9
Timothy Sweet
This chapter’s title suggests two themes, one apparently more pertinent to European colonists in the Americas and one apparently more pertinent to the concerns of twenty‐first‐century readers. Many explorers and settlers, from Christopher Columbus through Thomas Jefferson, were interested in the sense of “environmentalism” meaning environmental determinism. That is, they wanted to know whether environments or climates influenced humankind’s bodily and moral nature, as ancient learning held, and if so, how American environments had shaped Indigenous Americans and how they could shape European settlers or, later, African slaves. Twenty‐first‐century readers may also be interested in a “green” sense of environmentalism, that is, a concern for the well‐being of non‐human nature in itself and in humankind’s relation to it. These themes converge in various ways, as we will see. For example, colonial concerns with climatology and environmental determinism share some features of our present concerns over environmental risk and recent scholarly interest in the agency of the non‐human world. The curiosity of early American natural history writers speaks to the aesthetic response to nature that continues to motivate preservationism, while the desire for natural harmony among human and non‐human beings (a desire as old as the narrative of the fall of Eden) speaks to the new agrarianism, steady‐state economics, and other projects in human ecology.
Most early promotional tracts and natural history reports took up the question of whether or how a particular American environment would affect European bodies. While we have become accustomed to thinking about the project of American colonization as involving the management and exploitation of nature conceptualized as inert matter, early modern European thinking about climate recognized in nature an agency capable of acting on human bodies (Parrish 2006: 77–102). Europeans had inherited the Aristotelian theory of climate according to which the globe was divided laterally into zones, usually defined as two uninhabitable polar zones, two temperate zones, and an uninhabitable torrid zone in the equatorial region. Reports by early explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci questioned Aristotelian assumptions in claiming that, in the words of the latter, American lands in or near the torrid zone had “a more temperate and pleasant climate than in any other region known to us” (Branch 2004: 10). José de Acosta, in the Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590; translated into English as The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies, 1604), devoted a great deal of effort to refuting classical notions regarding the uninhabitable nature of the torrid zone, even though, by the time he was writing, Spaniards had been living in Mexico for nearly 70 years and Indigenous peoples had been living there for millennia. Anticipating later anthropologists, Acosta hypothesized that America’s Indigenous peoples had migrated from Asia via a land bridge to the north (not yet known as the Bering Strait), and thus were originally an Old World people – as they must have been if they were descended from Adam and Eve. If so, their bodily natures would not have been fundamentally different from those of Spaniards. In his climatological arguments, Acosta deployed a rhetoric that would become central to the emergence of the New Science, the claim of empiricism, “guiding ourselves not so much by the doctrine of ancient philosophers as by true reason and a degree of experience” (2002: 75). Nevertheless, Acosta’s commitment to Renaissance humanism is evident in his adherence to classical epistemic principles such as a geocentric cosmology. As more European explorations and settlements provided more experiences of American climates, it became evident that a basic principle of classical climatology, consistency of climates across latitudinal bands, did not apply to the North American temperate zone. English colonists, for example, unaware of the effects of the Gulf Stream, were puzzled as to why New England had colder winters than England, even though it lay farther south (Kupperman 1982).
