Scottish planter and astronomer William Dunbar, and the French engineer and slave trader Barthélémy Lafon. Their stories reveal how territorial expansion both added to, and exacerbated deep tensions within, the United States’ scientific community.