Richard W. Judd

a 'wonderfull order and ballance': NATURAL HISTORY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF FOREST CONSERVATION IN AMERICA, 1730–1830

ABSTRACT

This article traces the origins of conservationist thinking among a group of scientists who constructed a system of American natural history while exploring the transappalachian frontier between 1730 and 1830. Despite the importance of conservationist thought in American environmental history, we know too little about how its major precepts—balance, interrelatedness, and the practical and spiritual importance of nature—were formulated prior to the Darwinian era. The early conservationists deserve more attention because they provided a firm foundation for ideas that took shape and triumphed in the second half of the nineteenth century.

IN 1945 THE AMERICAN Philosophical Society held a symposium to showcase its collection of materials relating to early American conservation. The conference highlighted a rich body of documents representing a variety of American and foreign naturalists from an era that spanned the writings of Mark Catesby in the 1730s and John James Audubon in the 1830s. Focusing on such notable figures as John and William Bartram (1699–1777; 1739–1822), François and François-André Michaux (1746–1802; 1770–1855), Alexander Wilson (1766–1813), Benjamin Silliman (1799–1864), Thomas Nuttall (1786–1859), and Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815), they revealed a variety of concerns about the forests and other resources in the eastern United States. Although the values and ideas articulated by these early explorer-naturalists might seem foreign in today's ecology circles, the 1945 conference provided a wealth of evidence that the roots of American conservation go deep into the Enlightenment century bracketed by Catesby and Audubon.¹

Surprisingly, environmental historians have made little effort to follow up on the research unearthed by the 1945 conference, and, in fact, we have only an elemental understanding of how the conservation idea originated in America. At the beginning of the twentieth century the United States emerged as a pioneer in nature conservation, having created the world's first national parks, its first public game refuges, its first national forests, and its first full-blown preservationist and conservationist ideologies. Despite the global importance of these achievements, their history usually is reduced to a few obvious benchmarks. In most accounts, the conservation idea first took shape with the literary and artistic works of Romantics such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Feni-more Cooper, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer, and it was given a scientific grounding by George Perkins Marsh, whose definitive work, Man and Nature (1864), traced the various implications of forest destruction across the natural landscape. From there, a string of individuals such as J. Sterling Morton, the father of Arbor Day, Franklin Hough, our first federal forester, and Gifford Pinchot and John Muir prepared the way for the Progressive-era conservation movement. But this is a tale of several dozen men, most with exceptional personalities, and it begs the question: Can such a world-shaping idea flow from such a thin national tradition? It seems unlikely. But if we add to this narrative the early nineteenth-century naturalists who first voiced the concerns that echoed down through the rest of the century, a fuller history of the conservation idea emerges.

Figure 1. Catalog of Species.

John D. Godman, American Natural History (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I Lea, 1826).
In the years between 1730 and 1830, American naturalists pieced together a remarkably detailed description of America's natural landscapes. This scientific achievement, although not well understood today, was fertile ground for conservation thought.

These early naturalists have been excluded from the pantheon of American conservation in part because they have been poorly understood. Typically, historians have found these pre-Darwinian thinkers incapable of approaching nature holistically. In his sweeping Science in the British Colonies of America, Raymond Stearns noted that they pursued three primary objectives: collection, classification, and nomenclature. According to others, they viewed nature as an assemblage of individual species rather than an interconnected system: "as a static and perfect organization of separate facts, conceived by God at Creation and continuing without change into eternity," Ella Foshay writes.² If this was all they had accomplished, they would have added little to our history of conservation thought. But, in fact, they were impressive system-builders, and their imaginative connections between species and across disciplines led them to understand the importance of each plant, tree, animal, mountain, and river in the broader scheme of things. To what degree their concerns were heeded is difficult to say, but their message clearly was before the public by mid-century: Nature study is a prelude to nature preservation. For this crucial idea, American conservation owes them a great deal.

Several important reasons exist for rediscovering these early naturalists, even though their conservation message differs from our own. First, like the saga of Lewis and Clark, their histories document the epic of building a comprehensive system of natural history through first-hand observations, pieced together in individual wilderness explorations across a continent of incredible size and diversity, and these histories are worthy of being rescued from oblivion.³ Second, their ideas are more firmly embedded in our conservationist ethic than first meets the eye. Rightly or wrongly, their conceptual premises—the balance of nature, the divinity of the organic world, the purpose imbedded in all natural forms and processes, the sublimity of the unaltered landscape—continue to inform popular thinking about ecology and the environment today. Third, these naturalists were witness to one of the greatest environmental transformations in American history, as vast tracts of the eastern forest gave way to a landscape of fields, meadows, and pastures. It was this last point—the anxieties they expressed about America's forests—that provided a foundation for the conservationist ideas that took shape in the second half of the nineteenth century.

American natural history was subject to powerful cultural influences that took form in Europe during the Enlightenment and spread to the British colonies in the eighteenth century. Among these was a philosophical distaste for wild nature. At a time when U.S. colonial naturalists were beginning to fan out into the western frontier, the great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon (1707–1788), characterized nature as a nightmarish repetition of aimless growth and decay that, without human intervention, was barren of purpose. The primeval forest, he wrote, was "covered or rather bristling in all the higher parts with thick and dark woods, trees without bark and without tops, curved, broken, falling with age, [with] many more, lying ... rotting on the already rotted heap, suffocating, burying seeds ready to sprout.... The earth ... offers ... only an overcrowded space, filled with old trees loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, fungi, the impure fruits of corruption; in all the lower parts, dead and stagnant waters.... muddy ground..., marshes covered with aquatic and fetid plants, which nourish only venomous insects and serve as a den for foul animals." According to bio-grapher Jacques Roger, Buffon considered the conquest of nature part of the "long march toward the accession to the kingdom of God."⁴ Like Buffon, colonial naturalists saw nature as a backdrop for the unfolding pioneer pageant, and they formed their science to meet the expectations of these pioneers as they pushed back the frontier of wild nature.

Yet it would be a mistake to view American natural history simply as an extension of European Enlightenment ideas. Natural-ists in colonial America were constrained by provincial conditions and by the systems of British patronage that funded and legitimized their pursuits. But even in these primitive surroundings they were beginning to develop a uniquely American way of looking at nature. First, their scientific pursuits generally were oriented to practical purposes. Writing to attract migrants, locate valuable re-sources, and expand the British back-country, they described plants in terms of their culinary and medicinal benefits and trees in terms of their structural properties. Their topographies and geologies served practical military and commercial purposes as well.⁵ Second, eighteenth-century Americans were more accomplished as field naturalists than their European counter-parts, who typically composed their scientific systems from published herbaria and bestiaries, secondary accounts, correspondence, travel journals, and preserved specimens. Colonial naturalists stressed the importance of first-hand observation, and this emphasis established American natural history on a more empirical footing. Third, colonial natural history, like all New-World literature, carried Edenic overtones. The title alone of Gabriel Thomas's 1698 tract sums up the orientation: Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pensilvania; and of West-New-Jersey in America. The Richness of the Soil, the Sweetness of the Situation, the Wholesomeness of the Air, the Navigable Rivers, and Others, the Prodigious Encrease of Corn... the Strange Creatures, as Birds, Beasts, Fishes and Fowls, with the Several Sorts of Minerals, Purging Waters, and Stones.⁶ Themes like these, emerging out of the promotional biases in the literature of exploration, were tempered by the Enlightenment idea of improving nature, but in the context of the American wilderness, with its unexplored and exotic features, they remained powerful, and they foreshadowed the primitivist strain in American Romantic literature.⁷

Figure 2. An Eighteenth-Century Natural History.

John Brickell, The Natural History of North-Carolina, with an Account of the Trade, Manners, and Customs of the Christian and Indian Inhabitants (Dublin: James Carson, 1737).
Working in a constrained and insular scientific culture, colonial naturalists were often overwhelmed by the exotic species and confusing landforms they encountered. Their perspectives, although incomplete, provided a closer understanding of laws and interrelationships in the natural world.

Finally, colonial naturalists were developing a more popular brand of natural history, compared to the genteel and aristocratic pursuits that shaped European science. This democratic tone reflected the common origins and amateur status of America's first field naturalists and the promotional intent of their writing. In addition, the exotic species and landscapes they discovered found an unusually large audience at home and abroad, since people from all classes were curious about the New World and what it might have to offer. Over time, this popular inclination came to reflect the ideological bent of the American republic and its insistence that all citizens engage in reasoned intellectual pursuits. The early naturalists thus again anticipated the Romantic-era fascination with exotic places and monumental nature.