Further complicating classical climatology was the humoral theory of the human body in relation to its environment, as formulated by Hippocrates and elaborated by Galen of Pergamon, according to which health depended on a balance of the four humors (blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile) – though no body in this fallen world was ever perfectly in balance. The humors correlated to the four elements (air, water, earth, and fire respectively) as they manifested certain qualities (warm and moist, cold and moist, cold and dry, warm and dry). As the first‐generation New England Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet expressed it in “Of the Four Humors in Man’s Constitution” (1650), “Two hot, two moist, two cold, two dry here be, / A golden ring, the posy UNITY” (1967: 50). According to humoral theory, disease might be caused by a propensity for imbalance within the body or by external factors such as diet, excretion, exercise, temperature, or sleep that produced an excess or deficit of one or more of the humors. As imbalances could be caused by various environmental factors, so could they be remedied. Thus Thomas Harriot, in A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), an important early natural history and promotional tract that was published in multiple languages, reassured his readers that the Roanoke colonists maintained good health while eating indigenous foods such as maize and drinking local water, even though these “might have bene thought to have altered our temperatures” causing “greevous and dangerous diseases” (1972: 31). Moreover, the use of native tobacco contributed to health, Harriot argued, for
it purgeth superfluous fleame [i.e. phlegm] & other grosse humors, openeth all the pores & passages of the body: by which means the use thereof not only preserveth the body from obstructions; but also if any be, so that they have not been of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them; wherby their bodies are notably preserved in health, & know not many greevous diseases wherewithall wee in England are oftentimes afflicted. (16)
Seventeenth‐century speculator and fur trader Thomas Morton carried the point a step further in his promotional tract The New English Canaan (1637), differentiating among North American environments to favor his chosen New England: “No man living there was ever known to be troubled with a cold, a cough, or a murr, but many men, coming sick out of Virginia to New Canaan have instantly recovered with the help of the purity of that air; no man ever surfeited himself either by eating or drinking” (Branch 2004: 67). Although humoral theory was challenged by a new, alchemically oriented theory of medicine developed in the sixteenth century by Philippus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus – according to which health depended on the body’s balance of minerals and could be remedied by chemical dosing (Woodward 2010: 160–209) – it persisted into the eighteenth century, coexisting with vernacular healing practices. Cotton Mather’s unpublished medical compendium The Angel of Bethesda (1724), for example, attempted to accommodate Galenic, Paracelsan, and vernacular practices empirically within a Puritan providentialist scheme according to which illness was a message from God or a reminder of the state of sin.
Such applications of humoral theory emphasized the sameness of human bodies, all sharing the common ancestry of Adam and Eve, in response to the variabilities of environment. However, the environmental dimension of humoral theory could also be turned toward an explanation of national difference. Spanish physician Juan Huarte de San Juan, for example, contended, in an often reprinted late sixteenth‐century scientific treatise, Examen de ingenious para las ciencias (translated into English as The Examination of Mens Wits, 1594), that national difference was a matter of climate or “temperature.” Claiming the authority of Galen as the “groundplot” of his treatise, Huarte affirmed that
the maners of the soule, follow the temperature of the bodie, in which it keepes residence, and that by reason of the heat, the coldnesse, the moisture, and the drouth, of the territorie where men inhabit, of the meats which they feed on, of the waters which they drinke, and of the aire which they breathe. […] [T]he difference of nations, as well in composition of the bodie as in conditions of the soule, springeth from the varietie of this temperature: and experience itselfe evidently sheweth this, how far are different Greeks from Tartarians: Frenchmen from Spaniards: Indians from Dutch: and Aethiopians from English.
(Huarte 1959: 23, 21–22)
On this theory, nation or race were not inherent, but rather environmentally variable, although environmentally acquired traits might (in proto‐Lamarckian fashion) be passed on to descendants, thus creating the characteristics of nations. In this context, Harriot’s and Morton’s claims for the salubriousness of American climates addressed not merely bodily health but national character and reassured colonists that American residence would not change English bodies or tempers. William Wood’s promotional tract New England’s Prospect (1635) went so far as to claim nostalgically that “both winter and summer is more commended of the English there [in New England] than the summer‐winters, and winter‐summers of England. And who is there that could not wish that England’s climate were as it hath been in quondam times: colder in winter and hotter in summer” (1977: 31). Wood’s claim is puzzling, for even if he were recalling the particularly cool period circa 1590–1610 of the Little Ice Age (c. 1400 to 1700), English summers would not have been warm as winters were cold. This English concern regarding warm climates became especially acute for colonies in the Chesapeake Bay region and southward (Kupperman 1984). Thus John Lawson, in A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), identified a preservative mechanism: though Carolina was generally warm, its winter was “now and then attended with clear and thin Northwest Winds, that are sharp enough to regulate English Constitutions, and free them from a great many dangerous Distempers, that a continual summer afflicts them withal” (Branch 2004: 110). The sense of strangeness that Europeans experienced in tropical and subtropical environments remains a topic of scholarly investigation (Allewaert 2013).
In warmer climates, humoral environmentalism could be deployed to justify the use of African slaves as laborers supposedly more naturally suited than Europeans to hard work in the hot sun, given their origins in a hot climate. James Grainger sliced the matter even more finely in Book IV of his Caribbean georgic, The Sugar Cane (1764), differentiating among various climates of Africa as producing temperaments with particular moral qualities such as obedience or temperaments most suitable to particular tasks such as mechanics, field labor, and so on. Grainger’s account of Africans in The Sugar Cane included medical advice, which he fleshed out in a prose treatise, An Essay on the More Common West‐India Diseases (1764) (Wisecup 2013: 127–160). This treatise’s focus on the “seasoning” of recently imported Africans, on “those diseases whereunto the Blacks are most exposed in the islands,” and on “such distempers as more peculiarly affect the Negroes,” including discussions of “such medicines as the country affords for their removal,” gave the impression that the negative impacts of the subtropical climate primarily afflicted Africans, despite the widespread assumption that Europeans as well as Africans had to undergo “seasoning” to adapt to this environment (Grainger 1802: ii–iii).
