Ailanthus altissima is native to Taiwan and central China but was introduced to Europe by way of a Jesuit Priest named Pierre Nicolas d’Incarville, who sent seeds to Paris from Beijing in 1743. A few years later Peter Collinson, the English botanist and close correspondent of John Bartram, acquired some seeds from France that he grew in his garden in London. Although it is difficult to imagine given its noxious qualities today, eighteenth century botanists held Ailanthus in high regard, admiring its foliage, its perceived exoticism, and its toleration of urban environments. By the 1780s, it was a favorite in gardens across Europe and was widely planted in London and Paris, and it remained heavily used in urban landscaping through the nineteenth century.[2]

Foliage of Ailanthus altissima, the Tree-of-Heaven. Credit: Wikimedia commons.

Most sources credit Ailanthus’s introduction to America to William Hamilton, who maintained a botanical garden just about a mile up the Schuylkill of the Bartrams, at The Woodlands. Hamilton reportedly had Ailanthus seeds sent to his garden around 1784. But twenty years earlier, in 1764, John Bartram writes a letter to Peter Collinson where he describes the growth of a certain sumac species in his greenhouse:

“last summer there came up in my greenhouse from east India seed formerly sowed there an odd kind of Sumach (as I take it to be)   it growed in A few months near 4 foot high & continued green & growing all winter & this spring I planted it out to take its chance   it shoots vigorously & allmost as red as crimson”[3]

Most signs point to this plant being Ailanthus. The tree’s fast growth, hardiness in the winter, and red shoots are all characteristic of Ailanthus. The species is still sometimes referred to today as a sumac, although taxonomically it is no longer a member of the sumac genus. At the time the sumac genus, Rhus, included many different trees and shrubs with alternate compound leaves, like Ailanthus does. John Bartram would have been aware of all of the American sumac species, so if he is correct in recalling that he planted this from seeds brought from Asia (East India), then this very well could be the earliest recorded instance of Ailanthus in the Americas.

Peter Collinson, who was one of the first in Britain to receive Ailanthus via France, certainly thought that John Bartram had one in his greenhouse. He replied, describing his own plant:

“I have from China a Tree of surprising growth that much resembles a Sumach which is the Admiration of all that see it  Phaps thine may be the same—It Endours all our Winters   Thou Sayes thine came from the East but mentions not what Country: We call ours the Varnish Tree”[4]

The name “Varnish tree” refers to at least four different species of tree from Asia, and the 1750s saw intense taxonomical debate within the pages of the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions attempting to distinguish the different plants referred to by that name. English botanists were fixated on the so-called varnish tree because some species, like the Chinese Lacquer Tree or Japanese Wax Tree, had sap that could be turned into lacquer, a highly valuable substance that could be used for coating wooden furniture or artwork.[5]

Ailanthus is similar to these species and became caught up in the craze over Varnish trees, and d’Incarville may have originally sent seeds of it back to Europe because he mistook it for one of those species. Upon receiving the seeds, English botanists quickly realized that they had several different species. John Ellis published a paper in Philosophical Transactions that distinguished a “Varnish tree” specimen found growing at two botanical gardens in London from other Rhus species, including a diagram that is the earliest botanical sketch of the plant.[6] To the dismay of botanists, this species did not have useful sap, although it was well-regarded aesthetically. Phillip Miller gives it the name “altissimum” in his Gardener’s Dictionary in 1768, and the tree was finally defined in its own genus, Ailanthus, by the French botanist René Louiche Desfontaine in 1788.[7]

The English botanist John Ellis used this drawing to argue that the “Chinese Varnish Tree” (figure 5) should be its own species. That plant later became Ailanthus altissima. Credit: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

But at the time John Bartram and Peter Collinson were looking at this curious tree from China, botanists still would have thought of Ailanthus as a type of Varnish Tree belonging to the sumac (Rhus) genus. Collinson described his Varnish tree as a “stately tree sent over raised from seed sent over from Nankin in China, in 1751, sent over by Father d’Incarville, my correspondent in China.”[8] This account lines up perfectly with John Ellis’s description of his new Rhus species, which modern botanists consider to be a description of Ailanthus.

Identifying plants from the historical record is never a straightforward task, and we cannot say for sure that Bartram’s tree was an Ailanthus without having a more detailed description or drawing of it. We can only speculate. Genetic research has suggested, however, that Ailanthus was indeed first introduced to North America through the Philadelphia area at the end of the eighteenth century, making either Hamilton or Bartram possible candidates for its introduction.[9] Bartram does not mention this plant again, so perhaps it died at some point and has no relation to the Ailanthus trees that are now widespread across the area. But given the tree’s propensity to spread and take root in even extreme conditions, it is not out of the question that it escaped Bartram’s greenhouse and later became naturalized in the region.

We have a few more references to Ailanthus from the years that Robert Carr was proprietor of the garden. Ailanthus appears in Robert Carr’s catalogue from 1828 as an exotic tree, priced at $1 compared to the 25¢ or 50¢ that most trees sold for.[10] In 1844, one of Robert Carr’s correspondents recalls an Ailanthus tree that was apparently given to Ann Bartram Carr as a wedding present in 1809. That tree was supposedly procured from Hamilton’s garden at The Woodlands and was still preserved at Bartram’s in 1844.[11] Both references point to Ailanthus not being widespread in Philadelphia in the early 19^th century, but they do not rule out an earlier introduction during John Bartram’s lifetime.

Perhaps John Bartram, not William Hamilton, deserves the dubious designation of being the first to introduce Ailanthus to the Americas. We can only imagine what John Bartram would think if he saw what the little plant he found in his greenhouse in 1764 was up to today.

Notes

Cover image: Sketch of Ailanthus leaves by John Ellis, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1758.

[1] Patricia J. Wynne, “Ailanthus altissima”, Columbia Introduced Species Project, December 9, 2002.

[2] Shiu Ying Hu, “Ailanthus”, Arnoldia, 1979, 39(2): 29-50.

[3] John Bartram, Letter to Peter Collinson, May 1^st, 1764; in The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, ed. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (University of Florida Press, 1992).

[4] Peter Collinson, Letter to John Bartram, June 1^st, 1764; in The Correspondence, ed. Berkeley & Berkeley.

[5] The Chinese Lacquer Tree is now Toxicodendron vernicifluum while the Japanese Wax Tree is now Toxicodendron succedaneum. Each of these species were considered part of the Rhus (sumac) genus at the time.

[6] John Ellis, “CXII. A letter from Mr. John Ellis, F. R. S. to Philip Carteret Webb, Esq; F. R. S. attempting to ascertain the tree that yields the common varnish used in China and Japan; to promote Its propagation in our American Colonies; and to set right some mistakes botanists appear to have entertained concerning It,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 49, (1755), pp. 866-876.

[7] Walter T. Swingle, “The early European history and the botanical name of the Tree of Heaven, Ailanthus altissima,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 14 (1916), pp. 490-498

[8] Peter Collinson, published in Hortus Collinsonianus: An account of the plants cultivated by the late Peter Collinson, compiled by Lewis Weston Dillwyn in 1843. Not published, printed in Swansea by W. C. Murray and D. Rees. Dillwyn believed that what Collinson thought was the Chinese Varnish Tree was actually Ellis’s new species, and cites his article in the Philosophical Transactions to support this.

