Worshipping Weeds: The Parable of the Tares, the Rhetoric of Ecology, and the Origins of Agrarian Exceptionalism in Early America

Abstract

A careful consideration of how colonial and early Americans discussed weeds lends insight into the ways that common settlers aligned agricultural expectations with ecological realities. Current examinations of transatlantic exchanges of floral biomass have done an admirable job of showing how desirable plants that explorers obtained (and sometimes purloined) on the periphery of the empire enhanced the commercial, medical, and biological interests of the metropolis. A sustained consideration of weeds, however, shifts the focus in valuable ways. For one, it offers a much needed “from the ground up” perspective on a ubiquitous, if not mundane, botanical reality that nearly every settler to some degree or another had no choice but to confront. For another, because weeds were plants that happened to have strong spiritual and metaphorical connotations as a result of the popular Parable of the Tare, they provide the historian a rare opportunity to explore how the spiritual implications of weeds interacted with new world secular rationalizations of them to make sense of a novel environment. And, finally, weeds effectively open the door to subsequent explorations of so many other pervasive ecological realities—insects, forest growth, water supplies, fertilizer availability—that helped lay the rhetorical foundation for an agricultural system that became exceptional in size, commercial orientation, and wastefulness.