While early colonial promoters worked to assure their readers that the more temperate American climates were familiar enough to Europeans so as not to induce changes in “the temperature of the bodie” or the “maners of the soule,” such assurances could not account for the differences that Europeans perceived between themselves and Indigenous Americans. Contributing to this perception of bodily difference was Indigenous peoples’ vulnerability to contagious diseases such as smallpox introduced by Europeans, to which European settlers bore a certain level of herd immunity. Although a corpuscular theory of disease transmission was theoretically available, for example from Lucretian atomism, it was not widely held until the eighteenth century (and even then remained controversial). Prior to that, as scholars have noted, Europeans attributed virgin soil epidemics either to Indigenous peoples’ inherent bodily weakness or to divine providence, or both (Chaplin 2001: 156–198; Silva 2011: 24–61). Harriot, in a complex passage that has become familiar to students of the New Historicism, reveals that the Roanoke people may have imagined something like a corpuscular theory of disease when they accused the English of “shooting invisible bullets into them” from a distance to take revenge against “any such towne that had offended” the English (so Harriot claims) by means of the “subtile devise” of witchcraft (1972: 28). Harriot himself leaves open the question of whether the epidemic was “the special woorke of God for our sakes,” as he claims some of the Roanoke people believed (29). Despite the correlation evident in Harriot’s and numerous other accounts, Europeans ignored native peoples’ assertions that their arrival had brought disease. Harriot, for example, speculated on the effects of a comet as a possible cause of the Roanoke epidemic. Rather, Europeans saw epidemic diseases either as endemic components of American environments – which, despite the natives’ acknowledged facility with herbal medicines, afflicted the natives more seriously than the Europeans, suggesting a proto‐racialized understanding of bodies – or as the “woorke of God” which favored the Europeans.
Later outbreaks of epidemic disease among subsequent generations of colonists, when herd immunity was lowered, undercut the racialized theory of disease while reorienting the providentialist theory. In late seventeenth‐century New England, for example, when jeremiadic rhetoric was an especially pervasive component of public discourse, epidemics were figured as divine punishments inflicted against a nation that had failed to keep its national covenant with God (Silva 2011: 101–141). Corpuscular theory and the new practice (new to the Europeans) of inoculation further discredited environmental explanations for some kinds of disease. The Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721 became the occasion of a public quarrel over inoculation. The debate coalesced along political lines, Cotton Mather being an outspoken proponent of the efficacy and safety of inoculation and Boston’s anti‐Mather faction arguing against the practice in the pages of the New England Courant, a newspaper printed by Benjamin Franklin’s older brother James. Attempting to reconcile empirical observation with providentialist theology, Mather eventually came to focus less on the nation than on the individual. In The Angel of Bethesda, he attempted to find treatments of disease that would address the “Rational Soul” (1972: 28). On such a philosophy, inoculation could be understood as analogous to the preparation that was necessary for the soul to receive grace – preparation that would not, Mather’s Puritan theology held, prove effective in all cases. Thus while Mather first learned of the practice of inoculation from his African slave Onesimus, he gradually disavowed its African origin as he incorporated it into medical knowledge (Silva 2011: 142–179; Wisecup 2013: 97–126). Mather’s disavowal was part of a larger pattern through which colonial physicians and natural historians negotiated their intellectual status and claims to knowledge vis‐à‐vis established centers of authority in Europe such as the Royal Society (Parrish 2006: 103–315).
