Jefferson's Notes Research Articles

Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volumes 1 and 2: A Critical Edition ed. by Alexander von Humboldt

Reviewed by: Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volumes 1 and 2: A Critical Edition ed. by Alexander von Humboldt Lucas Nossaman (bio) Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volumes 1 and 2: A Critical Edition alexander von humboldt, edited by vera m. kutzinski and ottmar ette, translated by j. ryan poytner, kenneth berri, and vera kutzinski University of Chicago Press, 2019 Vol. 1, 586 pp.; Vol. 2, 634 pp. What is the relationship between New World colonialism and the sciences? These newly published volumes from the work of German polymath Alexander von Humboldt, the most celebrated scientist of the nineteenth century in Europe and the US, will help to nuance considerably the usual responses to that question. In The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (U of Chicago P, 2009), Laura Dassow Walls contended that the story of US national origins must include Humboldt to make sense of the nineteenth-century drive to explore, collect, and connect new knowledges of nature. But following her book's title, scholars have focused mainly on the impact of Humboldt's Cosmos (1845–59). These freshly translated and edited volumes, in effect the first of their kind in English since the nineteenth century, remind us that it was the earlier Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (particularly the revised French edition published from 1825 to 1827) that established Humboldt's reputation for combining knowledges of nature and human cultures into interconnected wholes. Susan Scott Parish and others have historicized the various modes of New World science, but many scholars continue to assume that most nineteenth-century European naturalists of the Americas followed Thomas [End Page 623] Jefferson's example: they erased Native presence, idealized the continents as pristine wildernesses, and hardened racial distinctions to justify white paternalism. New Spain, however, offers a glimpse of an alternative nineteenth-century tradition that saw intrinsic value in the land and people of the New World. Humboldt frames his proto-ecological understanding squarely against that of Columbus and Cortés: he pulls the imperialistic past into the present nineteenth century to imagine a future composed of diverse civilizations, racial harmony, and environmental stewardship. The question of whether his vision was ever fulfilled, or will be anytime soon, can direct us to consider how historical scientific literature both contributes to and contests our present world of climate change, global inequality, and racial injustice. To be sure, these particular volumes are not for the faint of heart. They consist primarily of statistical facts and forecasts concerning New Spain's "economy," capaciously understood at the time to include what we now understand as the fields of sociology, anthropology, archaeology, mineralogy, engineering, geography, and geology, among other sciences. Reading New Spain is a dizzying endeavor not only because today we expect facts in tighter analytical categories but also because, even at the time, Humboldt was expanding genre conventions to propose a more global perspective as he progressed toward what he would later call the Cosmos, his numinous term for the ecological chains of connection running through Earth, its people, and even the stars and planets above. For him, New Spain became a unique vista for witnessing the myriad forces shaping Earth's present form: "Nowhere can one better observe the admirable order with which different types of plant life succeed each other. … At every step, one sees changes in the physiognomy of the land, in the appearance of the sky, in the bearing of the plants, the shape of the animals, the customs of the inhabitants and the type of cultivation they practice" (1.409). When Humboldt imagined the web of nature, he grounded his ecological perspective in the facts he amassed during his field studies and archival research of Mexico. Scholars who persevere through these volumes will discover commentary that dissents from the scientific mainstream, and these passages could function as valuable pedagogical material for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on science, literature, and colonialism. For instance, when paired with Jefferson's Notes or Crevecoeur's Letters (Humboldt praises the former but also corrects it, in particular Jefferson's geographic coordinates [End Page 624] for the Presidio of Sante...

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Cheryl C. Boots. Singing for Equality: Hymns in the American Antislavery and Indian Rights Movements, 1640–1855.

Seldom utilized effectively by today's interpreters, hymns and metrical psalms are fundamental sources for the history of American religious culture. These ritual texts and their paired tunes were ubiquitous in colonial and antebellum America, legitimating cultural institutions and practices while also holding the potential to inspire change. In this ambitious study, Cheryl C. Boots explores hymns as agents of change before the Civil War and their role in the struggle to achieve racial equality for African Americans and Native Americans. Boots begins her survey with John Eliot's efforts to share Puritan psalmody with his indigenous “praying towns” in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and ends with hymn texts in the abolition fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Wells Brown. Along the way she offers short treatments of hymns in the work of Samson Occom, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, William Apess and Mary Apess, Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold Boudinot, Catherine Beecher, David Walker, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Maria Weston Chapman, and William Lloyd Garrison. She contrasts hymn use by these egalitarian writers with references to singing in white establishmentarian works like Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826). She also examines four important egalitarian hymnals, Occom's A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs: Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians of All Denominations (1774), Allen's The African Methodist Pocket Hymn Book (1816), the American Anti-Slavery Society's Freedom's Lyre (1840), and Brown's The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848).