Colonial naturalists labored under difficult and often insular conditions, and collectively they produced only a partial picture of America's natural world. At the end of the colonial period, they were still too scattered geographically to facilitate the interchange of opinions that would have eased the advance of science beyond the stage of discovery and documentation. Only a few magazines reviewed scientific literature, and since universities rarely offered courses or curricula in natural science, serious students had to study in Europe, a journey that few could afford.⁸ In 1815 DeWitt Clinton, an ardent supporter of science, laid out what he considered the main causes for America's scientific inferiority. The nation's wealth, he pointed out, was evenly distributed, and while this was a blessing to democracy, it provided no privileged and leisured class to engage in the unremunerative pursuit of scientific truth or to patronize others in these activities. American colonial and state governments were also slow to establish scientific or literary institutions. Demographic heterogeneity discouraged comprehensive cultural projects, and preoccupation with colonial wars, religious squabbles, and factional fighting left little room for loftier goals. Further, Americans had been brought together by mercenary motives rather than cultural affinities, and given the country's wide-open spaces and limitless opportunities, they were too footloose to engage in contemplative activities. Moreover, the first European migrations to America occurred before the scientific revolution had taken root in the Old World and before it had become fashionable to indulge a taste for the scientific arts. Finally, scientific exchange was cut short by the size of the country, the rural nature of the population, and the abysmal state of inland transportation. Early naturalists, in short, labored without the benefits available to their European counterparts, who enjoyed access to centuries-old libraries, venerable publications, and the vigorous exchange of opinion that animated all intellectual life.⁹

In the decades after the War of 1812, the American scientific community evolved from an isolated collection of amateurs into a cohesive professional body with established institutions, academic media, and a solid rationale for pure scientific pursuit. In 1837 the North American Review noted that "one of the chief national blessings" from two decades of peace was that Americans had been "induced to turn our thoughts inward; that the vast natural riches of our land are no longer trodden under foot without the slightest investigation, nor its majestic and beautiful scenery passed by with a heedless glance." Taking stock of this rising interest in science, geologist George W. Featherstonhaugh concluded rather poetically in 1831 that "the light of knowledge" was beaming down upon America, and "the time appears not to be far distant, when ignorance will ... timidly seek the obscurity where no one will take the trouble to notice it."¹⁰

These changes were prompted in part by developments in Europe. By the late eighteenth century, European scholars had largely abandoned the search for authority in antiquity and increasingly turned to observation and experiment as sources of truth. This shift was inspired by improvements in telescopes, microscopes, chronometers, and thermometers, better methods of chemical extraction and distillation, breakthroughs in understanding genetic transmission, and more precise lunar tables and navigating equipment. A few decades earlier Linnaeus completed his monumental catalog of life forms, and scientists were beginning to recognize universal patterns in form and design throughout nature. In addition, science was becoming fashionable, and works on American natural history were particularly favored. "Everything that tends in the least to reflect any light on this interesting subject is purchased and read with avidity," Philadelphian Benjamin Smith Barton remarked to his friend William Bartram. "With such a flood of light pouring on us from the Old World," geographer Lewis Caleb Beck wrote in 1813, it was the "duty of every one who desires his country's prosperity to direct it to the best advantage. Our resources must be investigated."¹¹

The ability to inspect nature more closely did not preclude the search for fundamental laws. Scientists were beginning to distinguish the separate fields that made up the corpus of natural history, but they continued to celebrate the connections across these fields. Botany, for instance, was improved by new methods of identifying chemical properties. Geologists derived useful ways of dating rock strata from discoveries in paleontology and comparative physiology. Hydrology and hydrography were informed by new directions in physics, and mineralogy benefited from the creation of tables of chemical equivalents. Connections like these reinforced the idea that the sciences should be studied as a single, unified body of knowledge. Alexander von Humboldt's astoundingly ambitious Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe summarized the search for natural laws by characterizing the history of science as a thousand-year quest for system amid diversity, an attempt to blend together "all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes [into] one great whole."¹²

Social conditions in America were favorable to the development of science as well. During the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars (1789–1815), disruptions in transatlantic commerce underscored the advantages of home markets and the untapped resources in the West. Then, during the War of 1812, British blockades and naval threats drove families into the interior, and the reports filtering back from soldiers engaged in the western military campaigns stimulated interest in this region. The postwar depression, British withdrawal from the Ohio country, and a bout of severe weather in 1816–1817 accelerated westward movement, and merchants responded by shifting their capital to western land speculation. Benjamin Vaughan, proprietor of a vast tract of land on the Kennebec frontier, claimed that it was important "to study whatever may contribute to the comforts and advantages of our back-settlers, as tending to our own immediate security and profit"; scientific scrutiny would speed the pace of frontier settlement, benefit the port cities, and quicken the commercial pulse of the nation. The war also stimulated a nationalistic spirit among scientists determined "to study and examine for themselves, instead of ... bowing ... to the decisions of a foreign bar of criticism."¹³

Other developments also heralded a truly American science in the years after 1815. The American Philosophical Society, formed in 1743, was a powerful inspiration to other scientific organizations, and by the first decade of the century similar societies had been formed in every major city in America. Beginning with Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Bowdoin, universities and colleges began offering courses in the natural sciences, and lectures on scientific topics gained progressively larger audiences, culminating in the popular Lowell lecture series in Boston, which attracted working men and women by the thousands. Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia Museum, meanwhile, spawned imitations as far west as Cincinnati, combining theatrical displays of natural "curiosities" with mounted specimens and herbaria arranged in Linnaean categories.

As in Europe, Americans searched for general theories—for the underlying continuity in the arrangement of mountains, the flow of the rivers, the composition of the forests, and the range and behavior of the animals and birds they encountered. Yale geologist Benjamin Silliman, editor of the nation's foremost scientific periodical, the American Journal of Science, applauded the powers of "separation and combination" that drew together the disparate threads of botany, entomology, ornithology, comparative anatomy, ichthyology, and other fields, giving "system and unity to the most desultory fragments." Like Newton, Bacon, Descartes, and Humboldt, American scientists aspired to a systema naturae (Linnaeus's term) that fit nature's parts into an overall design.¹⁴

Faced with the overwhelming complexity of their wilderness continent, American naturalists were tentative about these general truths, but from their various writings two basic assumptions emerge. First, it was clear that nature was arranged according to principles of balance and hierarchy, and that each species had a particular role to play in this system. Second, these patterns reflected the benevolence of the deity. The second assumption was common in almost all public scientific disquisition, and it reflected the evangelical bent in American religion and its emphasis on revealed truth and divine intervention. Sensitive to the battles raging in Europe over materialism and spiritualism, and under suspicion from local biblical traditionalists, American scientists wrestled with the theological implications of their studies. Clement Moore's Observations Upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Which Appear to Have a Tendency to Subvert Religion, and Establish a False Philosophy, published in 1804, offered a potent example of the fate awaiting those who premised their science on rationalism or materialism. As James Murphey wrote in his Creation: Or the Bible and Geology Consistent, science was no longer confined to the learned; it was "heard in conversation, read in newspapers, magazines, and books." Lay readers found the technical terms in this literature mysterious, and this in turn fostered suspicion about the iconoclastic implications of what they read. Only in qualified tones did they abandon occult and divine explanations for floods, earthquakes, and other unusual events.¹⁵

In both popular and ecclesiastical forms, religion was a powerful force, potent enough, as historian John G. West, Jr., put it, to make the relationship between politics and religion "a continuing and pressing concern." Paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin, West noted a common assumption among American public figures: At least in matters of religion, "those who seek the confidence of the public must be willing to accommodate the public's prejudices." Like politicians, scientists were scrutinized carefully for breaches in biblical dogma, and as historian George H. Daniels noted, they were therefore careful to point out "that the moral and religious aspects of science were as valuable to society as was its practical utility." Historian Nina Reid-Maroney described Philadelphia as an "intellectual culture in which the histories of the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment were interwoven."¹⁶

Thus, despite the inductive and positivist tenor of the age, American scientists remained essentially deductive and theological. Benjamin Silliman announced that the "study of nature is but the study of the works of the Almighty. We see in every portion, whether the animalcule, or the mastodon, the products of His all-directing hand." Such declarations warded off the two darkest shadows hanging over the scientific community: the public perception that scientists were dilettantes, and the equally dangerous perception that they were godless. Despite the "distrustful eyes" fixed on American science, James D. Dana nonetheless insisted that the pursuit of knowledge was both useful and reverential. Nature study cultivated the rational mind, refined the quest for beauty, and fortified the love of truth, but most of all, it encouraged contemplation of God's glory.¹⁷