Debates over environmentalist versus corpuscular theories of epidemic disease intensified during late eighteenth‐century outbreaks of yellow fever in New York and Philadelphia (Estes and Smith 1997). Each side identified some of the causal factors without fully understanding them: the corpuscular theorists were correct in that the immediate cause of the disease is a virus, yet the environmentalists were also correct in that the crucial vector in the transmission of this virus to humans is a mosquito (Aedes aegypti), which requires stagnant water to breed – thus certain environments were more conducive to the disease. Eminent Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush leaned toward an environmentalist explanation in his Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever as it Appeared in the City of Philadelphia in the Year 1793, arguing that that factors such as fatigue, intemperance, and a disturbed emotional state rendered persons vulnerable to locally generated, disease‐causing miasmas. Rush included an account of his own physical and emotional states during the epidemic. In treating the sick, he says, his “body became highly impregnated with the contagion,” resulting in symptoms such as yellow eyes, a quickened pulse, and night sweats. He reports that he treated himself with an “antiphlogistic” regimen, abstaining from alcohol and meat; he kept busy so that “a fresh current to my thought, kept me from dwelling on the gloomy scenes of the day”; and at the disease’s crisis point he dosed himself with “mercurial medicine,” which acted as an emetic (1794: 341, 345, 361). Philadelphia novelist Charles Brockden Brown survived the disease during the 1798 epidemic in New York but saw his good friend Elihu Hubbard Smith (a physician trained by Rush) die while treating patients. Evidently in response to these experiences, Brown soon produced two novels that were set during the Philadelphia epidemic of 1793: Ormond (1799) and Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800). While he was influenced by an intellectual cohort that included Rush and Smith, Brown was especially interested in observing individuals’ responses to their environment. He traced relations between mental and physical health and complexities of causation (or, at least, correlation) while suggesting in some cases that environmental contamination might be overcome. In Ormond, the Dudley family avoids contracting the disease apparently by virtue of abstemious diet and strict mental hygiene (a regiment much like Rush’s, but in this case effective without doses of mercury). In Arthur Mervyn, Brown entertained what we might think of as a secular moral version of Cotton Mather’s preparationist doctrine. Characters predisposed to benevolence hold an environmentalist view of the disease, and in the cases of the physicians Medlicote and Stevens, as well as the apprentice Mervyn himself, this benevolence seems to protect them. Narratives such as Rush’s and Brown’s, which assess environmental risk in the face of uncertainty, bear comparison with modern discourses of toxicity and risk as discussed in recent ecocritical theory (Heise 2008: 119–177).
Beyond issues specific to particular environments such as epidemics, Enlightenment science posed questions of influence and determinism on a global scale. Drawing on geological theories that extended the age of the earth well beyond the traditional biblical chronology of 6000 years, eminent natural historian George‐Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, launched the first salvo in a dispute over the supposed inferiority of American nature (Gerbi 1973). The claim was not original to Buffon and was in some sense a predictable outcome of Eurocentric bias in attempting to accommodate the so‐called discovery of the New World to the frames of classical climatology and biblical history. Buffon, however, gave the idea a precise formulation, working on a much longer timescale and using data from numerous natural history surveys. He argued that as a result of their comparatively recent emersion, the Americas were wetter and less receptive to the sun’s rays and thus less favorable than Europe and Asia to the production of large, warm‐blooded animals and more favorable to cold‐blooded animals such as insects and reptiles, which he considered inferior.
In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson refuted Buffon’s claims by comparing kinds and weights of American versus European animals both wild and domestic and by delving into questions of nutrition and inherent morphological constraints. Figuring largely in Jefferson’s argument were fossil remains of mammoths that had been found at Big Bone lick on the Ohio River (near present‐day Cincinnati) and in the upper Hudson Valley in New York. Jefferson argued that the presence of the mammoth decisively refuted Buffon’s claim that the American climate was not suited to the production of large, warm‐blooded mammals. This is one reason why Jefferson insisted that the mammoth was not extinct but rather was still to be found, as certain Native American stories allegorically suggested, somewhere in the American Northwest. He hoped that the Lewis and Clark expedition would find evidence of their survival. Important as such fossil evidence would be in the case against Buffon, it was more important to Jefferson’s Enlightenment faith in the rational order of nature. “Such is the oeconomy of nature,” Jefferson asserted, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken” (1999: 55). Many of Jefferson’s contemporaries, such as John Filson (The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke, 1784), thought it likely that the mammoth was extinct. They regarded this as a good thing, because they thought that the mammoth was carnivorous and had terrorized humankind. Yet despite Jefferson’s scientifically erroneous denial of extinction in the Notes (a position he later recanted), his prospective narration of extinction as loss anticipated our modern, elegiac response.