[9] Preston R. Aldrich, Joseph S. Briguglio, Shyam N. Kapadia, Minesh U. Morker, Ankit Rawal, Preeti Kalra, Cynthia D. Huebner, and Gary K. Greer, “Genetic Structure of the Invasive Tree Ailanthus altissima in Eastern United States Cities,” Journal of Botany, vol. 2010.

[10] Robert Carr, Periodical Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Green House Plants, &c. Cultivated and for Sale at Bartram’s Botanic Garden, Kingsessing, Near Gray’s Ferry—Four miles from Philadelphia. Russell and Martien, Philadelphia, 1828, p. 21

[11] Dr. Steph. Browne to Col. Robert Carr, September 19, 1844, Society Misc. Coll, Box 7-B, Of644, 1842K, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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The Seven Years’ War (1756–63) was an international conflict fought between long-standing rivals, Great Britain and France, for global superiority. The French and Indian War (1754–63) was the North American theater of the conflict and was named after the significant role Native Americans played on both sides. The two European powers had developed into major economic and political players on the continent, and the war gave Native Americans the chance to fight for the side they felt held their best interests. Although the British had Native allies, France’s better indigenous diplomacy and less manipulative past made them the more attractive ally for many nations.^[1]

This Francophile tendency was especially evident in Pennsylvania among indigenous nations, where the British had consistently exploited and distanced the region’s Lenape (Delaware), Shawnee, and other nations. These groups fought alongside the French in battles and raided the Pennsylvania frontier, stealing supplies and killing the region’s poorly defended white settlers. The Natives eventually agreed to a separate peace, under the Treaty of Easton in 1758, on the condition that the British would not expand further west into the indigenous lands of western Pennsylvania and Ohio. When the British quickly disregarded this requirement, indigenous raids of the Pennsylvanian frontier began again under Pontiac’s War (1763–64).^[2]

“The Indians delivering up the English captives to Colonel Bouquet… in Novr. 1764,” engraving by Pierre Charles Canot, 1766 (Library of Congress). This exchange occurred near the end of the Pontiac’s War and was a coerced requirement for peace (see the bayonets behind the colonists). While many captives were happy to be returned, others had been adopted as members of Native communities and had lived there happily for a long time. Both sets of individuals were returned in Sir William Johnson’s attempt to restore peace and reduce the region’s Native population.

Bartram’s response was like that of many Pennsylvania colonists. In February 1756, he wrote to Collinson in London with anger and fervent racism, expressing that “O: Pensilvania thou that was the most flourishing & peaceable province in North America is now scourged by the most barbarous creatures in the universe…. The barbarous inhuman ungrateful natives [are] weekly murdering our back inhabitants…. If our captains pursue them if in the level woods thay skip from tree to tree like monkies….” In the early years of the Seven Years’ War, Collinson seemed to agree with Bartram, responding how, “Wee here are greatly Effected at the Ravages and cruelties Exercised by your ungrateful perfidious Indians.” The raids were undeniably brutal, but both Bartram and Collinson failed to consider the Natives’ motives. They viewed the raiders as deceitful and “barbarous,” focusing solely on their actions rather than recognizing that they were fighting the British colonial system’s own treacheries and incursions onto their land, which threatened their very way of life.^[3]

By the time of Pontiac’s War, the decades-long friends and business partners had become polarized over these very viewpoints. Bartram continued to see his raiders in a similar light, expressing that the “only method to establish a lasting peace with the barbarous Indians is to bang them stoutly,” and that, “the Indians must be subdued or drove above 1000 miles back.” Collinson, on the other hand, began to consider the indigenous perspective more critically. He responded to John’s callous letters with criticism, stating:

“My dear John, thou does not consider the law of right, and doing to others as would be done unto. We, every manner of way, trick, cheat, and abuse these Indians…. Lett a person of Power come & take 5 or 10 Acres of my Friend Johns Land from Him… How Easy & resigned he would be… but if an Indian resents it, in his way… nothing but Fire and Fagot will do with my Friend John…” ^[4]

We may never know what led to Collinson’s change in perspective, but the backgrounds of both individuals provide potential avenues to understand why their views differed. Collinson was a Quaker, and as such, he likely believed in the core Quaker principle of the “inner light.” The inner light held that God resided universally within all humans, making their bodies, and not the church, his temple. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, preached that this light could be realized and lit within anyone, and he embodied this teaching by acting towards the equality of all – including women and Native Americans. The open-minded nature of this tenet made many Quakers pacifists and generally friendly towards Native Americans. It also formed the foundation behind Pennsylvania’s “Holy Experiment.” Although Bartram was also a Quaker, many of his beliefs strayed from Quaker orthodoxy, resulting in his disownment in 1758. Bartram’s exact views on the inner light are unknown, but his predilection towards war and his prejudice towards Native Americans suggest that he did not view innate equality as highly as other Quakers.^[5]

It is also important to consider how Bartram and Collinson lived in entirely different settings. Collinson lived in London, where he could look at the colonial raids from far outside of the situation, while Bartram lived in Pennsylvania and was affected by indigenous raids throughout his entire life. When he was still a child, John Bartram’s father was killed, and his stepmother and step siblings temporarily kidnapped, during the raids of the larger Tuscarora War (1711–1715) in North Carolina. As an adult, Bartram’s annual botanic expeditions across the colonies were sporadically halted by Native raids that made the frontiers unsafe, which limited his business. When raids erupted in Pennsylvania throughout the 1750s and 60s, it is possible that he knew some of the people who were affected, and it is likely that his opinions were also further influenced by the reactions of white settlers around him. While these developments do not excuse his prejudice and ignorance of the Natives’ true motives, it shows how Bartram was affected by the larger events around him, and how his views may have been shaped differently from Collinson’s over time.^[6]

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Notes

^[1] Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004): 22-89.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] John Bartram to Peter Collinson, February 21, 1756, in The Correspondence of John Bartram: 1734-1777, edited by Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992): 400-401; Peter Collinson to John Bartram, June 8, 1756, in Ibid, 405.

^[4] John Bartram to Peter Collinson, September 30, 1763, in Ibid, 609; John Bartram to Peter Collinson, October 23, 1763, in Ibid, 612; Peter Collinson to John Bartram, December 6, 1763, in Ibid, 615-616.

^[5] George Fox. “Boyhood: A Seeker,” “First Years of Ministry,” and “Two Years in America,” in An Autobiography. Originally written 1694. (Whitefish: Literary Licensing LLC, 2014). Street Corner Society. https://web.archive.org/web/20070612033233/http://www.strecorsoc.org/gfox/title.html; Henry Joel Cadbury, “The Disownment of John Bartram,” Bulletin of Friends’ Historical Association Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1928): 16-22.

^[6] Joel T. Fry, “Historic American Landscapes Survey, John Bartram House and Garden (Bartram’s Garden), HALS No. PA-1, History Report,” MS report, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, HABS/HAER/HALS/CRGIS Division, Washington, DC, 18.