The appeal to piety was genuine. "The more thoroughly we study and the more closely we observe nature in all its parts, the more shall we learn to admire and adore that being who holds our own eternal destiny in his hands," William Henry Dillingham wrote in his Discourse on the Advantages of the Study of Natural Sciences. Most scientists not only saw no conflict between science and theology, they saw scientific inquiry as a religious duty. Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard naturalist, explained why scientists were not simply interested in nomenclature: "we may be able to indicate with accuracy the characteristic difference between the various tribes of animals," he lectured to the College of Physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University) in New York, but there was a "higher point of view" to which the scientist also aspired—"we must understand the connection between the various parts of Creation, and, rising higher still, direct our contemplations to the Author of all, who has formed the whole and subjected it to all those modifications extending through long ages."¹⁸

This, then, was the theological basis of the scientist's search for unity within diversity. Naturalists dismissed superstition as contrary to reason and empirical observation, but sought legitimacy in an evangelical age by linking observed nature to theology. It was common in natural history texts to express wonder at the almost infinite variety in form and function in nature—to demonstrate that "out of the same soil and the same atmosphere, each [different] plant [species] should elaborate that which properly belongs to it." While this variety might appear confusing, it reflected God's glory in creating a perfectly intermeshed web of nature—a giant puzzle with perfectly interlinked parts. Given their theological bent, American naturalists considered the discovery of connections to be as important as finding new species: They were fixed on the idea of systems and laws in nature.¹⁹

These religious influences gave the sciences a strong teleological bent. According to Daniels, "one of the most important of the ideological commitments of that generation was a purposive view of nature—a belief that every natural activity subserved some specific purpose in God's plan for the world."²⁰ One author, for instance, pointed out that owls were unfairly reviled for their eerie nocturnal cries. He lectured that "nothing is a more effectual cure for superstition than a knowledge of the general laws and productions of nature." The owl's hideous cry was simply a function of the "width and capacity of its throat," a characteristic of all predators, and this in turn was "intended by heaven as an alarm and warning to the birds and animals on which it preys, to secure themselves from danger." Teleological exercises—in this case linking owl physiology to God's sporting nature—encouraged naturalists to look beyond description and nomenclature to the systems of divine reason that connected all species.²¹

Geologists found mountains particularly intriguing. To the casual observer, they might appear to be without purpose. "The powers of vegetation regularly diminish as we approach the summit of an high mountain," Samuel Williamson wrote. At about four thousand feet in Vermont's Green Mountains, the forests of birch, spruce, and fir began to shrink in size, forming at last an entangled thicket that gradually blended into the mosses and lichens.²² This was nature no farmer or woodsman could employ; and even for scientists and naturalists, as Benjamin Silliman remarked, there was "little to survey" among the barren mountaintops. It would "seem to have been a mistake of creative power in thus piling together so much rugged earth in a form and condition to make it entirely waste land," naturalist Ezekiel Holmes thought. But geology was a study of purposes, not mistakes: "rough and misshapen as are the most of these enormous piles of crag and ledge, they have important and indispensable use in the great economy of animal as well as vegetable life." Mountains generated the snows that protected lowland fields and meadows in winter; they supported forests used for building material and fuel, and they provided homes for animals that yielded meat, furs, and skins. They also served as "effectual and ever acting condensers," drawing pure water out of the atmosphere and sending it to replenish the reservoirs below.²³ And as they eroded, they contributed to nutrient cycles, sending pulverized rock down in mountain freshets to fertilize the valley floors. "Can we doubt, then, that it was the hand of benevolence that drove the ploughshare of ruin through the earth's crust, and ridged up its surface into a thousand fantastic forms?"²⁴

These teleological exercises had several implications. First, they encouraged scientists to see any change in nature as part of an overall evolutionary plan. Historian and ecologist Daniel Botkin records a conversation between Henry David Thoreau and an old Cape Cod farmer who claimed he had once lost a "crittur" in a nearby swamp. Since then, Thoreau said, the farmer had "lost the swamp" too, as it slipped under the restless Cape sands. A log canoe buried "many years before" on the bay side near Truro emerged at length on the Atlantic side, "the Cape having rolled over it." Botkin concludes that Thoreau "began to understand that nature is dynamic" and makes much of this epiphany: "the idea of the naturalness of change ran counter to the great, ancient myth of the balance of nature, which, before and during Thoreau's time, was the accepted explanation of how nature worked."²⁵ In fact, Thoreau's scientific contemporaries were quite familiar with changes like these. For some, geological change came in momentous cataclysms that heaved up mountains and set loose floods capable of altering entire continents. Others saw these forces as gradual, affecting the same changes over the vast expanse of geological time. Either way, geologists understood landscapes as mutable. Edward Hitchcock, writing in 1833, talked casually about the Cape "sliding from under his feet," and a century earlier John Bartram told Mark Catesby that New York's western mountains were "yearly tumbling down being composed of scaly mater which is penetrated by rains descending which in winter freezeth bursteth & tumbles down roling to ye bottom." Mountains and shores eroded and rivers changed course in geological and human time. "Nature ... never ceases to operate," Harvard's Benjamin Waterhouse concluded; thus his profession was properly deemed natural history.²⁶

Nature not only changed, but its changes were purposive. In the beginning, Hitchcock reminded his readers, the earth was a barren globe. "Compare such a world with that now teeming with life, and beauty, and glory, which we inhabit; and say, must not the transition to its present condition have demanded the exercise of infinite power, infinite wisdom, and infinite benevolence?" Naturalists typically considered human habitation the culmination of these evolutionary trends, and their explorations and discoveries were directed to imagining the form of society destined to emerge from a particular natural landscape. Since bedrock configurations, soils, forests, savannas, or rivers evolved according to design, the totality of the scientist's inventory of natural features would reveal the civilization to follow.²⁷

This faith in progress gave both Europeans and Americans a keen interest in discerning predictable patterns in historical development, and this in turn encouraged the search for patterns in nature. Harvard geologist Charles T. Jackson reasoned that "by a geological knowledge of the country" the scientist could "predict, with a great degree of certainty the occupations of those persons who will subsequently settle there, and trace the various stages of their improvement." Frontier settlers would rely first on timber, fish, and game, leaving the land in a "slight and superficial mode of cultivation," Maine geographer Moses Greenleaf predicted. As these natural "temptations" were depleted, the region's geological destiny would unfold. Maine's excellent bays and harbors and its advantages for ship-building would stimulate commercial activity. Its bedrock geology—rivers flowing over transverse ledges along the Appalachian plateau—would supply power to sawmills, gristmills, furnaces, foundries, and factories. Settlers would abandon their fields to take up manufacturing, and those who remained would find a home-market to stimulate scientific agriculture. Geological determinism was easy to accept in an age that saw the advance of civilization as linear and predictable; for a nation concerned about the dangers of luxury inherent in the latter stages of civilization, the link to fertile soils and natural resources was also reassuring. Searching for meaning in the wilderness, naturalists discovered trajectories absent in the civil history of the young nation, and this link between environment and civilization sensitized them to the value of nature in the destiny of America.²⁸

The belief that all things served broader purposes also sensitized naturalists to the interconnections among species. In an era before Darwin's formulations of plant and animal adaptation, most scientists believed that God made each species independently and assigned it a place in the natural order. Thus they looked for the logic in these interconnections. Nothing in nature was superfluous or anomalous, according to agriculturalist Henry Colman. "Every part of nature, from the largest to the smallest, from the planet to the atom, ... all have their action and use, and are bound together by a reciprocity of dependence and advantage." John James Audubon expressed this interconnectedness by illustrating his birds in their natural surroundings, representing, according to a contemporary reviewer, "the trees, plants, and flowers of the districts in which [the subjects] ... occur" and by relating them to that context through their actions. Botanist Asa Gray likewise indicated that plants were to be "contemplated in respect to their relations to other parts of the creation." He labeled this approach "geographical botany," a new discipline dealing with the "relations of plants to the earth, considered in reference to their natural distribution over the surface of the globe."²⁹ Harvard naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse explained how significant this interconnectedness was to a generation just beginning to appreciate nature's more subtle influences on society: "Ask the woodsman for what a tree was made—he will tell you to bear nuts; to be cut into boards; to burn, to keep him warm, and to cook his victuals. Ask the naturalist, and he will tell you that they are an important, nay indispensable link in the chain of human existence; insomuch that were the ... Legislator of nature to cause every vegetable on earth at once to be annihilated, the atmospheric air would directly become a putrid mass of every thing that is noxious, and man, and other terrestrial animals of similar construction, would soon turn into a mortified lump of corruption. The leaves of all sorts of vegetables are in fact so many laboratories for purifying the air we breathe."³⁰ The search for purpose encouraged naturalists to think about the ways in which all aspects of nature were mutually supporting and beneficial to human well-being.