Buffon had argued that the consequences of the unfavorable American climate extended to human inhabitants, “whether aboriginal or transplanted” (Jefferson 1999: 61). Native American men, he claimed, “lack ardor for their females and, by consequence, love for their fellow man […] [thus] accordingly have no community, no commonwealth, no social state” (Jefferson 1999: 306). Jefferson flatly denied the charge and turned Buffon’s claim of American newness against him to argue that Indigenous Americans do not lack “genius” but only education. Jefferson’s choice of evidence for Indigenous “genius” sounds an elegiac note, a speech given by Logan (Tah‐gah‐jute), a Cayuga chief whose family was murdered by frontiersmen and who proclaims himself the last of his line: “Who is there to mourn for Logan? – Not one” (68). Jefferson thus refused both the classical‐Renaissance climatological explanation of national difference and the emergent, proto‐biological theory of racial difference, even as he predicts the disappearance of Native Americans and their replacement by Euro‐American settlers. By contrast, his account of Africans in Query XIV on the laws of Virginia appeals to a claim regarding “the real distinctions which nature has made” to posit inherent difference and inferiority “as a suspicion only” even as he argues for the abolition of slavery (145, 150). Thus in chiasmic fashion, a discussion pertaining to culture (Query XIV) elicits a theory of racial difference in terms of nature, whereas a Query pertaining to nature (Query VI) elicits a theory of racial difference in terms of culture. Jefferson proposed further anthropological investigation, remarking that “the races of black and of red men […] have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history,” though he does not position himself similarly as a subject (150).
The other, “green” sense of environmentalism bearing on early American literature may originate in aesthetic response but ultimately concerns humankind’s economic relation to the non‐human world, whether phrased in terms of regret for such a relation at all, as in deep ecology (Sessions 1995), or in terms of managing that relation for the common good, as in the new agrarianism and other such georgic imaginings (Sweet 2002). The aesthetic response of wonder, sometimes taking shape as spiritual or scientific curiosity, interacted with pragmatic colonial motives to produce two forms of relation to the environment, pastoral and georgic. Investigating these “green” developments in early American literature, we need to be careful of anachronistic projection, for our material antedates such developments as Henry David Thoreau’s attempt to move beyond anthropocentrism and transcendentalism to a biocentric worldview, George Perkins Marsh’s conservationist critique of the exploitation of natural resources, John Muir’s preservationist efforts, and Aldo Leopold’s formulation of the land ethic. Even so, there are some recognizable continuities.
Wonder was arguably the originating figure in European writing on the Americas, setting a replicable paradigm (Greenblatt 1991). The words “delightful” and “marvelous” punctuate Columbus’s account of his first voyage; thus in summarizing his voyages he wrote, “I was so astonished at the sight of so much beauty that I can find no words to describe it. […] But now I am silent, only wishing that some other may see this land and write about it” (Branch 2004: 4, xiii, xiv). As later writers developed systematized accounts, the figure of wonder often took the form of curiosity, as for example the characterization of the armadillo as “a very strange animal to the Christians, and quite different from any animal in Spain or anywhere else” in the Historia General y Natural de las Indias (1535) of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (Branch 2004: 22). Wonder would also recur as the sublime, as in Father Louis Hennepin’s account of the “surprising,” “astonishing,” and “horrible Precipice” of Niagara Falls. Overestimating the height of the falls by a factor of three, Hennepin wrote that “the universe does not afford its Parallel. ’Tis true, Italy and Suedeland boast of some such Things; but we may well say they are sorry Patterns, when compared to this of which we now speak” (Branch 2004: 85).
As the preceding examples suggest, curiosity concerns the attempt to explain. Acosta, for example, was compelled to engage with classical climatology to prove, needlessly, the fact that Mexico was inhabitable and was, moreover, nearly a “paradise on earth,” contrary to the wisdom of the ancients (2002: 97). If Fernández de Oviedo felt no need to explain the mere existence of the armadillo as a creature of God, even so he familiarized it to his European readers by playfully reversing its etymology (armadillo = “armored one”) such that it becomes the source of its own name: “I cannot help suspecting that this animal was known by those who first put horses in full trappings, for from the appearance of these animals they could have learned the form of the trappings for the armored horse” (Branch 2004: 23). Over two centuries later, on the near side of the scientific revolution that began with such curious observers as Fernández de Oviedo, botanist Edwin James explained that the “astonishing beauty” of alpine flowers near Pike’s Peak derived not from any inherent quality, but rather from their location at the edge of the climatic limit imposed by altitude. Here “the intensity of the light transmitted from the bright and unobscured atmosphere of those regions, and increased by reflection from the immense impending masses of snow” enabled the observer to perceive a “peculiar brilliancy of coloring” (Branch 2004: 238). The explanatory urge was incited by the sublime as well as the beautiful. Thus in his account of the Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia – “the most sublime of Nature’s works […] so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!” – Jefferson speculated that the bridge had been produced by “some great convulsion” in the earth’s past (1999: 26). The Potomac Gap in the Blue Ridge, “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature,” showed “that this earth has been created in time” rather than all at once with its present geological features, as strict creationists held, thus indicating a “war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its center” (21).