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From the start, medicine in the colonies was markedly different from practices in Europe. Formally trained physicians already had a dubious reputation in Europe and were only scarcer and more expensive in the Americas, and their imported medicines were constantly in short supply. Medical science was, at best, imprecise, and at worst actively harmful to patients who came down with sickness. Most care was instead outsourced to apothecaries, who stocked their shelves with plants not native to the Americas and concocted recipes used to treat all sorts of ailments, from common colds to venereal diseases to tropical diseases like yellow fever. And without any knowledge of the strange and new plants they encountered in the region, apothecaries and commoners alike often turned to Indigenous people for care or otherwise sought cures from their medical botanicals.[1]

Needless to say, the often-improvised reality of medical treatment in America did not conform to the theories of the country’s most-remembered physicians. Two prominent Philadelphia physicians, Dr. Benjamin Rush and Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, wrote treatises that attempted to organize this rudimentary system of medical treatment, but generally excluded the original context that the remedies they described were discovered within. Those physicians had an economic incentive to appropriate Indigenous remedies while simultaneously disavowing their usage by Indigenous healers, since they would have competed directly with them for patients.[2] As a result, the contributions that Indigenous botanical knowledge made to early American medicine is usually underemphasized, but the writings of William Bartram preserve some of that history.[3]

Recent scholarship has suggested we should understand early American medicine as part of a distinctive “Atlantic World medical complex” which “melded people, plants, and knowledges” from Indigenous, African, and European sources.[4] Cures from Europe were widely used in this context, but so too were remedies that had their roots in the medical systems of the Lenape or Cherokee, and remedies that reached Euro-Americans through the African diaspora.[5] By tracing references William Bartram makes to Indigenous medical botany in his writings, we can reconstruct the Indigenous roots of early American medicine that have been left out of the record by authors like Barton and Rush. Bartram’s journey across the lands of the Creek and Cherokee in the southeastern part of the country, published in his literary classic Travels and other correspondences, offers a rich look into the medicinal world of those groups:

Indigenous Medical Botanicals described by William Bartram [6]

* Indicates a plant that was included in Bartram’s 1807 catalogue of plants at the garden.

Unlike other writers, Bartram’s ethnographic interest in Indigenous societies led him to record the cultural context that many of these remedies were used in. Euro-American physicians sometimes shared an interest in the specific properties of plants, but Bartram’s commitment to describing the rituals associated with medicine reveals the contours of Indigenous medical systems.[7] The Creek and Cherokee did not confine their treatments to remedies alone, for instance, but usually combined them with “regimen and a rigid abstinence with respect to eating and drinking, as well as the gratification of other passions & appetites.”[8] Sometimes, Bartram describes the preparation of different plants, for example how the China Brier and Sassafras root were combined with cuttings from the Bignonia crucigera vine and boiled to produce what he calls a “Diet Drink.”[9] An infusion of the tops of Collinsonia was “ordinarily drunk at breakfast” and unlike most medicines, this one was of “exceeding pleasant taste and flavor.”

Elsewhere, he recounts the processes the Creek and Cherokee underwent to turn plants into medicines. Podophyllum peltatum, the May-Apple, which Bartram described as “the most effectual and safe emetic and cathartic,” was prepared through digging up the roots in Autumn, drying them in a loft, and reducing them into a “fine sieved powder” that could then be used as medicine.[10]

William Bartram’s illustration of Collinsonia canadensis, horse-balm, ca. 1801-1802. Both John and William Bartram held Collinsonia in high regard as a febrifuge. [Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.]

At the time the town was fasting, taking medicine, and I think I may say praying, to avert a grievous calamity of sickness, which had lately afflicted them, and laid in the grave abundance of their citizens; they fast seven or eight days, during which time they eat or drink nothing but a meagre gruel, made of a little corn-flour and water; taking at the same time by way of medicine or physic, a strong decoction of the roots of the Iris versicolor, which is a powerful cathartic; they hold this root in high estimation, every town cultivates a little plantation of it, having a large artificial pond, just without the town, planted and almost overgrown with it, where they usually dig clay for pottery, and mortar and plaster for buildings, and I observed where they had lately been digging up this root.[11]

Medical texts might list Iris versicolor as a cathartic, but they would not list its role as part of a complex procedure for staving off sickness that Bartram describes. We cannot determine from this description if this medical ritual was replicated across the region, but the fact that “every town” would “cultivate a little plantation of it” indicates that it was among the most important medicinal plants to the Creek and likely carried strong symbolic significance.

The transfer of medicinal knowledge was not always a frictionless process. Indigenous people were acutely aware of the dangers posed by Euro-American settlers in this period, and in one case Bartram recalls the Cherokee nation withholding medicinal information from him:

The Cherokees use the Lobelia siphilitica & another plant of still greater power and efficacy, which the traders told me of, but would not undertake to show it to me under Thirty Guineas Reward for fear of the Indians who endeavor to conceal the knowledge of it from the whites lest its great virtues should excite their researches for it, to its expiration.[12]

Still, William Bartram lists at least four remedies that became widespread among white settlers after being described to them by the Indigenous inhabitants of the region, and as mentioned earlier, white settlers often turned to Indigenous doctors for care.

Two plants that Bartram held in particularly high regard were the Swamp Lily (Saururus cernuus) and the mayapple, (Podophyllum peltatum), the latter of which he attributed to preserving “the lives of many thousands of people of the Southern states.”[13] Bartram himself wrote that he had been treated with it and attested to its “almost infallible good effects”. The mayapple, known as highly toxic both to Europeans and Lenape people in the Northeast, was used by the Cherokee and Creek to expel worms, and as an emetic (to induce vomiting), and a cathartic (a laxative).[14] Swamp Lily could be used to treat wounds or fight fevers. The virtues of both plants, Bartram recounts, “were communicated to the White inhabitants by the Indians.”[15] Etoposide, a chemical derived from Podophyllum peltatum, remains a widely used medicine in chemotherapy treatments today.[16]

William Bartram’s drawings medical botanicals were renowned for their accuracy and beauty. Members of the American Philosophical Society commissioned drawings of his plants for their research. This drawing is of Podophyllum peltatum, the mayapple, ca. 1801-1803. [Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.]

William Bartram’s writings contributed to both the preservation and appropriation of Indigenous medical knowledge. In a very direct sense, the Bartrams commodified and perhaps profited off of the Indigenous cures they encountered. But William Bartram’s writings also preserved the Indigenous roots of early American medicine, when other sources have obscured or willfully suppressed them. William’s expeditions and careful observations of Indigenous medicine made Bartram’s Garden into an important node in the transatlantic exchange of medicinal knowledge and reveal the global and contested roots of modern medical science.

Notes

Cover image: William Bartram’s drawing of Silphium terebinthinaceum, rosinweed, engraved for publication in B. S. Barton’s Elements of Botany,  Philadelphia: 1803.

[1] Ray, Laura E. “Podophyllum peltatum and observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians: William Bartram’s preservation of Native American pharmacology.” The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. vol. 82,1 (2009), 31.

[2] McCulla, Theresa. “Medicine in Colonial North America,” Colonial North America at Harvard Library Project, 2017.

[3] Ray, “Podophyllum peltatum,” 29. Ray has shown how Barton’s writings borrowed or even plagiarized many of William Bartram’s observations on medicine in his Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United-States, omitting reference to the Indigenous context that Bartram found his plants in. Rush openly dismissed the idea that Indigenous sources could offer anything to Euro-American physicians, writing that “we have no discoveries in the materia medica to hope for from the Indians in North-America” (Cited in Robinson, “New Worlds, New Medicines”).

[4] Schiebinger, Londa L. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3.

[5] See our blog post on Cleome gynandra, an African plant that William Bartram found in Louisiana.

[6] This table compiles descriptions from four sources:

Bartram, William. “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians.” In William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians, ed. Gregory A Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995),161-164.

—The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 207-288.

—Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-1774: A Report to Dr. John Fothergill, annotated by Francis Harper, (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943).

— “William Bartram’s ‘Remarks’ descriptive specimens he sent to Dr. Fothergill and Mr. Barclay,” 1774, in William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788, ed. Joseph Ewan (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), 154-168.

