Fretting over Federalism: Reexamining Allegorical Indian Architecture in William Bartram's Travels

Abstract

William Bartram (1739–1823), early America's preeminent naturalist, was a worrier. He was a pacifist during the most violent years of the American Revolution; he was quiet, even private, in a family and society that valued public oratory and theatricality. William's father, John Bartram (1699–1777), was a friend to the luminaries of the Revolution and a founder of the American Philosophical Society. But John couldn't have been more different from, nor more disappointed in, his son. Of course, their interest in plants and nature was a deep similarity: John had been the leading horticulturalist of the previous generation. But the contrast of their natures, and their views on one vexing social group of the time—American Indians—was striking. John's father had been killed by Native Americans in the elder Bartram's youth, and John harbored an unrelenting grudge throughout his life, thinking of Indians as lazy, cruel savages (Slaughter xvii, 23). In contrast, William, in his time spent on the southern frontier in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, likely admired the nations of Native Americans he found in the southern regions more than any other white colonist in his time.1 William nonetheless believed that Native American cultures would have trouble remaining autonomous entities, and might never truly blend with white American society. If Native Americans would never become part of the American body politic due to whites' “injustice & avarice,” William indirectly advocates that Indians' governmental structures could still be included as part of the deeper American political lineage (Bartram, “Some Hints” 367).