[In the following essay, Anderson examines the lessons Bartram attempts to teach his reader in Travels, lessons that nature can teach society about its social and political organization.]

William Bartram's Travels (1791), like so many of the most interesting products of the Anglo-American sensibility in the eighteenth century, challenges the reader's capacities of adjustment. It presents itself at various times as a travel journal, a naturalist's notebook, a moral and religious effusion, an ethnographic essay, and a polemic on behalf of the cultural institutions and the rights of American Indians—a range of modes and interests that has led William Hedges to describe the Travels as “the most astounding verbal artifact of the early republic.”¹ This mixture of discourses is already sufficiently rich to invite the quite different critical approaches brought to Bartram's work in recent years by Roderick Nash, Robert Arner, Richard Slotkin, Patricia Medeiros, and Bruce Silver, among others.² But invariably readers of the Travels have insisted upon, or assumed, Bartram's nearly complete physical and imaginative isolation within the southeastern wilderness that he explored.³ Francis Harper's careful edition of the Travels for the Yale University Press more than thirty years ago calls attention to Bartram's curious confusion of dates at crucial points in his narrative, but neither Harper nor any reader since has pursued the chronological parallel that Bartram himself quietly draws between his botanical expeditions and the most volatile years of the American Revolution.⁴

Bartram's Travels has in common with the more celebrated voyages of Lemuel Gulliver an interest in the wider social and political context within which they take place. Swift's work, of course, is wholly fabulous, whereas Bartram is primarily a scientist even when his science and his natural piety collide.⁵ But in addition to describing and cataloguing the natural phenomena of the American wilderness, Bartram sought to comment as well on the political turmoil within which he worked and wrote.

Bartram shares this double focus with his two distinguished contemporaries, Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, both of whom produced books during the revolutionary period that comment directly and indirectly on their political setting. Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia is both a dispassionate reply to the inquiries of a “Foreigner of Distinction” and an act of revolutionary self-defense against the invidious, Eurocentric naturalism of the Comte de Buffon and the loyalist opposition to American independence within the colonies themselves. Jefferson's superbly pointed definition of “tory”—“a traitor in thought but not in deed”—begins the short chapter that falls between otherwise even-tempered descriptions of Virginia's colleges, roads, public buildings, and different religions (Jefferson 281-82). Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer addresses the violence and disruption of the revolution most directly and passionately in his last chapter, “Distresses of a Frontier Man,” which records the farmer James's near hysterical lament for the destruction of what he had perceived as his idyllic rural way of life by border warfare and his determination to unite his family with a tribe of neutral Indians and wait for peace (Crèvecoeur 200-227).

Compared with these two prominent figures, William Bartram often seems to be writing about a different continent altogether. His botanical excursions through the American southeast took place during some of the most troubled years of the revolutionary period, yet the only open acknowledgment Bartram makes of the civil crisis within which his Travels takes place is the few dates he allows to appear in the text: his departure from Philadelphia in the spring of 1773 a few months prior to the Boston Tea Party; a collecting trip begun in April 1776, as the Second Continental Congress prepared to convene; an excursion by boat from Mobile in November 1777; and the return to his father's farm near Philadelphia, which Bartram reports as taking place in January 1778, when Washington's army was wintering not many miles away and the future of American independence was very much in doubt. Francis Harper's examination of Bartram's itinerary and correspondence has led him to the discovery that Bartram actually returned to Philadelphia in January 1777, a year earlier than Bartram claims he did and at a much less symbolically fateful time.⁶ This uncharacteristic misstatement of fact Harper attributes to Bartram's “blind spot” for dates, but in light of the nature of the Travels as a whole Bartram's fictive return at such a critical moment in the Revolution underscores a narrative pattern that he had been at some pains to establish as he reworked his field notes for publication. By the time Bartram published the Travels in 1791, the contrast between his own distinctly pacific activity of thirteen years earlier and that of his politically active contemporaries must have seemed even more pronounced as the events of the Revolution began to cohere into a triumphant mythology, with Valley Forge serving as the point of moral and spiritual crisis, the dark night of the soul before salvation.

Instead of political engagement, Bartram offers the reader long paragraphs composed of the Linnaean names for the plants he finds covering the savannahs of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. In dramatic contrast to Crèvecoeur's interest in human beings and human institutions, or to Jefferson's sharply partisan sentiments, Bartram apparently turns his attention, with equal singlemindedness, to birds, fish, trees, or soil. The one exception to this focus upon nonhuman nature is the interest Bartram shows in the Indians he meets and visits in the course of his journeys. But even the Indians recognize the peculiar nature of Bartram's errand, honoring him with the oddly amusing name of Puc Puggy, the Flower Hunter, a designation that sharpens still further the subtle but distinct line that Bartram maintains between himself and his historical context: a hunter of flowers, not of deer, or bear, or men.⁷

William Bartram was serious about his botany and serious about the piety that nature's spectacle nourished in him—“O thou Creator supreme, almighty! how infinite and incomprehensible thy works! most perfect, and every way astonishing” (72)—but he also recognized the value of his vocation, even in its apparent detachment from social turmoil, as a political gesture and as a pretext for addressing the painful problems of nation building. Scientific detachment itself is a posture as well as a professional attribute. From the comparative wilderness of west Florida, the sounds of revolution are inaudible—fainter even than the sounds of the Concord militia carried on the breeze to Walden Pond. But that very remoteness permits Bartram to consider the broader implications of social transformation. Nature does not speak with the immediacy of one of Benjamin Franklin's political tracts, but to a surprising degree the wilderness enables Bartram to place his own eventful times in a context wide enough to provide a basis for measured skepticism as a corrective for patriotic fervor.