[7] Robinson, Martha. “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies, vol. 3,1 (2005), 97.

[8] Bartram, Observations, 162.

[9] Bartram, Observations, 163.

[10] Ibid., 163. [Podophyllum or mayapple can be fatally poisonous, do not try this at home.]

[11] Bartram, Travels, 276.

[12] Bartram, Observations, 163.

[13] Ibid., 163.

[14] The Pennsylvania Moravian missionary John Heckewelder (1743-1823), who spent years writing about the Lenape, includes the May-Apple on his list of their medical botanicals, but only references its toxicity. John Gottlieb E. Heckewelder, Names of various trees, shrubs & plants in the language of the Lenape. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1815)

[15] Ibid., 164.

[16] The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, “Etoposide”. Reviewed on Jun 29, 2021. Drugs.com, https://www.drugs.com/monograph/etoposide.html.

[17] Many of these plants are still cultivated at the garden today. These include Angelica atropurpurea, Bignonia capreolata, Collinsonia canadensis, Erigeron pulchellus, Ilex vomitoria, Iris versicolor, Panax quinquefolius, Persea borbonia, Saururus cernuus, Silphium terebinthinaceum, and Spigelia marilandica.

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Weiser’s July expedition was on behalf of Virginia’s governor to officially restore peace between the two sovereignties. For Bartram, the opportunity to travel to Onondaga was exciting. Not only did the journey provide him with the chance to collect new assortments of plants for personal and commercial purposes, but according to a letter he sent a week before his departure, it served to “afford us A fine opportunity of many Curious observations,” likely also referring to the region’s picturesque landscapes and sparsely documented Iroquois.^[2]

The party departed from Philadelphia on July 3, 1743, first traveling west, then up the Susquehanna River to the town of Shamokin. There, they met with an Iroquois leader, Shickellamy and his son, whose company guaranteed their safe passage. Subsequently, they traveled north along various rivers and valleys, eventually reaching Onondaga on July 21. While Weiser began negotiations with the Iroquois, Bartram and Evans traveled further north to Oswego on Lake Ontario to explore and obtain provisions for their way home. They returned to Onondaga on the 27th, in time to witness the final days of the proceedings, which concluded in peace. The party then returned home on approximately the same route by which they came, reaching Philadelphia on August 19.^[3]

John Bartram’s Route to Onondaga, 1743, in Nancy E. Hoffmann and John C. Van Horne, eds., America’s Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Reappraisal of John Bartram 1699-1777 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 2004).

Bartram kept a journal during his journey and sent a copy of it to his English business partner, Peter Collinson, who later had it published in London in 1751. Bartram did not plan for the account to be publicized, so its response was met with mixed reviews.

Those interested in the region’s botany and Bartram’s expertise on the subject were left fairly disappointed. While he does briefly mention finding a massive magnolia tree [Magnolia acuminata] and various other specimens, his account of the region’s flora is surprisingly sparse. The Swedish botanist Peter Kalm criticizes him on this, asserting that “he is to be blamed for his negligence…. He has not filled it with a thousandth part of the great knowledge which he has acquired in natural philosophy.” One private letter written by Bartram during the trip provides a potential insight into the absence. It states, “I have been taken off from viewing the agreable Phenomina of the beautiful varieties in Nature to the Disagreable phenomina of mens perverse Actions,” making it possible that the negotiations fully occupied his mind.^[4]

Nevertheless, for readers interested in an adventure story about indigenous lands and cultures, Bartram’s account was just as captivating and insightful then as it is today. Bartram’s description of Onondaga is considered by scholars to be one of the best sources detailing the capital during the mid-eighteenth century. The Iroquois were well known for their communal longhouses, where large numbers of families collectively resided, but after decades of war and disease outbreaks, Bartram painted a very different picture. He described the town as “2 or 3 miles long, yet the scattered cabins on both sides [of] the water are not above 40 in number,” many of them holding two families at most. Although Bartram and his party resided in a longhouse “80 feet long,” it seems it may have been one of the only ones left in the town, with its use being reserved for ceremonial and diplomatic purposes. European colonization efforts had clearly altered portions of the Iroquois’ communities. ^[5]

Bartram also recorded a number of Iroquois customs and legends on his journey, including a sweat lodge ceremony and the use of tobacco as an offering to appease the spirits of animals after a hunt. This kind of information would have been fairly novel and exciting to people reading in Bartram’s time, but for modern readers, it also provides a glimpse into Bartram’s perspectives towards indigenous populations. While Bartram expressed his gratitude on a number of occasions, he considered Native Americans to be very “superstitious” people, with their legends merely being “silly stories”. More condemning was his view on land ownership. While he described the Iroquois as the Great Lakes’ “original inhabitants,” he contended that the indigenous and French failure to properly cultivate the land “must entitle the crown of Great Britain to all North America.”^[6]

As a typical Enlightenment thinker, Bartram’s fascination with the Iroquois was, unfortunately, one of marveling at a lesser “curiosity” rather than an interest in an equal people. It is likely that his prejudiced views were influenced by the Tuscaroras in 1711, who killed his father during their larger war in North Carolina, but such close-minded views were also not uncommon amongst colonists. It is worth considering how the language barrier may have affected his ability to directly amend his views, but Bartram, nevertheless, exemplified the same mindset as the white expansionists who pushed Native Americans westward. It was the same indigenous peoples who, he wrote, had little right to the land that, simultaneously, guided, protected, and hunted for his travel party. Ironically, it is also the Iroquois who retain a portion of their original territory today.^[7]

Featured Image: John Bartram’s Sketch of an Onondaga Longhouse (top) and Oswego (bottom), in John Bartram, “Observations of the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other matters worthy of Notice” (London: J. Whiston and B. White, 1751): 9, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/196084#page/9/mode/1up.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes

^[1] James Patton to William Gooch, Dec. 23, 1742, in B. Scott Crawford “A Frontier of Fear: Terrorism and Social Tension along Virginia’s Western Waters, 1742-1775.” West Virginia History 2, No. 2 (Fall 2008): 1-29; Warren R. Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004): 14-49.

^[2] Whitfield J. Bell Jr., introduction to A Journey from Pennsylvania to Onondaga in 1743, by John Bartram, Lewis Evans, and Conrad Weiser. (Barre: Imprint Society, 1973): 7-18; John Bartram to Cadwallader Colden, June 26, 1743, in The Correspondence of John Bartram: 1734-1777, edited by Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992): 218-219.

^[3] Bartram, A Journey, 10-11.

^[4]  Bartram, A Journey, 10-15, 81.

^[5] Ibid, 56-59; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): 257-262.

^[6]  Bartram, A Journey, 43-51, 54, 67-68.

^[7] “Historic American Landscapes Survey, John Bartram House and Garden (Bartram’s Garden), HALS No. PA-1, History Report,” MS report, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, HABS/HAER/HALS/CRGIS Division, Washington, DC, 18.

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Silk’s importance to the early modern economy cannot be understated. Elites in Europe had long preferred silk garb, leading Britain and France to develop highly profitable silk weaving industries by the early 1700s.[1] Gathering raw silk from silkworms, however, proved much more difficult. Growers in Spain and Italy had some success raising silkworms, but most raw silk used in Britain and its colonies was imported from Asia, which along with tea and porcelain, formed the bulk of the East India Company’s lucrative China trade.[2]

The British were fascinated by the possibility of producing raw silk domestically. King James I developed a plan for growing silk in the Virginia colony as early as 1609. [3] They imported Morus alba trees in pursuit of this project, but the trees quickly escaped cultivation, becoming widespread in the countryside and hybridizing with native red and black mulberry trees. John Bartram reported M. alba growing wild in local forests by the 1750s.[4] The American silk industry never took off as tobacco and cotton were far more lucrative for most farmers. Still, the idea would continue to circulate in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century.