Scientists proceeded by taking discrete phenomena and fitting them into the web of nature. John Bartram, for example, noted a great army of caterpillars moving unaccountably through Pennsylvania in 1737, traveling about thirty miles each year on a course from west to east. Pondering this curiosity, he recalled that twelve or fourteen years earlier "there came a great number of bears among our inhabitants in the fall of the year." This he concluded was caused by a "want of acorns, their autumn food, a very great way westward, which might be occasioned by the caterpillars devouring the leaves and so disabling the trees from bearing acorns." Along with the bears came "incredible numbers of pigeons," also from the west, and also, perhaps, driven east by the caterpillars' assault on their food supply. Bartram connected these three events and drew conclusions about purpose in nature. They showed, he thought, "the wonderfull order and ballance that is maintain'd between ye vegetable and animal oeconomy, that the animal should not be too numerous to be supported by the vegetable: nor the vegetable production be lost for want of gathering by the animal." His correspondent, British botanist Peter Collinson, applauded Bartram's reasoning: it was "very providential" that each species "has its natural check,—which arises from accidents we cannot foresee, or prevent." Bartram, as Raymond Stearns points out, was a close observer of "the ecology of plants and animals," but his line of reasoning was not uncommon among naturalists of the era.³¹

As Bartram and Collinson indicated, these connections underscored the importance of balance in nature. It was critical, wrote Charles Willson Peale, that "no link should be lost from the chain, but all be maintained in those relative proportions necessary for the general good of the system." Occasionally one species prevailed over the rest, but the "unseen hand" wisely redressed this balance, "saying to each, 'Hither shalt thou come and no further.'" Peale found this "wondrous power" compelling to contemplate and applied the lesson to a story about Pennsylvania's bounty on purple grackles, thought to be pests to the farmer. After nearly extirpating the bird, Pennsylvanians found that "insects increased in such multitudes, as in the year 1749, to cause a total loss of the grass," and farmers were obliged to import hay from as far away as Great Britain. "Providence had not formed even these seemingly destructive birds in vain."³²

Ideas of providential design, interrelatedness, and natural balance suggested a unified cosmos. The vast spaces between the greatest and smallest creatures were filled, Peale insisted, and each facet in this panorama was requisite to the whole. "Every shrub, every leaf and tree are filled with living creatures, each as perfect in their internal and external structure as man." Alexander von Humboldt, perhaps the most widely traveled naturalist of the age, remarked that "even near ice-bound poles ... the air resounds with the song of birds and with the busy hum of insects." Minute forms of life, invisible to the naked eye, displayed a "perfect adaptation" to the purposes they served.³³ Benjamin Waterhouse traced the energy flowing through this profuse system and found again that nature's parts were inseparably linked: "a growing vegetable receives ... organic particles from the earth, from water, and from the air; and their reception perfects the plant. A quadruped receives the plant into its stomach for food, where ... the digesting apparatus animalizes the vegetable, and gradually converts it into the nature and substance of the creature. And when this animal dies, his constituent particles fly off in vapour: these are absorbed by the growing plant ... and ... causes them to grow and to flourish: and thus do animals and vegetables mutually nourish and support each other; so that what was yesterday grass, is to day part of a sheep, and tomorrow becomes part of a man." Waterhouse's observation, written in 1811, suggests his understanding of the essentially unified process at work behind observed nature.³⁴ Here was one source of the naturalist's concern for the loss of forests, animals, and birds as the pioneer pushed westward: In a system so perfectly intermeshed, and so important to the progress of civilization, widespread destruction of nature seemed reckless indeed.

This scientific literature also reveals a Romantic sensibility, even among the more professional and academic naturalists. Most approached their field study with a practical point of view, but because they were interested in reaching a popular audience, they took pains to draw attention to aesthetic features, a refinement important, they argued, to the youthful and sometimes coarse nation. "A noble tree, an exquisite flower, or the song of a bird," one wrote, should "bring the tear to the eye, and soften the heart."³⁵ Before beginning his detailed taxonomy of American birds, Thomas Nuttall offered an aesthetic apologia for the entire genus: "they play around us like fairy spirits, elude approach in an element which defies our pursuit, soar out of sight in the yielding sky, journey over our heads in marshaled ranks, dart like meteors in the sunshine of summer.... How volatile, how playfully capricious, how musical and happy, are these roving sylphs of nature, to whom the air, the earth, and the waters are almost alike habitable."³⁶ In popular lectures, broadsides, museum exhibits, and travel accounts, natural historians encouraged America's dawning appreciation for natural form and primitive landscape.

Alexander Wilson, the Scottish immigrant whose American Ornithology served as a vehicle for his poetic sensibilities, was an important bridge between the Enlightenment science of nature and the American Romantic movement. Wilson himself noted the influence of his Highland heritage: "I believe a Scotsman better fitted for descriptions of rural scenes than those of any other nation on earth. His country affords the most picturesque and striking scenery; his heart and imagination [are] warm and animated, ... his taste is highly improved by the numberless pathetic ballads and songs handed down from generation to generation." Wilson infused his study of nature with Romantic allusions: "my heart swells, my soul rises to an elevation I cannot express." His great horned owl (Strix Virginana) was a "ghostly watchman" who warned him of morning's approach by "sweeping down and around my fire, uttering a loud and sudden Waugh O! Waugh O! sufficient to have alarmed a whole garrison."³⁷ Wilson's distinctive combination of empirical observation, vernacular prose, and Romantic inclination set a standard for popular natural history that was followed closely by his con-temporary and rival, John James Audubon.

Of the two, Audubon's prose was more engaging, and at a time when American naturalists were wooing the public, this was an important advantage. An Audubon critic wrote that "his [literary] style, though there is a foreign aspect about it, is expressive, animated, and often very eloquent, particularly in the description of fine scenery. It is a style perfectly natural..., but it tells us precisely what he means to say, and when he would make us share his own feelings is evidently dictated and inspired by the heart. He has not the solemn enthusiasm of Wilson.... Audubon's passion for the science, is ... more easy, graceful, and such as others know better how to share."³⁸

Figure 3. Romantic Nature.

Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery; Or, Land, Lake, and River (London: George Virtue, 1840).
Pioneering the Romantic reconceptualization of nature that blossomed in the early nineteenth century, geologists gave Virginia's natural bridge and other natural monuments a primeval history of epic events and sublime cataclysms.

Audubon's drawings reflected his Romantic temperament as well. Where earlier naturalists represented specimens in profile, highlighting their taxonomical characteristics, Audubon added multiple dimensions to his birds, often displaying them engaged in intense activity against a background that told much about the birds' habits and habitat. Early on he developed a technique for passing wires through freshly killed birds to manipulate the position into characteristic poses, giving his illustrations a life-like, even animated quality. Using this device, he mastered the techniques of exaggeration, dramatization, attitude, and action, making his illustrations seem, according to one biographer, "more lifelike than life itself."³⁹ Both men were products of a trend toward nature appreciation justified in aesthetic and devotional terms.

In pursuing this Romantic mission, naturalists pioneered the cultural mapping of the American wilderness. European landscapes had been culturally encoded by established artistic, poetic, and literary conventions dating back to Classical times, but the American wilderness, by European standards, was de novo. "Every thing is new, and nothing arranged," one traveler complained. It was the explorer-naturalists who began filling in these blank spaces. On his scientific survey of the White Mountains, Jeremy Belknap described the aesthetic as well as the geologic configurations: "a poetic fancy may find full gratification amidst these wild and rugged scenes," he noted, "if its ardor be not checked by the fatigue of the approach." Similarly, Edward Hitchcock provided chapters on "scenographical geology" in his surveys of Massachusetts and Vermont. Creating monuments from culturally formless nature was important because it awakened in the mind, as Hitchcock put it, a "just pride and appreciation " for the country.⁴⁰ In turn, it validated these landscapes in aesthetic as well as utilitarian terms.

Seeking popular recognition for their discoveries, naturalists linked the wild or Arcadian landscape to American national character. Nature study was a truly republican pastime, they argued, appealing to a broad cluster of patriotic aspirations and concerns: fears about the corrupting effects of wealth; preferences for agriculture as the chosen occupation; duty to the common good; temperance, and Arcadian simplicity. The search for beauty in nature complemented the moral anti-commercialism beginning to emerge in American literature; it offered a constrained form of sensual satisfaction with just enough physical effort to avoid the stain of hedonism or self-indulgence. It contained a subtle critique of artificial sensuality appropriate to a nation with simple Arcadian roots. The theological inclinations, holistic explanations, and popular appeals in American natural history gave wilderness a cultural dimension that set the stage for later celebrations of the sublime in nature.