Jefferson's Shadow: The Story of His Science by Keith Thomson (review)

Jefferson's Shadow: Story of His Science. By Keith Thomson. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pp. 321. Cloth, $35. 00.)Reviewed by Joan WitkinAmong the pursuits for which Jefferson is known and discussed today, his science is perhaps the least controversial. However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Jeffer son was at the center of raging disputes over the quality of life forms in the New World. He was passionate in his scientific inquiry, driven by a determination to demonstrate that the natural history of America was equal if not superior to that of Europe. Keith Thomson sets the story of Jeffer son's science in that historical context.A professor emeritus of natural history at Oxford University, Thomson is an executive officer at the American Philosophical Society, of which body Jeffer son once served as president. author's source of inspiration for Jefferson's Shadow was his tenure as a visiting fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello when he wrote A Passion for Nature, in the Monticello Monograph Series. He has written widely on natural history, paleontology, and evolution.Jefferson's life as a scientist began with his early education. Thomson attributes a part of his subject's propensity for observing, measuring, and cataloging to his parents. Peter Jefferson, a surveyor who was passionate about record-keeping, farmed a estate. Jane Randolph Jefferson came from a family of botanists and avid gardeners. From early in life Jefferson kept a garden diary and recorded meteorological observations. data he collected over the years made major contributions to the fields of natural history, climatology, geology, and paleontology.Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia was rich in observation and responsive to European curiosity about the New World. There was much misinformation on the Continent regarding the true nature of the emerging nation. secretary to the French delegation in Philadelphia was directed by the French government to write to authorities in each of the newly independent states requesting answers to specific questions on rivers, ports, natural riches, laws, institutions, militias, and peoples. In addition to being a formal description of the laws and conventions, geography, and commerce of one state, and a comprehensive compendium of its natural history, Jeffer son's Notes was a personal manifesto extolling Virginia's virtues (46).Thomson's title is Jefferson's own characterization of the observations he reported in Notes·. The work is nothing more than the measure of a shadow, never stationary, but lengthening as the sun advances, and to be taken anew to hour (3).Beyond pure knowledge, science was a political tool for Jefferson. highly respected French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, was convinced that the New World was dismal and inhospitable, resulting in indigenous life that was sparse and weak. Jefferson steadfastly collected data to refute Buffon. He went so far as to send a box to the Comte containing parts of American mammals including a moose, which species is much larger than the caribou, the largest animal in Europe. long voyage took its toll on the contents. Buffon was impressed, if unconvinced.The scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic debated the origin of mountains, the presence of what appeared to be shells at high elevations, and the significance of petrified bones that were referred to only as fossils (based on the Latin origin of that word, meaning dug up). Jefferson never used this term, preferring large bone. Though Jefferson admired and understood Newton's theories on mechanics and mathematics, he lived in a time of transition between traditional (e. …

Redeeming Adam's Curse: The Bible and Enlightenment Science in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published and distributed to the American public in 1787, presented his mature thoughts on politics, amid a vast array of themes reflective of his own encyclopedic studies. The diverse contents and unusual form of the work have often led modern readers to neglect its overarching political purpose. We argue that when read as a unified whole shaped by an explicit literary structure and rational method, Jefferson's Notes lays the foundation for a new science of republican politics. By engaging and revising key aspects of both the Bible and Enlightenment science, whenever either asserts authoritative claims beyond rational scrutiny that obscure or distort nature, Jefferson overturns false idols that impede our inquiry into natural laws and natural right, and the proper grounds of republican government.