An illustration of the white mulberry tree (Morus alba).

The Bartrams were aware of these experiments in raising silkworms. In 1743, John Bartram received word from the naturalist and politician from New York, Cadwallader Colden, about the governor of Connecticut who was “cloathed in a good handsom Silk of his own making” and had plans to produce one hundred more yards of silk later in the year. Bartram replied and informed Colden of a previous misadventure in silkworm production:

Severall in our province made an attempt to raise Silk about 16 or 18 year ago but the trouble in raising the worms & winding the silk Soon discouraged them & the persons that was the most eager to promote it hath since found a greater profit in raising Hemp & Tobaco so that now we have no inclination to try any farther experiments of the Silk worms notwithstanding our plantations is full of mulberry trees… But if our Neibouring colonys should Succeed its very Likely Some would make another tryall[5]

Despite the failure described by Bartram, the allure of silkworms remained and further trials were indeed attempted. Bartram recognized that the “mighty Monarchs of China” became “so rich and their Princes So Powerfull” through raising silkworms.[6] Silk production would continue in Connecticut over the next few decades, and in the 1760s it piqued the interest of Benjamin Franklin, who organized the immigration of silk workers from England to Pennsylvania. Soon, Pennsylvania and its neighboring states had fledgling silk industries.[7]

The Bartrams enter the story of American silk production again a few years later. John’s son, Moses Bartram, evidently took an interest in collecting silk from native silkworms and experimented with raising them himself. He prepared his observations and delivered them to the American Philosophical Society in 1768. In his remarks, Moses describes capturing five cocoons from local moths in 1766, which gradually hatched and produced moths that laid some three hundred eggs.[8]

The following spring, Moses set to work raising the silkworms. He placed them in glass bottles, put the bottles in the shade to shield the worms from the heat, and filled the bottles with water and vegetables. Moses tried feeding them mulberry leaves, which his native worms apparently did not appreciate, instead preferring to graze on local vegetables (especially apple tree leaves). He wrote down his observations on the worms every week, recording their habits—they crawled down from their perches to “drink heartily two or three times a day”—and their life cycle. By August 10th, they were all wrapped up in cocoons again, where they would wait to emerge next year.

Moses did not report trying to extract silk from the cocoons. He likely did not know how or did not have the instruments to do so. But he hoped that his experiments would reveal how silkworms could be “raised to advantage, and perhaps, in time, become no contemptible branch of commerce,” and compared his worms favorably to those from the East.

Moses Bartram likely raised polyphemus moths, (Antheraea polyphemus) which can still be found at the garden today, like this one spotted a few years ago.

The Bartrams’ experiments with silk production were not over. In spring 1771, we have evidence that Elizabeth Bartram, daughter of John, younger sister of Moses, and William Bartram’s twin, was raising silkworms at their home. John writes to Franklin to inform him of this development, saying that she “hath saved several thousands of eggs of silkworms which she expects will hatch in A few days… she intends to give them A fair tryal this spring.” Franklin was delighted to hear this and replied, wishing her success, adding that “nothing is wanting to our country for the produce of silk, but skill; which will be obtained by persevering till we are instructed by experience.”[9] We know little of what happened to Elizabeth’s experiment in raising silkworms, but they may have been grown in bins in a room attached to the kitchen at the Bartram home in Kingsessing.

Why did silk production not take off in America despite many colonists’ best efforts? Franklin was right that acquiring the skill to grow silkworms was a major obstacle to building a silk industry in America, but there was an even bigger barrier: labor. Raising silkworms was notoriously labor-intensive. Silkworms have to feed for weeks. Once they spin their cocoons, the silkworms are boiled, their cocoons extracted, and then wound on a reel to produce usable fiber. More than two thousand silkworms are required to produce just one pound of silk.

In the American colonies, which were sparsely populated compared to Europe, to say nothing of China and India, finding enough labor to produce a competitive silk industry was a challenge that proved impossible to overcome. Pehr Kalm, a Swedish botanist and traveler who worked under Linnaeus and visited John Bartram, recognized this issue. In his treatise on North American mulberry trees, he commented that “the country was so sparsely inhabited,” that it would be “utterly useless to engage in silkworm culture and the additional work of spinning the silk.”[10] Countless other crops turned a far greater profit, and flax, hemp, and cotton could produce any fibers the colonists needed with far less effort.

Experiments with silk would continue. Around the Revolution, a “silk craze” and swept over the nation as people “gave themselves over completely to the cultivating of silk.”[11] That craze was evident during William Bartram’s travels across the southeastern states, where he describes encountering “a large orchard of the European Mulberry trees (Morus alba), some of which were grafted on stocks of the native Mulberry (Morus rubra) these trees were cultivated for the purpose of feeding silk-worms (phalaena bombyca).[12]

Growers were caught up in a similar craze in the 1830s, when thousands scrambled to buy the recently introduced “Chinese Mulberry” (Morus multicaulis).[13] Like previous experiments, these attempts at raising silkworms domestically could not produce silk efficiently enough and did not amount to much, except a bubble and bust in the nursery trade. Eventually, however, the refining of raw silk became a major industry in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century silk mills (usually relying on imported raw silk from Japan) popped up all over the country, and in 1920 the silk industry had become the largest industry in Pennsylvania. Silk was a dominant industry in the Eastern states until World War II, when wartime interruptions on imported silk and new synthetic fibers gradually made it obsolete.

White mulberry trees still grow at Bartram’s Garden today, like this one growing just in front of the Bartram house. Photograph by Gabriel Morbeck.

White mulberries remained in the Bartram catalogue for years after their attempts at raising silkworms. In the 1828 catalogue, mulberries are listed available as “small trees of the white Italian or Persian Mulberry, for Silk-worms.”[14] Robert Carr, then the proprietor of the garden, took out an advertisement for the garden’s stock of M. muticaulis in a Delaware County newspaper in 1838. These sales would have undoubtedly enticed the countless ordinary people who hitched their fortunes (and their labor) to dreams of silk cultivation.  White mulberries remain widespread around Philadelphia, a reminder of this intriguing piece of our region’s history.

Notes

Cover image: title page from Moses Bartram’s article in the Transactions of the APS.

[1]  Leanna Lee-Whitman, “The Silk Trade: Chinese Silks and the British East India Company,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 21-41

[2] Ronald C. Po, “Tea, Porcelain, and Silk: Chinese Exports to the West in the Early Modern Period,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (Oxford University Press: 2018).

[3] Cora E. Lutz, “Ezra Stiles and the Culture of Silk in Connecticut,” The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 58, No. 3/4 (April 1984), pp. 143-149

[4] Esther Louise Larsen and Pehr Kalm. “Pehr Kalm’s Description of the North American Mulberry Tree.” Agricultural History Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct., 1950), pp. 221-227

[5] John Bartram, Letter to Cadwallader Colden, September 17^th, 1743; in The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, ed. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (University of Florida Press, 1992), p. 222.

[6] John Bartram, Letter to Colden.

[7] Lutz, “Ezra Stiles and the Culture of Silk in Connecticut”, 144.