The scientific sublime marks the limit of the capacity to explain, as when the young Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (who would later become known for ethnographic researches among Native American peoples) contemplated the geology of the Ozarks. Describing Cave Creek canyon, he remarks “majestic walls of limestone” of which the “opposite banks correspond with general exactness in their curves, height, composition of strata and other characters evincing their connection at a former period. Yet the only object apparently affected by the separation of such immense strata of rocks, a change which I cannot now contemplate without awe and astonishment, is to allow a stream of twenty yards across a level and undisturbed passage into the adjacent river, the Currents” (Branch 2004: 226). Writing prior to the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1832), which established uniformism as the dominant geological theory, and influenced like Jefferson by catastrophists such as George Cuvier, Schoolcraft can only imagine a convulsion parting the rock to allow the passage of Cave Creek, rather than the uniformist explanation of erosion over time to form the canyon. When catastrophist theory reaches its explanatory limit, Schoolcraft responds with “awe and astonishment.”
Earlier generations of writers had marked this explanatory limit as God. That is, in such moments of wonder or curiosity, explorers, naturalists, ministers, and poets could draw on a long tradition of nature as God’s book which revealed the author’s power and wisdom (Gatta 2004). The tradition has been memorably expressed by Shakespeare’s Duke Senior in As You Like It as “find[ing] tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (2.1.16–17), but dates at least from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “For the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20). The methods for reading nature as God’s book varied with context and purpose but came increasingly under the influence of the New Science, which proposed empirical and mathematical methods for discerning the creator’s hand in the creation. Moreover, the trope provided a rationale for scientific study, as Robert Boyle, one of the leading lights of the New Science, put it in his treatise Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (1663): reading the “Book of Nature […] like a rare Book of Hieroglyphicks,” the naturalist finds “satisfaction in admiring the knowledge of the Author, and in finding out and inriching himselfe with those abstruse and vailed Truths dexterously hinted in them” (quoted in Iannini 2012: 26).
The “sermons in stones” trope thus has a long American history, dating at least from the first Anglo‐American nature poem, Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” (1650). Drawing like those who followed on the popular emblematic tradition exemplified in such works as Francis Quarles’s Emblemes (1635) or John Flavel’s Husbandry Spiritualized (1669), the Puritan Bradstreet nevertheless reluctantly advocated turning away from the awesome beauty of nature. Opening with a view of the glories of the New England autumn, a display of color unknown to readers back in England, Bradstreet writes that the “leaves and fruits seemed painted, but was true, / […] Rapt were my senses at this delectable view” (1967: 204). From the creation to the creator, so, “If so much excellence abide below, / How excellent is He that dwells on high” (205). Yet ultimately all this worldly “excellence” will fail, according to Bradstreet’s Christian understanding, for “Time” is the “fatal wrack of mortal things” and “Only above is found all with security” (213). However preparatory natural theology might be in reasoning from the creation to the creator, that is, no amount of study could produce the state of sanctification.