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature Martyn Bone (bio) Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. By Jennifer Rae Greeson. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 366. Cloth, $39.95.) Much "new southern studies" scholarship during the last decade has been informed by an emphasis on what Houston Baker and Dana Nelson have termed "the nuanced inseparability of North and South in any fruitful model of American cultural studies."1 As Jon Smith has observed, "Marginalization of the South has had disastrous consequences for American studies, unnecessarily prolonging ideas of American exceptionalism" (292 n. 13). Yet as the new southern studies has evolved, scholars have voiced concern about its nearly exclusive focus on the twentieth century. Moreover, because this scholarship has mostly been conducted from within literary and cultural studies, it may inadvertently have widened the disciplinary divide separating it from work by historians of the South.2 In many ways, then, Jennifer Greeson's Our South appears at exactly the right time. Primarily a literary and cultural study, it exhibits deep reading in the relevant historiography. The book's chronological focus on how from 1775 to 1900 "our South" was narrated as the nation's "internal other" complements Leigh Anne Duck's The Nation's Region (2006), which concentrates on the twentieth century (1). Our South's publication by a prominent national university press, trailed by blurbs from prominent Americanists, suggests that southern studies may yet be resituated at the center of a new American studies. Greeson's eleven chapters are structured across three sections devoted to "the plantation South," "the slave South," and "the Reconstruction South," respectively. The first section opens by suggesting that the plantation South was dominant during the early republican period, when an inchoate literary nationalism began to privilege the Northeast while quarantining slavery in the South. Greeson shows how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) constructs South Carolina as "a tropical American foil against which Farmer James asserts his new republican virtue" (27). Greeson reveals how Crèvecoeur wrote against his own earlier painting Plantation of Pine-Hill, which depicts an English colonial planter and a black field-worker in the Hudson Valley. In shifting from planter to yeoman farmer, and from pastoral black plowman to "Letter IX"'s infamous caged slave, "the plantation [became] 'southern' rather than 'American'" (25). Indeed, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) was anomalous in locating the plantation South at the center of the new nation's narrative geography. [End Page 289] In the second section, Greeson proposes that after 1831 the slave South came to the fore: U.S. writers worried that plantation slavery was not simply a regional residue of the colonial past but the harbinger of a dystopian national future. Greeson ingeniously unravels how the slave South also infiltrated urban, northern anxieties about the market revolution. William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator cannily stoked its northeastern audience's antipathy toward slavery by utilizing the exposé, a narrative form that was already widespread in the reformist literature of the antiprostitution and temperance movements. However, Garrison's strategic focus on sex and sin deflected attention from the economic dimensions of exploitation in both the South (slave labor) and the North ("free" labor). Thus proslavery southerners remained the most prominent critics of industrial capitalist wage slavery. Few readers nowadays will dispute that transcendentalists privileged New England when conceptualizing the nation; however, some might balk at Greeson's insistence that Ralph Waldo Emerson "embraces abolitionism as an imperial civilizing project": masculine, moral New Englanders would emancipate the slave South as "imperialists for liberty" (157-58). Yet the second section's most bracing claims come in the chapter on Harriet Beecher Stowe, in which Greeson declares that "though her subject was the Slave South . . . Uncle Tom's Cabin [was] perhaps the most innovative and important novel of metropolitan modernity published in the United States before the Civil War" (173). In the depiction of Simon Legree's Louisiana plantation as a mill town in the mode of Lowell, Massachusetts, "Stowe fully realizes the Slave South as the dark satanic field of...

“The Cause of This Blackness”: The Early American Republic and the Construction of Race

Race is routinely defined as “socially constructed,” from which it follows that there was a time before its construction. What that time looked like, and how Africans were then viewed by white Americans, is difficult to perceive from a vantage point within the paradigm of race. This essay considers important but neglected cultural referents to argue that a binary distinction between black and white did not emerge on theoretical grounds until the 1780s, when Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia shrewdly redirected growing challenges to slavery into quasi-metaphysical reflections on the gulf between whites and blacks.

Bridging the Americas: Humboldtian Legacies

(2006). Bridging the Americas: Humboldtian Legacies. Geographical Review: Vol. 96, No. 3, pp. vi-ix.

Keeping the Republic: Ideology and Early American Diplomacy (review)

Reviewed by: Keeping the Republic: Ideology and Early American Diplomacy James E. Lewis Jr. (bio) Keeping the Republic: Ideology and Early American Diplomacy. By Robert W. Smith. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 196. Cloth, $38.50.) In Keeping the Republic, Robert W. Smith teases out the relationship between ideology and diplomacy from the eve of independence to the end of the War of 1812. He tracks four key figures—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison—as he studies the impact of what he sees as three different versions of republicanism: classical, Whig, and yeoman. Smith hits most of the key events in early American diplomacy in this book. But, at less than 150 pages of text, Keeping the Republic reads like an analytical essay rather than a comprehensive narrative. [End Page 302] Different ideas of virtue, according to Smith, shaped the different versions of republicanism that guided early American foreign policy. From ancient Greece and Rome came a "classical" version of virtue that emphasized the subordination of private interest to the public good, particularly in terms of military service. In diplomacy, classical republicanism suggested that the United States would be able to draw more strength from the support of its virtuous citizenry than Europe's monarchies could from their corrupt subjects. From eighteenth-century England came a "Whig" notion of virtue that required "respect for the constitution and adherence to the law" (6), but not the self-sacrifice expected in the classical model. Whig foreign policy demanded the preservation of the republic and recognized the advantages of the United States' unique geographic position. The "yeoman" idea of virtue arose from a combination of historic forces and received its clearest expression in Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Yeoman diplomacy relied upon the international demand for American agricultural production and "made the preservation of an agrarian political economy a main goal" (7). Adams and Hamilton, Smith argues, "went from classical to whig" (5) in response to the failure of the public to meet their expectations during the Revolution. Jefferson and Madison, in contrast, "never doubted the yeoman virtue of the American people" (7). As such, they never reevaluated the relationship of "republicanism and diplomacy" (7) in the way that Adams and Hamilton did. Their inflexible devotion to yeoman diplomacy was a near-fatal error, in Smith's view. His account of American foreign policy from the early 1790s through the War of 1812 makes clear that he considers the Whig diplomacy of Adams and Hamilton far better-suited to the situation of the new nation than the yeoman diplomacy of Jefferson and Madison. In a number of ways, Keeping the Republic feels a bit dated. Smith shows very little engagement with the most recent work on early American foreign relations. Just a few works from the last ten years appear in his bibliography or citations; even those do not seem to have made much of an impact upon his interpretation. Furthermore, his focus upon republicanism and reliance upon Lance Banning, Drew R. McCoy, and others recalls a debate that peaked some two decades ago. Even more striking is Keeping the Republic's recurring engagement with the great idealism/realism debates that dominated the 1950s and 1960s. While Smith ultimately criticizes this interpretive framework, his assessments of Whig and yeoman diplomacy and his evaluations of Adams and Hamilton [End Page 303] relative to Jefferson and Madison recall many of its features. Readers who are versed in the realist critique of Jeffersonian policymaking, from Robert W. Tucker and David Hendrickson in the early 1990s all the way back to Henry Adams a century earlier, will find much that is familiar in Smith's judgments. At a couple of points, he even refers to a "whig republican realpolitik" (103). Smith runs into some of the same problems as other writers on early republic ideology. His categories feel somewhat artificial. Individuals and policies often seem to have been shoehorned into their respective places largely for the sake of the argument. I find it hard to imagine his subjects recognizing their thinking or their policies in his terms. "Republicanism" itself, moreover, becomes so capacious in Smith's...