The most direct appeal that Bartram makes to his reader's political conscience involves his advocacy for the Indians. He is not blind to their vices. Indians slaughter animals, keep slaves, make war, get drunk, and fornicate, much as the white man does (183-84). But Bartram also finds much to admire in Indian character and institutions. Unlike Crèvecoeur's James, who joins a tribe of neutral Indians only as a last resort and in spite of his fears of their barbarizing influence on his children, Bartram clearly sees the Indians in the context of national debates on the stability and the dangers of democracy. At the end of his introduction to the Travels, he suggests a tentative plan for bringing the Indian tribes into “civilization and union” with the United States, and he concludes his book with a brief, largely admiring appendix on Indian customs and government in which his sole reservation about Indian manners has to do with the “extravagantly libidinous” songs they sometimes sing at their dances (396)—a complaint perfectly consistent with the apprehensions many Federalists and moderate Republicans felt about the democratic “extravagance” unleashed by the Revolution. The unruly nature of American democracy as a whole was already amply evident to Bartram and many other observers of the first years of national existence under the Articles of Confederation. The debates over the new Constitution were taking place during the months that Bartram was preparing his manuscript for publication. The challenges of “civilization and union” that Bartram addresses with respect to communities of Indians, in other words, were general ones that he introduces into his Travels in such a way as to suggest quite early in the book that the management of nature and of native populations is no different from the management of ourselves.

The Indian tribes themselves are most significant for Bartram as parts of a pattern of growth and decay, death and life, in which all of existence participates. It would be well, in his view, if white traders ceased corrupting the Indians with rum, but even under the most ideal circumstances imaginable, no civilization or people can expect to endure forever. The world that Bartram describes during his journeys is haunted by an unstable balance of appetites, by violence, by false paradises, irrecoverable utopias, and by ruin. Nature in all its manifestations is unfailingly beautiful, but it tells, at the same time, a sobering story of endless mutability. The “universal vibration of life insensibly and irresistibly moves the wondrous machine,” Bartram exults at one point, mingling his pre- and postenlightenment metaphors, but the direction in which the machine of nature moves, as often as not, is toward death (159).⁸

The natural world, even in the experience of a devout optimist like Bartram, is constantly at war. On one botanically inspired stroll about a campsite, Bartram notes “a number of little gravelly pyramidal hills” in a streambed that proved to be the defensive stronghold of a community of crayfish, “their citadel, or place of retreat for their young against the attacks and ravages of their enemy, the goldfish” (61). The beautiful yellow bream is a spectacular creature, with fins that are decorated (according to Bartram) like the eyes in a peacock's tail, but the bream is also fierce, “a warrior in a gilded coat of mail” giving “no rest or quarter to small fish, which he preys upon” (141). Vultures and ravens lurk about Bartram's campsites, “sharpening their beaks, in low debate” and waiting for the men to depart. Alligators and gar, equally “warlike” predators, seem to Bartram to form a “confederacy … to enslave and devour the numerous defenceless tribes” of smaller fishes (178).

Contemporary political and military metaphors are a natural language for describing the kind of systematic hostility with which Bartram finds himself surrounded in the wilderness and of which he is himself nearly a victim. On an early excursion up the San Juan River in east Florida, Bartram is set upon by great numbers of alligators that seem to oppose the progress of his journey with a disturbing degree of concerted action, surrounding his canoe, blockading his landing sites, closing off the mouths of lagoons as if consciously preparing traps for unwary naturalists. Only by great good luck does Bartram escape becoming a meal. The fish that later try to run the alligator blockade are less fortunate:

What expressions can sufficiently declare the shocking scene that for some minutes continued, whilst this mighty army of fish were forcing the pass? During this attempt, thousands, I may say hundreds of thousands, of them were caught and swallowed by the devouring alligators. I have seen an alligator take up out of the water several great fish at a time, and just squeeze them betwixt his jaws, while the tails of the great trout flapped about his eyes and lips, ere he had swallowed them. The horrid noise of their closing jaws, their plunging amidst the broken banks of fish, and rising with their prey some feet upright above the water, the floods of water and blood rushing out of their mouths, and the clouds of vapour issuing from their wide nostrils, were truly frightful.

(118-19)

Bartram himself is a bit reassured to discover that the alligators' strategy is directed at these fish rather than at him. But his description has much of the animation and atmosphere of an eighteenth-century sea battle and he refers to this place hereafter in the Travels as “Battle Lagoon.”