America's early naturalists also were concerned about species preservation. Because they viewed Euroamerican civilization as nature's destiny, they sanctioned the settlers' assault on the western wilderness, but they were acutely aware of the destruction this process entailed. At this early stage in thinking about wildlife extinction, naturalists were somewhat ambivalent. Some merely advised a thorough investigation of a species before it disappeared; others saw extinction as inevitable—even preordained. In his 1840 Report on the Quadrupeds of Massachusetts, Ebenezer Emmons observed that moose had disappeared from Massachusetts, and he pondered the meaning of this prodigality. "In some re-spects, it is desirable that so fine an animal should be saved from entire extirpation, though it is quite doubtful whether it could be made profitable to man in the present state of society." Perhaps, he thought, it would be advantageous to protect the moose in places where the land could not be used for farming, but it would be difficult to enforce laws to preserve them. Moreover from an Enlightenment perspective, extinction might have its benefits: "So far as game and hunting are concerned, the sooner our wild animals are extinct the better, for they serve to support a few individuals just on the borders of a savage state, whose labors in the family of man are more injurious than beneficial. It is not, therefore, so much to be regretted that our larger animals of the chase have disappeared. What comforts their fur and their skins have provided, can be abundantly supplied by animals already domesticated, at far less expense, both of time and money, and are not subject to that drawback, the deterioration of morals."⁴¹

Figure 4. An Ethical Bond.

Anon., The Book of Nature, in Two Volumes (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1826).
Naturalists anthropomorphized animals and vested them with reason and emotion. This encouraged some to imagine an ethical bond between humans and the natural world.

Others were more openly troubled by these regional extinctions. Audubon, the "American Woodsman," prided himself on his hunting abilities, but his natural histories include numerous cautionary references to declining wildlife. Benjamin Smith Barton noted that elk once frequented the banks of the Susquehanna and recommended laws to "prevent many of our animals from being almost entirely extirpated in a few years, through the whole of that extensive tract of territory within the limits of the United States."⁴²

The ethics of wildlife conservation also emerged in part out of a scientific debate over "mechanistic" and "vitalistic" theories of animal behavior. The former defined animals simply as machines with instincts, and the latter as rational and emotional creatures. Beavers' well orchestrated behavior in constructing dams and "cabins" contributed a great deal to the belief in animal "sagacity," and most American naturalists, given the value they placed on popular legitimacy, anthropomorphized animals as capable of learning from past behavior, communicating, tutoring their young, and expressing anger, agony, and contentment.⁴³ They also endowed their subjects with emotion. Charles Willson Peale found even the smallest insect emotionally complex. Although their existence was brief and their exertions futile, they enjoyed their work, he thought. "What strikes us as wearisome toil, is to these little agents a delightful occupation. The kind Author of their being has associated the performance of an especial duty with feelings evidently of the most pleasurable description; ... these little insects are never more happy than when thus actively engaged." Deprived of her egg sac, a female spider exhibited "a stupefying melancholy," he observed; if she regained it, "her actions demonstrate the excess of her joy. She eagerly seizes it, and with utmost agility runs off with it to a place of security." Audubon portrayed bird passions by presenting his subjects in narrative posture: feeding their young, locating a prey, or defending a nest. This in turn expressed maternal love, aggression, fear, or pride.⁴⁴

Vitalism had ethical overtones. After describing the beaver's architecture and government in unusually anthropomorphic terms, Benjamin Smith Barton went on to plea for their preservation: "I have sometimes been so extravagant as to wish that the laws of my country were extended, in their influence, to the protection of this sagacious quadruped."⁴⁵ In his widely read Travels, William Bartram described the emotional trauma of a bear cub whose mother had been shot by a member of Bartram's party. "Not seemingly the least moved at the report of our piece, [the cub] approached the dead body, smelled, and pawed it, and appearing in agony, fell to weeping and looking upwards, then towards us, and cried out like a child. Whilst our boat approached very near, the hunter was loading his rifle in order to shoot the survivor, ... the continual cries of this afflicted child, bereft of its parent, affected me very sensibly, I was moved with compassion, and charging myself as if accessary to what now appeared to be a cruel murder, and endeavoured to prevail on the hunter to save its life, but to no effect! For ... being now within a few yards of the harmless devoted victim, he fired, and laid it dead, upon the body of the dam."⁴⁶

Bartram's well-known sympathy for animals, based on his belief that they were rational and emotional creatures, "gave rise to an environmental vision of universal harmony between humans and nature," according to Kerry Walters. The notion of a "peaceable kingdom," best illustrated by fellow Philadelphian Edward Hicks in a series of landscape paintings by that name, was a dominant theme in Quaker thought, and through Bartram and Hicks it influenced the Philadelphia scientific community. This mix of Enlightenment rationalism, religious animism, and ethical humanism left a strong mark in the annals of early natural history, anticipating, as Walters put it, "many of the ecological concerns which so preoccupy the twentieth-century mind."⁴⁷

In addition, natural historians offered a practical calculus for conservation that again prepared the ground for an ecological understanding of nature. Convinced that all creatures served broader purposes, Wilson and Audubon routinely categorized birds and animals as beneficial or noxious to humankind, and generally they found redeeming qualities in even the most maligned creature. The jay, despite its irascible character, planted acorns, making it "one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature for disseminating forest trees." Woodpeckers seemed destructive, but they attacked only infected trees, Wilson insisted, leaving behind a healthier forest. "Until some ... more complete mode of destruction can be devised against these insects and their larvae, I would humbly suggest the propriety of protecting ... the whole tribe of Woodpeckers." Close observation stripped away the "mistaken opinions and groundless prejudices" that encouraged Americans to abuse the very species upon which they depended.⁴⁸

For similar aesthetic, ethical, and scientific reasons, naturalists were the first Americans to raise the banner of forest conservation. The cautionary statements of French botanists François Michaux and François- André Michaux are well known, but there were others who acted on the realization that America's forests were valuable resources. This, too was a conflicted impulse. Traveling through unexplored territory, plagued by heat and cold, biting flies, floods, and fevers, naturalist-explorers found it difficult to love the seemingly endless forest stretching westward from the Appalachians. Alexander Wilson, an intrepid backwoods traveler, described the Jersey swamp as a tomb-like place where trees rose to fifty or sixty feet without a limb, their tops "so closely woven together as to shut out the day." In calm weather, he recalled, "the silence of death reigns in these dreary regions; a few interrupted rays of light shoot across the gloom; and unless for the occasional hollow screams of the Herons, and the melancholy chirping of one or two species of small birds, all is silence, solitude and desolation."⁴⁹ Naturalists understood that clearing the forest and cultivating the land changed the balance of nature, but early on they saw this as improvement—as part of a broader evolutionary framework by which God perfected the American landscape.⁵⁰ Given the search for purpose in natural events, it is not surprising that commentators saw western settlement and its attendant deforestation as a capstone to the geological and biological evolution of America. Natural change was not capricious; neither were human modifications.

This notion of purpose in nature was axiomatic in the late eighteenth century, but over the next fifty years a note of uncertainty crept into the discussion of settlement and the natural landscape. As early as 1753, John Bartram warned of Pennsylvania's "approaching distress on ye account of our want of timber for fencing," and in his American Husbandry, published in 1775, John Mitchell called for laws to preserve the East's remaining timber supplies. In 1798 Nicholas Collin, rector of the Swedish Churches in Pennsylvania, described America's forests as a "national treasure deserving the solicitous care of the patriotic philosopher and politician" and asked the rhetorical question: "what person of sense and feeling can without indignation behold millions of young oaks and hickories destroyed, to make bonfires in open smoaky houses, or trucked in the cities for foreign toys!" In his 1846 Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts, George Emerson mused that it was "difficult to account for the thoughtless destruction of rich resources of this kind, in a land where so universal and laudable an economy prevails in the use of all things that are worth money."⁵¹

Naturalists soon discovered a host of reasons to be concerned about deforestation. In 1843 Ebenezer Emmons, who contributed to the massive, multi-volume natural history of New York, noted that the state's northern highlands contained a "great extent of arable lands." Yet the forests that clothed these highland soils were important as well, since they ensured "a constant and regular supply of water" for the rivers below. Anticipating by forty years the New York constitutional amendment that guaranteed portions of the Adirondacks would remain "forever wild," Emmons pointed out that New York's all-important Hudson River "rises wholly under the shadow of forests, wild and uncultivated." His concern for these forests was still tentative and qualified, but his message was that forests were connected to other natural processes: "If now those forests were to be replaced by pastures or open fields of any description, the quantity of rain which now falls would be materially diminished, especially during midsummer; or if it should not be diminished, the evaporation from the surface would be greatly increased, so that the result would remain the same under either condition. Less will flow in the natural channels, and the supply for navigation may be so far diminished as to prevent, or if not prevent, greatly impede the navigation, and interfere with its employment for moving machinery, or the various purposes to which water is applied."⁵²

Figure 5. Foreste As Important to National Identily.