Such study remained compelling, even so. By the early eighteenth century, Cotton Mather, who attempted to integrate the New Science into a Reformed Protestant cosmology, elaborated the sermons in stones trope in The Christian Philosopher (1721) by expressing a wish to “hear the Fishes preaching to me, which they do many Truths of no small importance. As mute as they are, they are plain and loud Preachers; I want nothing but an Ear to make me a profitable Hearer of them” (Branch 2004: 117, italics in original). Perhaps the most “profitable Hearer” of nature’s preaching in the Puritan tradition was Jonathan Edwards, whose natural history writings from the 1720s interpret the spiritual significance of natural phenomena aided by the terms of the New Science. For example, he used Newtonian optics to understand the colors of the rainbow and their sense impressions on the human eye, mind, and soul. Edwards’s closely observed account of how spiders propel themselves from treetop to treetop by means of web and wind closes, like all of his natural history observations, with spiritual corollaries. Among these is the notion that God provides for the spiders’ “pleasure and recreation” even as he controls their population by wafting most of them out to sea to their destruction so as not to overburden or “plague” the world (Branch 2004: 121). Writing not from a Puritan but a Quaker tradition in his Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida (1791), William Bartram blurred the boundary between human and non‐human beings, discerning “the almighty power, wisdom, and beneficence of the Supreme Creator” in the “vivific principle of life” that “secretly operates within” all creatures, humans, animals, and plants alike (1955: 20, 21). Thomas Paine, writing outside of any tradition of revealed religion whatever, developed a deist version of the “sermons in stones” trope in The Age of Reason (1794), according to which “The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, has invited man to study and to imitation” (1987: 428).
If post‐Enlightenment thought no longer imagines nature as a conduit for the word of God (even a deist god), the sermons in stones trope has recently returned in ecological discourse, where new‐materialist ontological theories reenvision the agency of non‐human matter and critique the Enlightenment boundary between the human and the non‐human (Allewaert 2013; Ziser 2013). Though not explicitly theological, such theorizing is compatible with Bartram’s refusal of the Enlightenment disenchantment of the world by insisting on a “vivific principle,” and it takes seriously Mather’s desire to “hear the Fishes.” As Mather’s “Ear” consisted of the descriptive, comparative, and classificatory techniques of natural history observation, so modern scientific tools can be regarded as “speech prostheses” by means of which, as philosopher of science Bruno Latour argues, human beings can hear non‐human beings and enable them to participate in collective decision making regarding the earth’s future (quoted in Ziser 2013: 16).
From its aesthetic and spiritual beginnings in wonder and curiosity as well as its pragmatic motivations in providing information for colonial projects, natural history writing thus became central to the culture of letters in the Americas (Iannini 2012; Regis 1999). Two important works heralding the eighteenth‐century flowering of natural history were Hans Sloan’s Voyage to the Islands (1707–1725) and Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1731–1743). These extended the lively style established in Fernández de Oviedo’s widely translated Historia General (parts of which had been available in English since Richard Eden’s translation in Decades of the New World [1555]) and, together with other natural histories such as Lawson’s, influenced numerous subsequent writers. Catesby’s Natural History, for example, informed William Bartram’s remarkable Travels, which in turn served as a resource for later naturalists such as John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson. Natural history reinvigorated the classical and Renaissance genre of chorography (etymologically, place writing) in such works as Robert Beverly’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705), William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and Secret History of the Line (c. 1728), and Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. Natural history also provided a base for the emerging genre of ethnography (etymologically, race or nation writing) sporadically, as we have seen, in Jefferson’s Notes and more systematically in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) (especially Letters IV–VIII on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard) and Bartram’s Travels (especially Part IV, on the manners, customs, and government of the Muscogees, Cherokees, and Choctaws). Natural history was also an important component in the revitalization of the georgic, not only in direct imitations of the Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics (c. 29 BCE) such as Grainger’s The Sugar Cane, but more broadly in all writing that understood the natural environment as the originating site of cultural production.
Pastoral and georgic, the literary imagining of leisure and labor respectively, were and continue to be important components of the American culture of letters. Each values harmony between humankind and the non‐human world, but each approaches that value differently. American pastoral – be it the complex form that attempts to establish an ideal, rural middle ground between the city and the wilderness but always finds itself beset by an economic or technological counterforce (Marx 1964), or the wilderness form that envisions the natural state of the world as one absent of human beings (Cronon 1996) – often begins with the imagination of abundance. Thus among the sources of early American pastoral are the accounts of copious commodities and salubrious climates in early promotional writings such as Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of Virginia or Morton’s New English Canaan. John Smith and his crew, voyaging up the Chesapeake in 1607, found “an aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above water, as for want of nets […] we attempted to catch them with a frying pan; but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with” (quoted in Sweet 2002: 33–34). Such wit, playing on the familiar hyperbole that fish will actually jump into the pan while registering abundance to be gotten through appropriate technology and labor, gives Smith’s writings a pragmatic tone that opens onto the georgic. The trope of abundance also generated moral ambivalence, however, as is evident for example in Beverly’s History and Present State of Virginia. In The History of the Dividing Line, Byrd draws on medieval satires on idleness and gluttony to describe North Carolina as “Lubberland […] by the great felicity of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the Slothfulness of the People” (Byrd 2013: 105). Ease seems to invite sloth; thus “they loiter away their Lives […] and at the Winding up of the Year scarcely have Bread to eat” (106). This ambivalence persisted in later eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century criticisms of semi‐migratory frontier agriculture by Crèvecoeur, Jefferson, Brockden Brown, and others (Sweet 2002: 97–121).