From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749-1826. By Thomas Hallock. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xxii, 289 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2820-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078- 5491-3.)

From the Fallen Tree surveys the politics of environmental imagination from the late colonial era through the early national period. The literary historian Thomas Hallock focuses especially upon how his chosen texts register the interaction of the triumphal westward march of Euro-American settler culture; the rise of systematic, informed attention to the natural landscape, typically with the aid of (underac-knowledged) native and other subaltern local informants; and the emergence of a pastoral self-conception of the rootedness of national culture arising in part from a vicarious identification with the increasingly subjugated or evacuated indigenes, notwithstanding a certain lingering sense of guilt and accountability toward their displacement. Hallock examines a series of texts that loosely share an investment in a cartographic envisagement of regions that breaks down and eventually is abandoned under pressure of internal contradictions and data overload as national landscapes become more thickly described, settled, and mythified. Among these, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), John Filson's Kentucke (1784), William Bartram's Travels (1791), the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New-York (1821–1822), Anne Grant's (unjustly neglected) Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), and James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers (1823) are discussed at greatest length.

“Nature's Nation” Revisited: Citizenship and the Sublime in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

Research Article| December 01 2001 “Nature's Nation” Revisited: Citizenship and the Sublime in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia Matthew Cordova Frankel Matthew Cordova Frankel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2001) 73 (4): 695–726. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-73-4-695 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew Cordova Frankel; “Nature's Nation” Revisited: Citizenship and the Sublime in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. American Literature 1 December 2001; 73 (4): 695–726. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-73-4-695 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT'S VISIT TO WASHINGTON AND PHILADELPHIA, HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH JEFFERSON, AND HIS FASCINATION WITH THE UNITED STATES

Alexander von Humboldt paid a short visit to the United States at the end of his famous travels in the New World. In Philadelphia, he met the leading scientists of the country. More importantly, President Jefferson invited him to Washington where he supplied the government with the latest statistical and geographical facts about New Spain (Mexico). Jefferson appreciated Humboldt's scientific achievements; Humboldt found Jefferson's Notes on Virginia a model of how to describe a region. Between Humboldt and Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born Secretary of the Treasury, a lasting friendship developed based on common interests, e.g., in monetary questions.Humboldt's interests with regard to the U.S. were centered around three topics: the spread of slavery and its consequences in terms of the maintenance of the Union; the mining of gold as compared with Russia; the possibilities of building a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.The debate over the slave question caused Humboldt to increase his criticism of American politics. He used his influence in Prussia to have a law passed that prohibited the ownership of slaves, thereby signaling his opposition to slavery to American leaders. In addition, Humboldt envisioned the improvement of international relations through free trade, and therefore favored projects such as an inter-oceanic canal. He never stopped admiring the achievements of the new nation in the sciences. That is why he liked to call himself “half an American.”

Does the Republic of Letters Have a Body?