Ebenezer Emmons, Agriculture of New-York; Comprising an Account of the Classification, Composition and Distribution of the Soils, and Rocks, and the Natural Waters of the Different Geological Formations (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen & Co. 1846).
Well before publication of George Perkins Marsh's influential Man and Nature, naturalists sounded the tocsin of conservation, citing a number of proto-ecological reasons to protect forests.

Emmons's reflection on the relationship between forests, hydrology, and climate added a somber note to the chorus of praise for forest clearing that had begun with the first explorations of the Appalachian frontier. Understanding why the same phenomenon now led to such a different conclusion helps explain the beginnings of conservation thought in America.

First, these naturalists were among the first to see trees as a symbol of America's uniqueness and a source of national pride. In an age when commercialism seemed to threaten republican values, preserving forests affirmed familiar virtues like thrift, prudence, and service to the common good. They also saw forests as important to American identity. The Boston Naturalist pointed out that venerable forest groves were "often the first objects that attract the attention of those who have been long absent from their native land, and who, on their return, pour out their genuine effusions of joy on beholding them."⁵³ Since America had no historical icons, the forest "must be the monuments of our country," a North American Review editor explained. By comparison, Old-World antiquities seemed degenerate: the China wall betrayed that country's "cowardice and weakness"; the pyramids were a beacon to "ignorance and superstition"; Europe's cathedrals symbolized "corrupt religion," and its baronial castles, a barbarous and warlike state of society. Trees were more fitting memorials for the young republic. "The tower, as soon as it is completed, begins to decay; the tree, from the moment when it is planted, grows firmer and stronger for many an age to come."⁵⁴

Second, naturalists were beginning to piece together ecological reasons for forest conservation. For instance, they were aware of the extensive clearing under way west of the Appalachians, and they developed an interest in forest succession. Constantine Rafinesque listed among the great scientific inquiries of the age "the causes of the natural rotation of wild trees and plants, and of their alternative appearance and disappearance from certain tracts and regions." Ohio naturalist Benjamin Harrison described this process, and linked it, again, to national ideology.

The first growth on ... land once cleared and then abandoned to nature, ... is more homogenous.... The more thrifty individuals soon overtop the weaker of their own kind, which sicken and die.... The roots below rob them of moisture, and the canopy of limbs and leaves above intercept the rays of the sun and the dews of heaven: the young giants in possession, like another kind of aristocracy, absorb the whole means of subsistence, and leave the mass to perish at their feet. This state of things will not, however, always continue. If the process of nature is slow and circuitous in ... establishing the equality which she loves ... it is sure and effectual. The preference of the soil for the first growth, ceases with its maturity. It admits of no succession upon the principles of legitimacy. The long undisputed masters of the forest may be thinned by the lightening, the tempest, or by diseases peculiar to themselves; and whenever this is the case, one of the oft-rejected of another family, will find great lesson in republican values!

It was easy to see, he concluded, the "great length of time" necessary for a denuded tract to "again to clothe itself with the amazing variety of foliage which is the characteristic of the forests of this region."⁵⁵

Naturalists expressed a similar proto-ecological curiosity about the relation between forests and climate, their interest again piqued by events unfolding in the west. Climate fluctuations were intriguing; many amateur and professional naturalists kept "floral calendars," recording, among other things, the seasonal cycle of plants, the annual arrival of birds and waterfowl, the dates at which frogs began to sing, and the activities of local farmers, on the assumption that, as Stephen W. Williams of Deerfield put it, "any thing which has a tendency to elicit facts with regard to the climate of a country must be interesting." These observations spurred a debate over changes since first settlement. Since Classical times naturalists had suspected that forests influenced climate, but Europe's forests receded at such a slow pace that it was difficult to draw firm conclusions. America's western forests, laid low in a single generation, provided valuable clues to the riddle of climate change.⁵⁶ Although naturalists never resolved the issue, their discussion spurred thinking about the value of forests in the broader scheme of things, and about an even deeper question: Could human modifications change the natural order?

In addition to the climate question, naturalists debated the hygienic effects of forested landscapes. Since the early 1600s, medical theorists had struggled to understand the relation between vegetation, climate, and disease, and most supposed that decaying vegetation in thick forests or swamps exuded harmful miasmas that caused fevers, agues, and other diseases. If forests were leveled, the sun would dry out the soils; less vegetation would rot and putrefy, and the circulating air would dissipate the miasmas. William Currie, writing in the 1790s, Samuel Forry in the 1840s, and Daniel Drake in the 1850s, were only the three most notable theorists who pondered the environmental causes of these mysterious intermittent and remittent fevers. As historian Richard Grove pointed out, the theory that forests contributed to seasonal fevers was "hotly contested," and while no "medical topography" proved conclusive, together they brought sustained attention to the broader purposes of forested landscapes.⁵⁷

Over time, the balance of opinion tipped to those who saw forests as a positive hygienic influence. As early as 1783 Boston naturalist Manasseh Cutler wrote to Harvard Professor Edward Wigglesworth that the "surprising effects which a luxuriant vegetation may produce on putrid and noxious air may contribute much in rendering particular situations the more healthy." Cutler based this theory on Joseph Priestly's experiments with plants and oxygen, which proved that "air rendered noxious by the breath of animals, or by putrefaction, is restored by vegetables growing in it to a state fit for respiration and the support of animal life." No plant grew in vain, Benjamin Waterhouse wrote. "Whether ill-scented, acrid, or poisonous, [plants] ... pour down a shower of ... vital air, which, diffusing itself through the common mass of the atmosphere, renders it more fit for animal life." Vermont naturalist Samuel Williams placed a bottle filled with water over several leaves on a maple tree and found that in six hours the exhalations had forced sixty grains of water from the bottle. "The purity and salubrity of this air is as remarkable as the quantity of it," he observed.⁵⁸

A similar debate involved forests and water cycles. All naturalists assumed that forests preserved moisture in the soils by shading the earth and made the air more humid by exhaling moisture. By extension, forest clearing desiccated soils and the atmosphere. Because damp soils were difficult to farm and stagnant waters difficult to drain, early scientists saw this as an improvement, but in the early decades of the century they began to qualify the assumption. A Pennsylvania naturalist expressed this transition in thinking in 1837. The country he surveyed was potentially fertile, he found, but the soils were impossibly wet and "cold." This would change as settlers moved into the area: "where the forests are removed, the earth becomes sufficiently dry for all the purposes of agriculture, and for good permanent roads." Yet this alteration left him uneasy. By shading the ground, trees modified temperature extremes, and like mountains they could "call ... down humidity from the clouds." Deforestation, he remarked, would intensify summer heats, diminish the rainfall, reduce stream flow in summer, and promote flooding in the spring. Perhaps, Samuel Williams resolved, forests should be cleared in the valleys, where lands were "wet and miry," but trees should be left on the mountain slopes, where waters did not stagnate.⁵⁹ As naturalists grew more sophisticated in understanding the effects of deforestation, a consensus grew that trees played a key role in nature's balance.

These scientific debates were influenced by disturbing changes in the eastern upland farming districts, where agricultural stagnation was noticeable as early as 1810. Troubled by out-migration, western competition, soil exhaustion, disappearing rural small industries, and market uncertainties, farmers began to question the ideology of unbridled expansion. Their forebears, it seemed, had used the forest "only as source of timber and something to be cleared."⁶⁰ As upland families pulled up roots and moved west, they left behind a scene of "desolation and ruin," an old farmer mused. His concern for this abandoned landscape shifted seamlessly from demographic to environmental declension: "Near this summit, four or five families resided in our boyhood.... but scarcely as much of their old buildings as a cellar-hole now remains. A short distance at the northeast, a district of farmers then existed, in which there were boys and girls enough to fill an ordinary country school house, that is now without an inhabitant.... Their farms have become pastures and wood lots, or bare ledges, from which the thin soil that once covered them has been washed in by the mountain torrent, or blown off by the mountain winds. Square rods—almost acres—of the bald rock are now exposed, where the reaper once laid heavy gavels of wheat or other grain, and where cattle and sheep were 'up to their eyes in clover."'⁶¹ Although farmers and loggers continued their assault on the forest, by the 1830s "a few timid voices began to call for conservation," according to Vermont historian T. D. Seymour Bassett.⁶²