[8] The domesticated silk moth, Bombyx mori, has not existed outside of human care for thousands of years, but dozens of its relatives are referred to as “silk moths” and make similar cocoons. Moses described the moth that hatched as a “large brown fly”, which could have been one of the Giant Silk Moths from the family Saturniidae, perhaps Antheraea polyphemus, the polyphemus moth.

[9] John Bartram, Letter to Benjamin Franklin, April 29th, 1771; and Franklin to Bartram, July 17, 1771; in The Correspondence of John Bartram. p. 739, 744. Elizabeth Bartram married William Wright, August 12, 1771 and moved to Conestoga on the Susquehanna in Lancaster County.

[10] Pehr Kalm, “Pehr Kalm’s Description of the North American Mulberry Tree.”

[11] Elizabeth Hall, “If Looms Could Speak: The Story of Pennsylvania’s Silk Industry,” Pennsylvania Heritage, Summer 2006.

[12] William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 308.

[13] David Landry. “History of Silk Production,” Mansfield Historical Society, May 6, 2013. Botanists now consider M. multicaulis a variety of M. alba.

[14] Robert Carr, Periodical Catalogue of Frit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Green House Plants &c. Cultivated and For Sale at Bartram’s Botanic Garden, Kingsessing, 1828. Provided through the Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

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“Here are few habitations, and some fields cleared and cultivated; but the inhabitants neglect agriculture; and generally employ themselves in hunting, and fishing; we however furnished ourselves here with a sufficiency of excellent Batatas. I observed no new vegetable productions, except a species of Cleome, (Cleome lupinifolia) this plant possesses a very strong scent, somewhat like Gum Assafetida, notwithstanding which the inhabitants give it a place in soups and sauces.” [1]

William never mentions the plant again, but he must have taken some seeds of it back with him to grow at Bartram’s Garden, because the plant re-emerges in an illustration that he made for the book Elements of Botany in 1803. That illustration can clearly be identified as cat’s whiskers (modern name Cleome gynandra), which at the time Bartram named Cleome lupinifolia but later corrected to Cleome pentaphylla owing to its foliage that came in leaflets of five. The plant was still in cultivation at the Garden for some years after that, appearing in catalogues William Bartram compiled for interested botanists in 1807 and 1819, before it disappears from the historical record.

Unlike most other plants Bartram found during his expeditions, however, cat’s whiskers was not recorded anywhere else in the Southeastern United States, nor was it native to the region. Cat’s whiskers is actually native to the Old World. In many areas in Asia, locals treat it as a weed. But in many parts of Africa, especially eastern and southern Africa, the cultivation of cat’s whiskers as a leafy vegetable was (and remains) widespread.[2] At the time there was no evidence of anyone growing cat’s whiskers within thousands of miles of Louisiana.

How could William Bartram have found it on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain in 1775? Answering this question requires looking closely at the context he provides and at social histories of the region. Doing so gives a look into a lost piece of Louisiana cuisine and horticultural practice. Cleome gynandra shows that plants carry with them a social story that deserves careful investigation, filling in the gaps left by written records of the past.

We suspect that Bartram may have encountered a community that included free people of African descent who knew how to cultivate cat’s whiskers. Although Bartram does not give any more details on this community, we can infer that they probably were not of wholly European origin. Robert Hastings, in his The Lakes of Pontchartrain, speculates that the dwellings described by Bartram here were “apparently of European settlement.”[3] This was likely not the case, as the presence of Cleome gynandra would indicate.

When Bartram encountered European settlers, he usually identified their name and country of origin, as in the case of the “English Gentleman” named James Rumsey who Bartram had stayed with earlier that week. We know that Rumsey was deeply involved in the West Floridian slave trade. A fact that Bartram often tried to obscure in his writings, possibly owing to his own failed experience starting a plantation in Florida in 1766. Perhaps this is why no enslaved people are mentioned during his time at Rumsey’s.[4] But he does explicitly refer to Rumsey’s settlement (and other sites he visits) as a “plantation.” The settlement where he encounters cat’s whiskers is described with entirely different terminology, as “a few habitations” in a “fertile and delightful region.”

William Bartram journeyed along the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, eventually stopping at a fort along the Iberville River. Bartram found Cleome gynandra somewhere near the mouth of the Tangiapahoa river. Credit: Brad Sanders of the Bartram Trail Conference.

This part of Louisiana, which oscillated between British and Spanish colonial control, has been described by historian Frances Kolb as a “borderland” where all sorts of people sought to survive on the porous boundary between empires.[5] Indigenous Acolapissa and Choctaw people, many of whom were displaced by conflict with Britain during the Seven Years’ War, still lived on the north shores of Lake Pontchartrain and traded with colonial settlements.  While Louisiana was under Spanish control, French Acadians and Canary Islanders flocked to the region. The period of British control brought a flood of European planters, who frequently brought with them enslaved African people, usually originating from West Africa.[6] And most importantly, the Louisiana borderlands were home to freed African Americans and Black Creoles, who sought whatever escape they could from a rapidly expanding slave system, sometimes even forming self-sustaining Maroon communities who lived on the outskirts of plantation society.[7]

The boundaries between these groups were blurred, since they intermarried throughout the eighteenth century.[8] Research on Louisiana Folklife by local historians has shown that so-called “swamp communities” on the northwestern side of the Lake persisted through the 20^th century, where creolized families of mixed European, African and Native descent live fishing and hunting “virtually as did the Choctaw.”[9] That description lines up with evidence describing eighteenth century makeup of this part of Louisiana.

If Africans did indeed live at the settlement Bartram encountered, they could have brought with them the knowledge of how to cultivate and prepare Cleome gynandra. People in West Africa sometimes ate cat’s whiskers, especially during times of famine when they would foraged it naturally in disturbed or unsown fields. There, it may have been referred to as “boanga” or “mugole.”[10] Although most of the enslaved people in Louisiana came from Senegambia, which was not known to cultivate cat’s whiskers, there is evidence of the Birifor people of Burkina Faso preparing the leaves in sauces and soups, which matches William Bartram’s description.[11] Some enslaved people sold on the Gold Coast and transported to the Americas through the Middle Passage could have originated from that region.[12] They also could have come from another part of West Africa such as Nigeria, Ghana, or Benin where Cleome gynandra cultivation has been documented.

Photograph of  wild cat’s whiskers growing in Tanzania. Credit: Dick Culbert, Wikimedia Commons

Cat’s whiskers would certainly not be the only plant to make its way from West Africa into the cuisine of Louisiana, where close contact between people of vastly different ethnic backgrounds led to a high degree of cultural diffusion. Enslaved people from West Africa would have found a climate and ecosystem suitable to growing many of the vegetables they grew at home. Okra, for instance, was brought to the region by people of African descent via the West Indies and became an important part of the region’s distinctive gumbo, while knowledge of rice cultivation came via the slave trade at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was quickly taken up across the region.[13] Perhaps Cleome gynandra is a forgotten part of this story of transcontinental cultural exchanges.

Slavery and settler colonialism cast a long shadow over early American plant science, and historians have documented how the labor of enslaved people and dispossession of Indigenous lands contributed to producing the profits that made empirical botanical research from people like the Bartrams possible.[14] William Bartram’s encounter with Cleome gynandra highlights an underappreciated part of this story, one that centers the contribution and agency of free Black Creoles in disseminating botanical knowledge.

Notes

Cover image: William Bartram’s engraving of Cleome gynandra for Elements of Botany in 1803.

Thanks to Joel Fry, whose research on Cleome gynandra made this article possible; and Brad Sanders, who created the map used here.