Does the Republic of Letters Have a Body? Betsy Erkkila (bio) Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early American Republic. Bruce Burgett. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 213 pp. At its most radical the American Revolution empowered everybody. "[L]et the crown . . . be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is," Tom Paine asserted in Common Sense (98). In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the name of the American people: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is no coincidence that when Abigail Adams translated the Revolutionary language of rights, liberty, consent, and representation into a plea for the rights of women in marriage, family, and state, John Adams associated her request with the uprising of other bodies-"Children," "Apprentices," "Negroes," "Indians"-who were implicitly excluded from the abstract, disembodied, and universal language of personhood and rights that grounds the originary charter of the American republic. "As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh," John wrote in response to Adams's threat "to foment a Rebelion" among women. "We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient-that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent-that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to the Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented." Recognizing the dangerous loosening of traditional bonds of rank and subordination brought by the revolutionary moment, John reasserts [End Page 115] the absolute power of patriarchy: "Depend upon it,We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems" (Adams Family 1: 370, 382). His bantering tone does not disguise his self-contradiction and his edginess. "Whence arises the Right of Men to govern the Women, without their consent?" he wrote only a month later to James Sullivan about proposed revisions in Massachusetts law. "Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So Fruitfull a Source of Controversy and Altercation. . . . There will be no End to it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote . . . and every Man,who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell" (Papers of John Adams 4: 211-12). John Adams's fear of the uprising of everybody-that there would be "no End" to the "Controversy and Altercation" spawned by the founding language of rights, consent, and representation-is at the sources of revolutionary fantasy. The specter of the unruly body, its needs, desires, hungers, and excess, shadows the scene of revolution in the literature of the founding. For all its emphasis on a republic of reason, virtue, liberty, and law, the writing of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period is often marked by scenes of bodiliness, corporeality, passion, and blood. In Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley grounds her authority to a speak as a patriot of American "Freedom" in her bodily experience as an enslaved "African." The "shocking spectacle" of a caged Negro, his eyes "picked out" by birds of prey and his body "covered with a multitude of wounds," erodes the orderly form and enlightened republican vision of the farmer's letters in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (178). The second part of Franklin's Autobiography, which was composed the year after the close of what Franklin called "the bloody Contest" with England, is wholly taken up with his "account" of his unsuccessful effort to quell the unruly impulses of the body: "Habit took the Advantage of Inattention. Inclination was sometimes too strong for Reason" (Autobiography 66). While Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) was written as an early national defense of a republican order grounded in virtue, liberty, and law, several sections of his narrative are focused on the lower body parts of...

John Adams Confronts Turgot

John Adams Confronts Turgot A. OWEN ALDRIDGE A recent scholar has described John Adams's Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787) as perhaps the most important work of American political thought prior to The Federalist.1 It ranks in significance with three other eighteenth-century literary works published originally in Europe by eminent Americans, Benjamin Franklin's Memoirs , Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia . According to a specialist on French-American relations, Durand Echeveria, John Adams "seems to have been the only diplomat besides Franklin to make a lasting impression on the French public."2 A distinguished librarian, Zoltan Haraszti, has given a systematic description of Adams's Defence? and a Belgian historian, Jean-Paul Goffinon, has given the work a penetrating analysis,4 but American scholarship in general has neglected the work, probably because the Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, despite its title, has more to do with Europe than with America. It is composed essentially of quotations from European authors whose works were not at the time to be found in the United States, even in the best libraries. Adams does not mention Turgot at all in the title of the first edition of his Defence in 1787, but the following year he added to the title page of an expanded edition of three volumes the phrase "against the attack of Mr. 91 92 / ALDRIDGE Turgot." In a letter to John Trumbull four years later, 23 January 1791, he seems to defend himself for drawing attention to Turgot in this way: "If another edition should ever be published, I would insert in the titlepage: Ά defence, &c. against the attack of M. Turgot.' This, I apprehend, would cure all defects in point of title."5 Presumably Adams believed that the addition of the symbol for etcetera to the title would serve to decrease the significance of Turgot and suggest the importance of other matters. The only change he made in a new edition in 1794, however, does not in the least detract attention from his French opponent: "Against the Attack of M. Turgot in his Letter to Dr. Price Dated the Twenty-Second day of March 1784. " In this succession of titles, Adams may have meant to convey the impression that Turgot's attack was delivered against the Constitution of the United States, but the final subtitle suggests that it had been directed against Adams himself. The latter was not in any sense true. Price published Turgot's letter in 1784, shortly after the latter's death, when he included it as an appendix to his own Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World. Readers of Adams's Defence three years later in 1787 would have had no reason to associate the work in any way with Turgot. They may well have considered it a reply to a similar study by the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. On the other hand, Mably's Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des Etats-Unis de l'Amérique (1784) boldly states on its first page that it is addressed to Adams: "A Mr. Adams, Ministre Plénipotentiare des Etats-Unis en Holland & pour les Negotiations de la Paix." The title of an English translation in London was even more specific concerning the role of Adams: Remarks concerning the Government and the Laws of the United States of America: in Four Letters Addressed to Mr. Adams (London: Debrett, 1784). Biographers have suggested that Adams wrote his Defence in order to prepare the way for his return to the United States. Because of his absence in Europe, he had dropped out of the public eye in America and needed to fortify his reputation.6 The hypothesis does not explain why he selected the particular subject of the state constitutions, however. It may be that he had subconsciously felt the urge to reply to Mably's Observations, to which his Defence is slightly related, but had refrained from doing so, thinking that such an action could be condemned as ungracious if interpreted as censuring a work...

Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk, Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation

Jefferson and the Iconography of Romanticism: Folk Land, Culture and the Romantic Nation. By Malcolm Kelsall. Romanticism in Perspective: Texts, Cultures, Histories. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 207. Plates. $55.00.) Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen. Edited by James Gilreath. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Pp. xv, 383. $40.00.) University of Wales English Professor Malcolm Kelsall has contrived to write an aggressively literate analysis of Jefferson's romantic nationalism. His book is not so much engaged the American state of mind as an internationalist consciousness of which Jefferson, he suggests, emphatically partook. Fair warning must be given: the author's Eurocentrism is marked, and he is all over the map and unbounded by time. Therefore, prepare to incorporate Mosaic, Germanic, and Irish equivalents. Expect to encounter Wordsworth, Frankenstein, Bismarck, and William McKinley along Jefferson. Kelsall himself offhandedly warns that his realm is the metaphorical rather than the literal, and that his approach to Jefferson will be topsy turvy (11-12). As a text that explores symbolic history, the interpretation begins and ends foreigners' visits to Monticello. Lafayette's monumental pilgrimage in 1824 exposes the shared passion of two ardent, dreamy creators, a hero and a sage both striving to make their revolutionary principles durable. Through their common identification Jefferson's Declaration-the foundational document of romantic nationalism (25)-the two larger-than-life figures achieve symbiosis by understanding the secular/sacred, private/public motifs embodied in the host's classical villa. Liberals Lafayette and Jefferson want the same thing: to impose a militant ethic (their self-evident truths) on the waking world, to derive hope from an orderly myth of moral progress. But Jefferson, for one, may be too restless to succeed. Just when the author seems to be establishing his premise, he moves the discussion sideways into irony. There is a Miltonic Jefferson, for whom the Satanic pose was not without its attractions: political enemies were doomed to darkness. There is a Janus-faced Jefferson, whose villa alternates between representations of empowered individualism and aristocratic pretense. In the most dramatic two-step of Kelsall's analysis, Ossianic romance gleaned from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia leads to a persuasive statement about Jeffersonian racism: the chosen (white) people of God, in Jefferson's calculus, are bound for a bloody contest the other, because Jefferson sees that Nature effects its transformations by cataclysm, and politics apes Nature. Just as Europe's corrupting influence must be kept at bay, black degeneration (symbolized by belief in the orangoutans' rape of African women) breathes gothic terror into the Virginia idyll. The Jeffersonian mind introduces symbolic order even before political structure is in place. The stories underlying the Great Seal of the United States reveal how Jefferson aspired to universality as much as Franklin, his partner in this enterprise: all he needed was his lightning rod, which materialized once he had textualized a credible sense of American homeland, a national ideal meant to be imitated by future republics elsewhere in the world. This is the vision Jefferson ostensibly imparts to Lafayette and other pilgrims to his mountaintop shrine. Monticello's downstairs design shows Jefferson blending his self-determined role as philosopher-statesman in repose that of the performer displaying his fabricated world, with the desire to entertain and instruct the transient visitor (136). Some historians are bound to find Kelsall's approach meandering, anarchic, or uncomfortably riotous. There are moments when his view of Jefferson resembles a snapshot. But unconventionality is what gives the book its life: where else can one find a man whom scholars have long considered pacifistic, even fainthearted, to have had an imaginative taste for violence (145)? …

Voices from Cemetery Hill: The Civil War Diary, Reports and Letters of Colonel William Henry Asbury Speer (1861-1864) by Allen Paul Speer (review)

or fails, and this book does a good deal ofthe former and a bit ofthe latter . Selections from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Earl Hamner's On Spencer's Mountain, and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek are as powerful as they were in their original settings. But then again, they are engaging, at least in part, because we are familiar with those settings. Other selections are engaging because of their relative obscurity, coupled with the historical importance-ifnot the literary abilities —ofthe writers. It is intriguing to read the complaints ofthe King of France on his Shenandoah Valley holiday, to learn the ornithological expertise of Theodore Roosevelt, or to experience the way the war in Vietnam intruded on the mountain retreat of Washington journalist Charles Seib. Less engaging are selections from a handful ofwriters who, while rightly included (given the book's focus), have neither the intrinsic power to engage us as quickly as briefselections necessarily demand, nor the historical familiarity to make their works interesting despite a lack of literary merit. While all or many ofthese writers may be excellent in larger doses, the single thematic commonality-that they deal in some way with the region under study-is sometimes insufficient to maintain our sincere interest. But compensations abound. To begin, the descriptions of certain natural and human phenomena create continuities which interest us regardless ofwhether a particular writer fails to engage. Perceptions of the Natural Bridge, for example, develop a cumulative power, and the more the perspectives differ, the better. Too, certain political progressions , such as the creation of the Shenandoah National Forest, allow selections to become mutually enriching which might not have engaged us alone. And ifsome ofthe relatively obscure writers might just as well have remained obscure, the opposite is also true: we owe Branch and Philippon our thanks for rescuing from relative obscurity such superb pieces as Archibald Alexander's "The Sublime and the Beautiful," Havilah Babcock's "Hunting Bee Trees," and the selections from The Journal ofJohn Fontaine. In sum, despite the occasional lapse, this collection is a superb addition to the literature of the Appalachian region. And as a focused scholarly introduction to the nature writing of a region, it presents an excellent model and exercises it with exemplary rigor. -William Jolliff Speer, Allen Paul. Voices from Cemetery Hill: The Civil War Diary, Reports and Letters ofColonel William Henry Asbury Speer (1861-1864). Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press, 1997. 217 pages. Paperback $19.95. 70 Allen Speer ofLees-McRae College has compiled and edited a book here that is a monumental exercise in family history. Yet Dr. Speer's task is only partly done. When Speer's Aunt Nellie Dobbins died in 1980, a large family archive was left to him, and he has vigorously supplemented these family documents by drawing upon the Official Records ofthe War of the Rebellion, the Vance Papers, letters and diaries of family friends, broad reading in standard Civil War titles and North Carolina local history , research in the National Archives and local newspapers. Yet there are more stories to tell from this family stretching across the eight generations buried in the old Methodist cemetery on the Speer farm in central Yadkin County, North Carolina. Most of this volume involves the remarkably detailed diary, letters, and reports ofWilliam Henry Asbury Speer, which covers his Civil War experience between August 1861, when he enlisted in the Confederate service, and his death at Ream's Station, south ofPetersburg, on August 29, 1864. Together they follow Colonel Speer from the Battle of Hanover Court House (May 27, 1862), where he was captured; his incarcerations at Fort Columbus, in New York harbor, and Johnson's Island near Sandusky, Ohio; then his return to the Confederate army and action at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg. Civil War scholars will find important insights into the battles ofHanover Court House and Chancellorsville not found elsewhere. James I. Robertson has called these memoirs what a "family wartime chronicle should be." Colonel Asbury Speer was an able officer and died a hero of the Confederate cause. Yet he opposed secession and attacked slavery...