Naturalists and agricultural editors exchanged views in a variety of venues, and the moralistic judgments from the latter mirrored the naturalists' impulse to connect forests to other aspects of nature. Like naturalists, farm correspondents and agricultural reformers searched for connections across the natural landscape. Those in Maine complained that radiation from parched and denuded land dried the atmosphere. "The electrical rain-bearing clouds that approach from the westward, as they come within this dry atmosphere, are absorbed and dissipated before their watery contents can reach the earth, while the clouds just [to the] north ... float on over a better wooded district, and yield copious rainfall." Apple trees were suffering; springs were drying up, wells were failing, and snow cover was growing thinner, leaving the soils less productive.⁶³

Mid-century naturalists found a variety of reasons to urge conservation. Forests were valuable for scientific reasons: they provided sanctuary for the plants, animals, insects, and birds naturalists studied. They were important for economic reasons, providing fuel, construction material, and "many substances used in the arts." They contributed to agriculture by sheltering the earth from desiccating heats in summer and freezing blasts in winter, by maintaining and conserving moisture, and by renewing the soils with their falling leaves and rotting stumps and fallen trunks. They were important for hygienic reasons, meliorating the climate and cleansing the air. When trees disappeared, Samuel Williams concluded, "the earth suffers."⁶⁴ In 1831 The Naturalist summarized an emerging opinion among America's scientists. "Independent of ornamenting the earth and of furnishing us with timber and fuel, forests arrest the progress of impetuous and dangerous winds; maintain the temperature of the air; diminish extreme cold, and regulate intense heat; oppose the formation of ice and shelter the earth from the scorching rays of the sun; produce an abundance of water in the streams and impose a barrier to washing away or undermining their banks; preserve and enrich the soil on hills and mountains; discharge the electricity of the atmosphere, and serve as laboratories for purifying the air we breathe."⁶⁵

This litany of benefits—utilitarian, aesthetic, ecological—embodies the lessons naturalist learned about the "wonderfull order and ballance" in nature. At a time when most Americans still thought of forests as a barrier to civilization, naturalists were mustering the arguments that would inspire literary Romantics a few years later and inform a conservation movement six decades down the road.

The aesthetic, poetic, devotional, or scientific references in the natural history of American were not altogether consonant with the reasons we conserve nature today, but the fundamental idea that all aspects of nature were connected and that all Americans benefited from these connections was firmly planted among the naturalists represented in the holdings in the American Philosophical Society and elsewhere. Whatever we think of their science, these several hundred corresponding colleagues in Enlightenment cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Charleston, and Cincinnati understood the importance of nature in the rise of American civilization. They appreciated these connections because they scrutinized the American natural landscape so incredibly well. John Bartram wrote in a letter to John Hope that he had "in thirty years' travels, acquired a perfect knowledge of most, if not all of the vegetables between New England and Georgia, and from the sea-coast to Lake Ontario and Erie."⁶⁶ Bartram's was not an idle boast, and his intimacy with nature and nature's processes was an important source of conservation thinking in early America.

Richard W. Judd received his PhD from the University of California Irvine in 1979 and from 1981 to 1984 was assistant/associate editor of the Journal of Forest History. In 1984 he joined the history faculty at the University of Maine, where he is now Adelaide C. and Alan L. Bird Professor of History and co-editor of Maine History. His publications include Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation (Resources for the Future, 2003), co-authored with Christopher S. Beach; Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Harvard, 1997); Maine: The Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present (Maine, 1995), co-edited with Joel W. Eastman and Edwin S. Churchill; Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass-roots of American Socialism (SUNY, 1979); and Aroostook: A Century of Logging in Northern Maine, 1831–1931 (Maine, 1979). His current research involves early natural history of the transappalachian West.

NOTES

This essay was written with the support of research grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Historical Society. My thanks to Roy Goodman, whose valuable suggestions led me to many of these documents.

^1. See, for example, Gilbert Chinard, "The American Philosophical Society and the Early History of Forestry in America," American Philosophical Society Proceedings 89 (1945): 334–87.

^2. Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 6; and Ella M. Foshay, Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 29, 30–31. See Patricia Tyson Stroud, Thomas Say: New World Naturalist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 198.

^3. Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 20.

^4. Georges-Louis LeClerc, Compte de Buffon (1764) in Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 236–37.

^5. Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 4; Wayne Hanley, Natural History in America: From Mark Catesby to Rachel Carson (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1977), 6. On topography, see Lewis Evans, Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1755), iii.

^6. Gabriel Thomas, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pensilvania (1848; facsimile, London: A. Baldwin, 1698).

^7. See Ernest Earnest, John and William Bartram: Botanists and Explorers, 1699–1777; 1739–1823 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), 114; Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32; J. M. Edelstein, "America's First Native Botanists," Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 14 (February 1958): 56.

^8. Benjamin Smith Barton, A Discourse on Some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History, and on the Best Means of Promoting the Study of This Science, in the United States (Philadelphia: Denham and Town, 1807), 39, 40–41; G. W. Featherstonhaugh to William Maclure, September 20, 1833, B 212, MacLure Papers, American Philosophical Society (hereafter, APS); John C. Greene, "Science and the Public in the Age of Jefferson," Isis 49 (1958): 13, 15, 17, 19–20; Jeannette E. Graustein, Thomas Nuttall: Naturalist Explorations in America, 1808–1841 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 25.

^9. De Witt Clinton, "Introductory Discourse, Delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New–York," Port Folio 6, 3d series (August 1815): 140, 145–47; Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life, 20; Mabel Sarah Coon Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 101; Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1956), 3–5, 59, 327, 354–55; George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 8.

^10. "American Forest Trees," North American Review 44 (April 1837): 361; George W. Featherstonhaugh, "Geology," North American Review 31 (April 1831): 471–72. See Daniels, American Science, 7.

^11. Benjamin S. Barton to William Bartram, February 18, 1788, file 14, Bartram Papers, vol. 1, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia; Theodric Romeyn Beck, Annual Address, Delivered by Appointment, Before the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts (Albany, New York: Websters and Skinners, 1813), 11. See Jules Marcou, A Geological Map of the United States, and the British Provinces of North America (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853), 13; James E. De Kay, Zoology of New-York, or the New-York Fauna (Albany: W. & A. White & J. Vissher, 1842), 9.

^12. Baron Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870), preface, iii–v, 24–25. See Phillip R. Sloan and John Lyon, "Introduction," in Georges Louis-Leclerc, Compte de Buffon, From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and His Critics, ed. Phillip R. Sloan and John Lyon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 3; Joel R. Poinsett, Discourse on the Objects and Importance of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science, Established at Washington, 1840 (Washington, D.C.: P. Force, 1841), 29, 38–39.

^13. Benjamin Vaughan, "Maine," Benjamin Vaughan Papers, B Vol. 46, p, 2, APS. See Thomas Allen, An Historical Sketch of the County of Berkshire and the Town of Pittsfield (Boston: Belcher & Armstrong, 1808), 4, 6; "Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan," Niles Weekly Register 5 (October 2, 1813): 65; Noah Webster, An Address, Delivered before the Hampshire, Franklin and Hampden Agricultural Society (Northampton, Mass.: Thomas W. Shepard, 1818), 8.

^14. Benjamin Silliman, "A Synopsis of the Birds of North America, by John James Audubon, ... [and] The Birds of America, from Drawings Made in the United States and their Territories, by John James Audubon," American Journal of Science and Arts 39 (October 1840): 344–46, 349. See Barton, Discourse on Some of the Principal Desiderata, 11, 12, 16; Grove, Green Imperialism, 11; Michael Dettelbach, "Humboldtian Science," Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 300.

^15. Clement Moore, Observations Upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Which Appear to Have a Tendency to Subvert Religion, and Establish a False Philosophy (New York: n.p., 1804), 7, 8, 9, 11–12; James Murphey, Creation: Or the Bible and Geology Consistent: Together with the Moral Design of the Mosaic History (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1850), v. See Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 9, 66–97, 184–85; Charles Woodruff Shields, Natural and Revealed Science: The Importance, and Best Method of Its Introduction (Philadelphia? ca. 1859), 1.

^16. John G. West, Jr., The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 6, 16; Daniels, American Science, 48; Nina Reid-Maroney, Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740–1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 1, 3. See Benjamin Silliman, "Consistency of Geology with Sacred History," supplement to Robert Bakewell, An Introduction to Geology (New Haven, Conn.: Hezekiah Howe & Co., 1833), 391; Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology & American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28.

^17. Silliman, "Synopsis of the Birds," 347; James D. Dana, An Address Before the Alumni of Yale College, at the Comment Anniversary, August, 1856 (New Haven, Conn.: S. Babcock, 1856), 4–5. See Alphonso Wood, Leaves and Flowers; Or, Object Lessons in Botany, With a Flora, Prepared for Beginners in Academies and Public Schools (New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1875 [c. 1860]), 5–6.