Wilderness pastoral, which disavows economic and technological engagements with the environment altogether, has its roots in the trope of wonder and its first growth in the ideology of westward colonial expansion. In such texts as Jefferson’s Notes, Bartram’s Travels, Crèvecoeur’s Letters, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, the simultaneous replacement of and identification with Indigenous peoples, represented elegiacally as a vanishing race, provided white Americans with a national identity as the land’s natural inhabitants (Hallock 2003). This possessive pastoral conceptualization of America as nature’s nation would later provide an important motivation for the preservation of a now depopulated “wilderness.” While Cooper criticized the wanton exploitation of nature through the voice of Leatherstocking in The Pioneeers (1823) and the idea of nature preserves was proposed by writers such as George Catlin in the 1840s and Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s, preservationist work began in earnest only with the Congressional protection of the Yosemite Valley in 1869 and the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.
Refusing pastoral’s alienation of labor from the very landscapes that such labor creates and maintains (for even “wilderness” requires management), georgic by contrast emphasizes the ways in which humankind engages with nature to produce life and culture. Colonization necessarily addressed the relation between the human economy and the physical environment, inspiring new theorizations. Sixteenth‐century English promoters took a systemic view of this relation. As settler colonialism shaped economic–environmental relations in North America, a strain of georgic emerged that attempted to shape this relation for the common good (Sweet 2002). Thus, for example, John Smith and Robert Beverley both criticized the Chesapeake region’s tobacco monoculture and urged economic and environmental diversification. Such critiques of monocultural commodity production resonate with today’s new agrarianism (Freyfogle 2001). Reflecting on the effects of tobacco culture, Beverley observes that “all that the English have done […] has been only to make some of these Native Pleasures more scarce, by an inordinate and unseasonable Use of them; hardly making Improvements equivalent to that Damage” (2013: 119). Using the trope of the noble savage to critique Euro‐American culture, Beverley casts the precolonial era as a golden age destroyed by colonization. In this early recognition that some economic engagements produce irreversible environmental transformations, Beverley advances a georgic calculus of compensation, according to which some diversifying “Improvements” could be exchanged for the environmental “Damage” done by the colonists. That is, Beverley does not imagine, as deep ecologists might, that nature can be restored to some pristine, original state; rather, he attempts to imagine new patterns of engagement that will promote the common good. The georgic debate over the shape of the common good was taken up in different ways in Jefferson’s Notes, Crèvecoeur’s Letters, Cherokee anti‐Removal writings, and numerous other texts, leading to early conservationist work such as George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) and twentieth‐century environmental writers such as Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry (Sweet 2002).
Recent scholarship on early American environmental writing, like recent ecocriticism generally, has turned to the agency of the non‐human world, drawing on recent ontological debates in philosophy and science studies taking place under the rubric of the “new materialism.” Significant theories include object‐oriented realism, which places all objects (including gods, if they exist) on equal ontological footing, and agential realism, which contends that objects come to exist only in relations. Object‐oriented realism has, for example, revealed the ways in which non‐humans – assembled either as species (tobacco, potato, apple, honey bee) or as bioregions – become cultural agents, even to the extent of shaping literary forms (Ziser 2013). Agential realism, brought to bear on texts from the tropics, has revealed the ways in which the plantation complex troubled georgic practice, producing new understandings of environment and body, not only in staple colony georgics such as Grainger’s Sugar Cane, but also in new Afro‐American cosmologies such as Obeah, Vodou, and Santeria (Allewaert 2013). Dissatisfied with the Enlightenment disenchantment of the world, yet in most cases unable to make a theological commitment, the new materialism unsettles fundamental questions such as the nature of matter and the definition of the human. As such, it is potentially capable of providing fresh insights into the work of early writers who, in their engagements with the nature of the New World, addressed these very questions.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 22 (cosmopolitan correspondences); chapter 28 (medicine, disability, and early american literature).