American Catholics and Slavery: 1789-1866. An Anthology of Primary Documents ed. by Kenneth J. Zanca.

510BOOK REVIEWS Life" Father Guest examines health and sanitation, discipline, and cultural change at the missions. A second article, "Junípero Serra and the Indians," defends the religious ideaUsm of the great missionary and his companions.A third article on "Discipline in California Mission life" concludes that discipline at the California missions was mUd, about what might be expected in simUar institutions anywhere in the world at the time. "The missions," writes Father Guest, "need to be viewed as expressions of Spanish reUgious culture" (p. 295).The final article, "The California Missions Were Far from Faultless," deals with such topics as the ethnocentrism of the missionaries and the persistence of superstition among the converts. As in the other essays, Father Guest concludes that many ofthe criticisms ofthe missions are based on isolated incidents, taken out of context.Answering the accusation that the Indian converts did not reaUy accept Christianity, Father Guest describes the obvious fervor ofthe Indian Christians . In one particularly long quotation from the death register for Mission Santa Cruz, the missionary priest recaUed the saintly Ufe of a young woman name Antonina in terms that bear repeating: "She busied herself with common and ordinary chores to which her lot in life had assigned her, doing them with aU the perfection possible for her, doing them for God,which is what perfection consists in" (p. 371). AU of the articles are based on thorough research Ln the original sources, most of which are avaUable at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive library. The prose style is clear and concise.The page layout is pleasing.The index is thorough . If there is a fault in Father Guest's work it is that he assumes the critics of the missions are people ofgood wUl who really want to be engaged Ln scholarly discourse. Harry Kelsey Huntington Library San Marino, California American Catholics and Slavery: 1 789-1866. An Anthology ofPrimary Documents . CompUed and edited by Kenneth J. Zanca. (Lanham, Maryland: University Press ofAmerica. 1994. Pp.xxxi, 290. $4950.) Kenneth Zanca, professor in the department of reUgious studies at Marymount CoUege, has compüed a series of documents dealing with CathoUcism and slavery Ln the United States.This work, 'which began as a coUection to aid his own teaching, includes more than one hundred documents ranging from Scripture texts and excerpts from Early Church Uterature to quotations from the antebeUum Catholic press and the bishops' pastoral letters of the midnineteenth century. An introduction begins each section with an explanation before each document. The coUection has been divided into three categories : the CathoUc tradition regarding slavery; sources that trace the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America (the author Includes such docu- BOOK REVIEWS511 ments as Jefferson's Notes on Virginia and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ); and the observations of Catholics on slavery between 1789 and 1866. Professor Zanca has produced an anthology that should be of use to aU students of American church history. Interest in Black CathoUc history in the United States is growing rapidly. HopefuUy in a subsequent volume Professor Zanca wUl consider placing the documents in chronological order.The present arrangement causes too much repetition. A case in point is the treatment of Pope Gregory XVTs condemnation of the slave trade (1839) on page 27, reaction to the condemnation of the slave trade on page 128, reference to Gregory XVTs apostoUc brief on the slave trade on page 221, and finaUy the treatment of it by Bishop England on page 191 . Professor Zanca makes a very good effort to explain the proslavery mentality of the Catholic clergy and people, placing this mentaUty within the context of the time. It is interesting to note that Félix Dupanloup, Bishop of Orléans, had no difficulty in denouncing slavery with passion and feeling as moraUy reprehensible (p. 121) whUe American bishops could only bring themselves to avoid it as a political issue. Surprisingly Zanca includes none of the anti-slavery speeches of Daniel 0'ConneU,who fiercely condemned the pro-slavery stance of the Irish in this country. Zanca seems less famUiar with the documents that reveal the thoughts and feelings of Black Americans. He overlooked "The Journal of...