^18. William Henry Dillingham, A Discourse on the Advantages of the Study of Natural Sciences, Delivered by Request of the Chester County Cabinet, Introductory to their Course of Lectures: December 5th, 1835 (Philadelphia: William Brown, 1835), 6; Louis Agassiz, An Introduction to the Study of Natural History, in a Series of Lectures Delivered in the Hall of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New-York (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1847), 5.

^19. Charles Willson Peale, Lectures, B P31, no. 7a, APS; The Book of Nature, in Two Volumes, Embracing a Condensed Survey of the Animal Kingdom as Well as Sketches of Vegetable Anatomy, Geology, Botany, Mineralogy (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1826), 3; "Discussion Between Two Readers of Darwin's Treatise on the Origin of Species, Upon Its Natural Theology," American Journal of Science and Arts, second series, 30 (1860): 29; Louis Agassiz, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, vol. 1 (Boston: Little & Brown, 1857), 18.

^20. Daniels, American Science, 144.

^21. The Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sports, with Illustrations (Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1973), 73.

^22. Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont 1, 2nd ed. (Burlington, Vermont: Samuel Mills, 1809), 29. See Robert Sears, ed., A New and Popular Pictorial Description of the United States (New York: R. Sears, 1848), 34.

^23. Benjamin Silliman, "Remarks by the editor," in G. W. Nichols, "Popular Notices of Mount Washington and the Vicinity," American Journal of Science and Arts: American Journal of Science and Arts 34 (July 1838): 79; Ezekiel Holmes, "General Reports upon the Natural History and Geology of Maine," Sixth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture, 1861 (Augusta: Stevens & Sayward, 1861), 105–06. See Christoph Christian Sturm, Beauties of Nature Delineated, comp. Thaddeus M. Harris (Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge, 1801), 55–57, 59; Charles Varte, Topographical Description of the Counties of Frederick, Berkeley and Jefferson Situated in the State of Virginia (Winchester, Va.: W. Heiskell, 1810), 30–31.

^24. Edward Hitchcock, The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences (Glasgow and London: William Collins, 1851), 158.

^25. Daniel B. Botkin, No Man's Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2001), 103–04, 107.

^26. Edward Hitchcock, Report on the Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, and Zoology of Massachusetts (Amherst: J.S. & C. Adams, 1833), 129–30; John Bartram to Mark Catesby, ca. September 1740, Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 140; Benjamin Waterhouse, The Botanist (Boston: Joseph T. Buckingham, 1811), xii–xiii.

^27. Hitchcock, Religion of Geology, 143, 154–55, 171–72.

^28. Charles T. Jackson, Second Report on the Geology of the State of Maine (Augusta: Luther Severance, 1838), xi–xii, xiv; Moses Greenleaf, A Survey of the State of Maine in Reference to Its Geographical Features, Statistics and Political Economy (reprint; Augusta: Maine State Museum; Portland: Shirley and Hyde, 1829), 37–38, 109, 181–82, 217, 278, 284. See Gilbert Chinard, "Eighteenth Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat," American Philosophical Society Proceedings 91 (February 1947): 27; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980), 16–18.

^29. Henry Colman, Agriculture of the United States: An Address Delivered 14th April, 1841, Before the American Institute in New York (Boston: H.A. Chapin and Company, 1840), 5; "Audubon," Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science 1 (April 1832): 465; "Gray's Manual of Botany," North American Review 67 n.s. (July 1848): 180.

^30. Waterhouse, The Botanist, 155.

^31. John Bartram to Peter Collinson, April 26, 1737, in Berkeley and Berkeley, Correspondence of John Bartram, 44–45; Collinson to Bartram, December 10, 1737, December 14, 1737, September 20 [1751?] in William Darlington, Memorials of John Bartram and Humphry Marshall (New York: Hafner, 1967), 102, 103, 188; Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 591.

^32. Peale Lectures.

^33. Peale Lectures. See Foshay, Reflections of Nature, 29; N. Bryllion Fagin, William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), 46; Grove, Green Imperialism, 12.

^34. Waterhouse, The Botanist, 41–42. See William Bartram, Jr. to Isaac Bartram, 1764, Miscellaneous Collection, APS.

^35. "Ornithology," North American Review 50 (April 1840): 404.

^36. Thomas Nuttall, Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1832), 1.

^37. Alexander Wilson to Charles Orr, July 15, 1802, Clark Hunter, ed., The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 193–94; Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucian Bonaparte, American Ornithology: or, the Natural History of the Birds of the United States (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, n.d.), 94. See Elsa Guerdrum Allen, The History of American Ornithology Before Audubon, American Philosophical Society Transactions (Philadelphia: APS, 1951), 556.

^38. "Audubon's Biography of Birds," North American Review 41 (July 1835): 230.

^39. Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 223.

^40. Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829), 111; Jeremy Belknap, History of New-Hampshire, vol. 3 (Dover, N.H.: Mann and Remick for Crosby & Varney, 1812), 39; Edward Hitchcock, et al., Report on the Geology of Vermont: Descriptive, Theoretical, Economical, and Scenographical, 2 vols. (Claremont, N.H.: Claremont Manufacturing Company, 1861); Hitchcock, Report on Massachusetts, 70, 73. See Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and the Influence of Natural History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 64.

^41. Ebenezer Emmons, A Report on the Quadrupeds of Massachusetts (Cambridge: Folsom, Wells, and Thurston, 1840), 75–79.

^42. John James Audubon and John Bachman, The Quadrupeds of North America, vol. 2 (New York: V.G. Audubon, 1851–1854), 35–36; John James Audubon, Birds of America, vol. 4 (Kent: National Audubon Society by Volair Books, 1979), 22–23, 46; Benjamin Smith Barton, "On the Animals of North America" (1793), Benjamin Smith Barton Papers, B B284.d Series 1: Correspondence, Patterson, R - Scott, E, APS.

^43. John D. Godman, American Natural History, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey & I Lea, 1826): 22–23; "Instinct and Intellect," North American Review 63 (July 1846): 104, 118; Charles Christopher Reiche, "Fifteen Discourses on the Marvelous Works in Nature, Delivered by a Father to his Children," The Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine 5 (November 1790): 335–36; Charlotte M. Porter, The Eagle's Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812–1842 (University of Alabama Press, 1986), 20–21; Kerry S. Walters, "The 'Peaceable Disposition' of Animals: William Bartram on the Moral Sensibility of Brute Creation," Pennsylvania History 56 (no. 3, 1989): 169–71.

^44. Peale Lectures. See Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist: A History of his Life and Time, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1917), 177; Richard Harlan, Fauna Americana: Being a Description of the Mammiferoius Animals Inhabiting North America (Philadelphia: A. Finley, 1825), 23–24; Julius Deming, "Facts Relative to that Faculty of Animals which Has Been Called Instinct," The Medical Repository 1 (no. 3, 1898): 269.

^45. Barton, "On the Animals of North America," 1, 11.

^46. William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), lvii.

^47. Walters, "Peaceable Disposition of Animals," 157, 164.

^48. Bartram in Wilson and Bonaparte, American Ornithology, 138, 164, 186.

^49. Wilson and Bonaparte, American Ornithology, 295. See John Bartram, Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other Matters Worthy of Notice (London: J. Whiston and B. White, 1751), 37.

^50. See Jervis Cutler, A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana (Boston: Charles Williams, 1812), 14.

^51. John Bartram to Jared Eliot, February 12, 1753, Berkeley and Berkeley, Correspondence of John Bartram, 342; John Mitchell (or Arthur Young?), American Husbandry (London: J. Bew, 1775), 83– 84; "Emerson on the Trees of Massachusetts," North American Review 66 (January 1848): 192; George Barrell Emerson, A Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, State Printers, 1846). See Jacob Richard Schramm, "Influence—Past and Present—of François-André Michaux on Forestry and Forest Research in America," American Philosophical Society Proceedings 101 (no. 4, 1957): 337.

^52. Ebenezer Emmons, Report of the Survey of the Second Geological District in Natural History of New-York, Part 4, Geology (Albany: Carroll & Cook, 1842–43), 13.

^53. "Forest Trees," The Naturalist 1 (November 1831): 350. See McCoy, Elusive Republic, 22; Willis, American Scenery, 1–2; Regis, Describing Early America, 61.

^54. "American Forest Trees," North American Review 35 (October 1832): 401–04.

^55. Constantine Rafinesque, "Botany," Western Minerva, or American Annals of Knowledge and Literature (n.p., n.d.), 63, APS; William Henry Harrison, "A Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio," Transactions of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 1 (1839): 248–49.

^56. Stephen W. Williams, "Floral Calendar Kept at Deerfield, Massachusetts," American Journal of Science 1 (1818): 359. See Chinard, "American Philosophical Society," 452; James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).