[1] Bartram, William. The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 269.   

[2] Chweya, James A. and Nameus A. Mnzava. “Cat’s whiskers. Cleome gynandra L. Promoting the conservation and use of underutilized and neglected crops,” Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Gatersleben / International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome, Italy, 11. Chweya and Mnzava list nearly 40 countries that C. gynandra is likely native to.

[3] Hastings, Robert W. The Lakes of Pontchartrain: Their History and Environments, (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 45

[4] McGaughy, Taylor. “Bartram’s Westerly Wanderings: Economic Transitions in Travels”. In The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy, ed. Kathryn H. Braund. (University of Alabama Press, 2022), p. 17. See Sharece Blakney’s blog post titled “Six Likely Negroes: John Bartram and the East Florida Plantation” to read more about William’s past with slavery.

[5] Kolb, Frances. “Profitable Transgressions: International Borders and British Atlantic Trade Networks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1763-1783,” in Atlantic Environments and the American South, ed. Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020), 135-54.

[6] Usner, Daniel H. “‘A Prospect of the Grand Sublime’: An Atlantic World Borderland Seen and Unseen by William Bartram,” in The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy, ed. Kathryn H. Braund. (University of Alabama Press, 2022), 22.

[7] Reeves, William D. Historic Louisiana: An Illustrated History. (San Antonio: Historical Publishing Network, 2003), 11-12.

[8] Gardner, Joel. “The Florida Parishes: An Overview,” In Folklife in the Florida Parishes. (New Orleans: Louisiana Division of the Arts, 1988).

[9] Gregory, H.F. “Indians and Folklife in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana,” in Folklife in the Florida Parishes. (New Orleans: Louisiana Division of the Arts, 1988).

[10] Chweya, James A. and Nameus A. Mnzava. “Cat’s whiskers,” 10.

[11] Freedman, Bob. “Cleome gynandra.” Purdue University Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture’s Famine Foods Project. https://www.purdue.edu/hla/sites/famine-foods/famine_food/cleome-gynandra/. Accessed 6-2-2022.

[12] Slavery and Remembrance Project, 2022. “Slave Trade Routes”. Published by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and UNESCO’s Slave Route Project.

[13] Brasseaux, Carl A. The Founding of New Acadia, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

[14] McGaughy, Taylor. “Bartram’s Westerly Wanderings: Economic Transitions in Travels”. In The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy, ed. Kathryn H. Braund. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022), p. 18.

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The word “plantation” has lost some of its varied meanings in modern US English, with the common colloquial definition now focused down to large-scale agriculture (or industry) with enslaved labor, often implying ante-bellum Southern US plantations. “Plantation” in English derives from action words in Latin or French meaning “to plant” or “a planting” [of crops, trees, even people]. An example of its early 18th century meaning can be gathered from Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia of 1728:

PLANTATION, in the Colonies, a Spot of Ground which some Planter or Person arrived in a new Colony, pitches on to cultivate and till for his own Use. See COLONY.

COLONY, a Plantation, or Company of People, of all Sexes and Conditions, transported into a remote Province, in order to cultivate and inhabit it. See PLANTATION.[1]

In the Cyclopaedia definition, a plantation is essentially part of and similar to a colony. Chambers’ definition of “Colony” is expanded out with three forms of colonies: “The first to ease or discharge the Inhabitants of a Country where the People are become too numerous…; the second are those establish’d by victorious Princes and People, in the middle of vanquish’d Nations… to keep ‘em in awe and obedience. The third may be call’d Colonies of Commerce….” All three of these forms of colony seem to also be found in the efforts of plantations in North America.[2]

By 1739 John Bartram owned three adjacent farms in Kingsessing totaling close to 3oo acres, and he also retained the ancestral farm in Darby which was around 140 acres. From limited data, Bartram operated these tracts as individual farms, pursuing typical mixed agriculture of the rural areas around Philadelphia — mixing dairying and small number of sheep and horses with wheat and a mix of other small grains and field crops in rotation.[3] The Kingsessing farms were eventually combined into two farms of around 140 acres each with Bartram himself managing one, and an older son James Bartram was given control of one farm at his marriage in 1753. The Bartram family farm in Darby was likely leased or run by a tenant. Mixed farms or plantations in Kingsessing could be operated within the scope of family labor with occasional hired help, indentured labor, and only rarely with limited enslaved labor.[4]

John Bartram and his European correspondents, and particularly his London correspondent Peter Collinson (1694-1768) only occasionally used the word “plantation” and then with several meanings. The Londoner, Peter Collison mainly used “plantation” to mean large agricultural or forestry plantings, generally in Europe, but he also on occasion used it to describe the Virginia tobacco plantations where he had acquaintances.[5]

John Bartram only very occasionally referred to his farm in Kingsessing as a plantation and used farm much more regularly. “Plantation” tends to be used with a vaguely historical sense, referring to when Bartram first settled in Kingsessing:

… the first I observed sloe trees was at a plantation whose owner came two years into this country before A house was builded in Philadelphia I brought some from there when I settled on my plantation.[6]

And notably, John Bartram, retired in 1772, wrote to his son William, then on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina: “I have thrown of[f] all plantation business to John & we live with him.”[7]

In biographical accounts long following the death of John Bartram, his son William Bartram uses “plantation” with some more frequency to describe all his father’s botanical plantings in and around the family farm and garden at Kingsessing. The term appears in the several published versions of William Bartram’s biography of his father that first appeared anonymously in the Philadelphia edition of the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia 1800 and was reprinted little changed in the Cyclopaedia printed in Philadelphia in 1807. William Bartram also published a longer biographical essay on his father in 1804, and included similar biography in the “Preface” to the 1807 Catalogue of the plants at Bartram’s Garden. In each of these biographical pieces, William Bartram uses “plantation” to include both North American plantings at his father’s farm and garden, as well as plantings of American plants in gardens of the European customers of the Bartrams:

he purchased a plantation in a delightful situation on the banks of the Schuylkill, about five miles from Philadelphia, where he laid out, with his own hands a large garden.[8]

And John Bartram’s work was:

collecting whatever was new and curious to furnish and ornament the European gardens and plantations with the productions of the New World.[9]

By the early 19th century date of these filial biographies it may seem William Bartram was using “plantation” as an intentionally nostalgic glance back at the old colonial world. These same biographical accounts of John Bartram by son William are also the major source of evidence that John Bartram freed a slave.[10]

Notes

[1] Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia, or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences: containing the definitions of the terms, and accounts of the things signify’d thereby, in the several arts… 2 vols. London: Printed for J. and J. Knapton… (1728). “Plantation” vol.2, p. 832; “Colony” vol. 1, p. 257. Chambers ended his long article on Colonies with this: “Originally, the Word Colony signify’d no more than a Farm: i.e. the Habitation of a Peasant, with the Quantity of Land sufficient for the Support of his Family.”

[2] It is often stated that “plantation” was a measurement term in the mid-Atlantic for a farm of larger acreage. The current entry on “Plantations,” in the web-based “Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia,” https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/plantations/ uses that exact hierarchy of acreage: “In the eighteenth century the word simply meant a property containing between one hundred and one thousand acres.” While the terms “farm”, “plantation” and “manor” do appear in early descriptions of property and land transactions in Pennsylvania, there is nothing to indicate that “plantation” referred to this precise range of size or scale. “Manor” had a special meaning in purchases from the Proprietor, usually reserved for Penn family relations or extraordinary conditions, and it sometimes conveyed quasi-feudal rights. Plantation seems largely synonymous with farm or perhaps “colonial farm” in early Pennsylvania.