History of Science and Technology Through Primary Sources: Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

History of Science and Technology Through Primary Sources: Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia Get access Kent D. Mutchler Kent D. Mutchler Kent D. Mutchler is the principal at Guthrie Center High School Guthrie Center, Iowa. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar OAH Magazine of History, Volume 4, Issue 2, Spring 1989, Pages 50–51, https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/4.2.50 Published: 01 March 1989

City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism (review)

128Reviews Grandissimes more and more looks like not a passport to immortality but a visa about ready to expire. The idea that he somehow anticipated William Faulkner will carry him no further than the footnotes of a multi-volume literary history. Though Turner's selections hold enough exploded prophecies to make anybody wary, I can predict no hope for Cable unless the mainline South, or at least the mythical general reader, comes back to treasuring him as the local colorist of a vanished New Orleans, whose polyglot tensions he transmuted into an exoticism kept believable by his inwoven humor. Meanwhile, Turner has brought the critical heritage thoroughly up to date and has added to the very valuable body of scholarship he left us. Duke UniversityLouis J. Budd Rosenthal, Bernard. City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1980. 273 pp. Cloth: $16.50. In Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West remarks sardonically of skyscraper city: "Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians." What is the source for this ecstasy of city expansion in America? Capitalistic greed? Historians might agree, but the urban dream had its emotional or imaginative roots in an urban myth, argues Mr. Rosenthal in this monograph on American romanticism and the myths of society and nature found in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe and popular expressions of the era. It is now practically a dogma that these romantic writers' works exhibit as much animus toward the city as Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, though for different reasons. Distrust of the city is as engrained a feature of the American intellectual landscape as the escape into nature. As Morton and Lucia White in 1962 have stated in The Intellectual versus the City (inexplicably ignored by Rosenthal), "Most of them distrusted or hated the city, but some like Thoreau, fled from it to the woods alone; some like Emerson, went to Concord, where they could take sociability or leave it for the nearby woods; and some, like the Brook Farmers, went to the woods in socialist phalanxes" (p. 31). As for Cooper's readers, "they imbibed his heady brew of romantic animosity toward the city" (p. 201). However, Rosenthal quarrels mainly with Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden (1964), which asserted the existence in America of a pervasive pastoral myth derived from Virgil and which recoiled from the prospect of the despoliation of nature by the machine and by implication the city. In Rosenthal's rebuttal, he shows a literature much less anxious than at first appears about the improvement of nature, or at least ambivalent about progress and the growth of cities. He suggests two different strains. One is a "romantic quest" or journey motif in popular novels, "a journey into the wilderness from which would emerge nature and the city" (p. 27); nature and city are fused in the happy endings of the adventure fiction of Cooper and his followers. The other motif derives from the romantic preoccupation with the self; this takes the form of "a journey that would lead to nature and the city of the self (p. 27) . Or to state it another way: many romantics in America felt that civilization would finally reside in individual minds, not in the world's streets, buildings, theaters, and temples. Rosenthal's title, City of Nature, clearly contains a paradox of profound significance, but was there a mythic city of nature in the American mind? Yes, as long as we refuse to Studies in American Fiction129 equate nature with wilderness, as for example, Perry Miller has insisted upon in Errand into the Wilderness. There is another, competing definition, Rosenthal cogently maintains in Chapter 2, "Nature in the Land of Milk and Honey," an equation of nature with products , industry, civilization: "Nature was the builder of cities, the codifier of laws, the guiding spirit of commerce. . . . Nature as wilderness carried a pejorative connotation" (p. 32). The fulfillment of this nature in the fictions of Poe, Cooper, and other popular novelists would be the city as garden, the...

"Mysterious Obligation": Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

r lHOMAS JEFFERSON, by any standard, is major writer of the early Republic, and his one book, Notes on the State of Virginia, has been accepted universally as both an American classic and vital contribution to the political and scientific thought of the eighteenth century. Yet the same book has been virtually ignored as literary text, and is true even though Notes is prototype for understanding literary involvement in post-Revolutionary America. Critical neglect began in Jefferson's own seeming disregard. He once threatened to burn the entire first edition of Notes-some two hundred copies privately printed at considerable expense. Do not view me as an author, and attached to what he has written, he warned James Madison. I am neither.' Calling his book private communication unfit for distribution, he tried hard to prevent its general publication.2 In subsequent letters, Notes became a poor crayon,'' this trifle, nothing more than the measure of shadow, and a bad book . . . the author of which has no other merit than that of thinking as little of it as any man in the world can.3