[3] Marsh lands and drained marsh meadows for grazing were also perhaps the most valuable part of the farms along both sides of the lower Schuylkill. From the mid-17th century, considerable community cooperative effort was put into building and maintaining banks and ditches and sluices to drain the marshlands.

[4] There were a few individual cases of farms or plantations with a workforce of 4 or more enslaved Africans in Kingsessing, possibly raising tobacco in the Chesapeake fashion with hand cultivation. Tobacco cultivation had been attempted under the Swedish colony on the Delaware and Schuylkill, following the model of Maryland and Virginia, in part as the Swedish crown granted the colony a monopoly on tobacco imports to Sweden. But tobacco was apparently never a widespread crop in New Sweden, and tobacco was not grown by the Bartram family.

[5] Peter Collinson to John Bartram, March 14, 1737; The Correspondence of John Bartram 1734-1777, edited by Edmund Berkeley, and Dorothy Smith Berkeley. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1992, p. 41; PC to JB, September 1, 1741; Correspondence of JB: p. 167; PC to JB, ca. March 10, 1744, Correspondence of JB: p. 235

[6] JB to PC, May 1738; Correspondence of JB: p. 89.

[7] JB to WB, July 15, 1772, Correspondence of JB: p. p. 749.

[8] “BARTRAM, (JOHN)” in Supplement to the Encyclopædia, vol. 1, Philadelphia: 1800, p. 91.

[9] Supplement to the Encyclopædia, p. 92.

[10] William Bartram, both anonymously and credited penned several short biographies for his father, the first printed in 1800 was the biographical entry, “BARTRAM, (JOHN),” that appeared Supplement to the Encyclopædia,. vol. 1, Printed by Budd and Bartram for Thomas Dobson, Philadelphia 1800, p. 91-92; and reprinted in 1807 as “Bartram, John,” in The Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, vol. 4, Philadelphia: 1807, with minor additions by Alexander Wilson. William Bartram also wrote a biographical article under his name for B. S. Barton’s medical journal in 1804. “Some Account of the late Mr. John Bartram, of Pennsylvania.” Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, vol. 1, part 1 (1804), p. 115-124. And finally, the preface to the 1807 Bartram catalogue contains a different short version of William Bartram’s biography of his father, A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, and Herbaceous Plants, Indigenous to the United States of America; Cultivated and Disposed of By John Bartram & Son, At their Botanical Garden, Kingsess, near Philadelphia. Bartram and Reynolds, Philadelphia: 1807, p. 5-7.

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Little is known about the lives of the Clarks during their time in bondage or after manumission. Although Ann Bartram lived in present day-Old City (Second Street between Walnut and Chestnut Streets) rather than at Bartram’s Garden, the Clarks’ manumission document is an example of the Bartram family’s involvement in the institution of slavery. Download Stories We Know for more on the Black history of Kingsessing and the Bartram family.

Notes

[1] Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers. Collection 0490, Box 2, folder 5.

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On April 5, 1766, John Bartram wrote a letter to his son about a shipment from Charleston to East Florida. William Bartram became a plantation owner in the British colony to plant rice on 500 acres of land along the St. Johns River. However, William needed his father’s help to finance his new venture. Supporting his efforts, John Bartram purchased six enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, and shipped them to William’s East Florida plantation.[1] In John Bartram’s letter to William, he described the enslaved group:

I have shiped on board the East Florida Captain Bachop 6 likely negroes called Jack a lusty man a new negro 5 foot 8 inches high & ¼: Siby his wife new 5 foot one inch ¾ Jacob 5 foot high & Sam 4 foot 7 inches ½   allso Flora a lusty woman not so black as many a cromantee… Bachus her son is a pretty boy 3 or 4 years ould.[2]

John Bartram’s letter to William reveals more than his participation in the slave trade but his attitude towards the people he held in bondage. Immediately after describing the group of people sent to East Florida, Bartram ends his letter the way it began, with a list of items he sent to William. The newly purchased human chattel was casually mentioned between four good yams and a grindstone. In a follow-up letter to William, Bartram reminds his son that he sent him “two young breeding wenches,” referring to Siby and Flora.[3]

Bartram’s use of ‘new’ in his description indicates the amount of time an individual had to acclimate to enslavement. In his letter, he explains that newly imported slaves are preferred since they, “as yet not haveing learnt the mischievous practices of the negroes born in the country and town which the people generally represents as if thay was all either murderers runaways [or] robers, or theeves; espetially the Plantation negroes.”[4] During the purchase process, John Bartram relied heavily on the advice and assistance of friends in Charleston who already owned people. Historians have found no archival evidence that Bartram ever manumitted the people he sent to East Florida. Further research is required to locate them in the historical record. The way scholars write about historical figures has evolved with the field of history itself. The ability to present a transparent historical narrative has grown more necessary with time. Early depictions of Bartram and more recent discussions of race and slavery create an opportunity to examine the past through a more transparent lens.[5]

After the failure of his East Florida plantation, William Bartram enslaved “a negro woman named Jenny” from North Carolina before transferring ownership to his brother-in-law, George Bartram.[6] Later in life, William wrote extensively of his opposition to slavery. Archival documents certainly support an argument for antislavery advocacy among John Bartram’s descendants. And still, John Bartram purchased six people. Building a complete narrative is imperative for posterity, credibility, and accountability. More importantly, we owe it to Jack, Siby, Jacob, Sam, Flora, and Bachus.

[1] “Letter from John Bartram, [Charleston, SC] to William Bartram, St. Augustine, April 5, 1766”, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Bartram Family Papers (Collection 36), Box 1, folder 62. This letter is published in the collection of William Bartram’s correspondence, edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffman, William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings. (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA: 2010), pp. 54-56. Quotes from the Bartram letters reproduced here reflect the original and sometimes erratic spelling of John and William Bartram.

[2] Ibid. Note: “Cromantee” is a subgroup of the Akan people from southern Ghana. Joseph K. Adjaye, “Time in the Black Experience”, Issue 167 of Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994).

[3] “Letter from John Bartram, [Charleston, SC] to William Bartram, [St. Augustine, FL] April 9, 1766,” New York Historical Society, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection.

[4] “Letter from John Bartram to William Bartram, April 9, 1766”, HSP, BP 1:62. Hallock & Hoffmann, eds. William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design…, pp. 56-58.

[5] For more information on William Bartram’s failed plantation on the St. Johns River in Florida see: Daniel L. Schafer, William Bartram and the Ghost Plantations of British East Florida. (University Press of Florida, Gainesville: 2010), Chapter 2 pp. 29-38.

[6] This 1772-1773 Slave deed is reproduced in the Hallock & Hoffmann eds., William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design…, p. 91, Figure 29. The original document is at the American Philosophical Society. George Bartram (1735-1777) was the Scottish husband of Ann Bartram (1741-1824) referenced in Stories We Know, and father of Philadelphia alderman George Bartram (1767-1840). Joel T. Fry, “Slavery and Freedom at Bartram’s Garden”, pp. 13.

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The film was first released in late 2019 by Eric Breitenbach (director), Scott Auerbach (director of photography), and Dorinda G. Dallmayer (writer), and has been broadcast across the country on public television beginning in 2020. It is currently free and available to view via the South Carolina ETV website. Also available is a review/interview of the documentary by Doug Carlson and Dorinda G. Dallmayer in The Georgia Review. Links to both the film and the review can be found below.

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