Even without the metaphors from human conflict to emphasize the parallel, Bartram makes it clear that in moving quite deliberately away from the center of revolutionary violence, he has placed himself in the midst of the still more fundamental violence of nature. Crèvecoeur too had employed violent images from the natural “world” to dramatize the essential political and social violence of American life in Letters from an American Farmer: wasps and birds that feed on a dying slave who is caged and suspended from a tree, hummingbirds that embody both natural beauty and a natural “lacerating” ferocity, snakes whose insidious venom suggests the poison of slavery that is latent in the northern as well as overt in the southern states.⁹ But Crèvecoeur's focus in the Letters is on the temperamental transformation of his narrator from euphoric celebrant of American promise to hysterical refugee from American ambiguity. The consciousness of James, in Henry May's helpful terminology, leaps from that of the moderate to that of the radical enlightenment in the space of a few pages.¹⁰ Bartram, though much more remote from scenes of revolutionary violence than Crèvecoeur's narrator, is much less in flight from them. Because his vision of nature is never so idyllic as that of Crèvecoeur's James, his disappointments are never so apocalyptic. But this moderation of response derives less from optimism than from a sense on Bartram's part that the sobering lessons of the natural world are pervasive.

This fact is clear from the celebrated moment in his introduction when Bartram describes a particularly formidable spider (“his body was about the size of a pigeon's egg”) stalking a bumblebee that eventually succumbs to “the repeated wounds of the butcher” (24). Bartram elsewhere characterizes himself as a “vindicator of the benevolent and peaceable disposition of animal creation in general,” but among the inhabitants of creation in general something is nearly always particularly hungry, and even as he recounts the “extraordinary deliverance” that saved him from a wolf that stole some of his fish, Bartram's language unavoidably suggests that this instance of natural mercy is among the rare exceptions that prove the grim rule:

How much easier and more eligible might it have been for him to have leaped upon my breast in the dead of sleep, and torn my throat, which would have instantly deprived me of life, and then glutted his stomach for the present with my warm blood, and dragged off my body, which would have made a feast afterwards for him and his howling associates! I say, would not this have been a wiser step, than to have made protracted and circular approaches, and then after, by chance, espying the fish over my head, with the greatest caution and silence rear up, and take them off the snags one by one, then make off with them, and that so cunningly as not to waken me until he had fairly accomplished his purpose?

(145)

The animal in this passage, of course, is merely deft at gaining a meal and justifiably wary of man. As Bartram himself dramatically illustrates, it is the human imagination and the human community, with its capacity for calculating foresight, that is bloody.

In a world where alligators feed on their own young, where mud turtles devour “any animal they can seize” (159), where even the beautiful and harmless ephemera fly seems to be created simply to be eaten (89), the expectation of slaughter is only natural. Indeed it is noteworthy but not particularly shocking to Bartram on one wilderness ride to pass by “heaps of white, gnawed bones of ancient buffalo, elk, and deer, indiscriminately mixed with those of men, half grown over with moss” (263). A mind of “delicate feelings” might be appalled at such sights, Bartram admits, and he himself prefers a nature more amenable to his endless fund of trite euphemisms: “the glorious sovereign of the day,” “the finny inhabitants” of “the pellucid floods,” “the feathered songsters of the grove.” But predatory violence is a fact of life so inescapable that when he encounters an apparent exception to the rule, Bartram is careful to explain it away. In an unusually deep and clear sinkhole, or spring, Bartram notes a “paradise” of fish and alligators where all the creatures seem to sail “like butterflies in the cerulean ether” with “no signs of enmity, no attempt to devour each other” despite the mutual hostility he had seen them display in other settings. The solution to the mystery is that the water is “so perfectly clear and transparent, it places them all on an equality with regard to their ability to injure or escape from one another” (151). The wisdom of the Creator expresses itself here not in an Edenic peace—which Bartram dismisses as a “mere representation”—but in a balance of terror that Bartram presents as a kind of dark parody of Madison's argument in Federalist 10 that republican “representation” functions as a restraint upon the bitterness of faction (Madison 127-28). It is not surprising to Bartram, in such a natural context, that human communities show an equal vulnerability to predatory violence, but Bartram is less willing than Madison to express his “pleasure and pride” in a system of restraint founded upon a competition of brute instincts.

Bartram in fact discovers that the American Revolution is taking place on a continent accustomed to revolution, to the succession of one form of civilization and the disappearance of another. Men are quite capable of the same acts of cruelty and destruction that Bartram finds so prevalent among animals, and white men are, perhaps, more culpable in this regard than Indians. But it is a difference of degree only, not a difference in basic nature. Of greater significance, particularly to Bartram's nation-building contemporaries, is the fact that the political and natural turmoil of the present occurs, quite literally, on the ruins of “ancient” civilizations, both Indian and European. The course of his travels takes Bartram through ancient Indian burial grounds, over the sites of old and bloody battles, past ruined plantations, abandoned colonies, decayed forts. On occasion the Indians even build their villages on top of the pyramid-shaped monuments of some earlier people whose history and fate are completely unknown. When William Cullen Bryant makes a similar sense of American antiquity and the succession of civilizations part of his subject in “The Prairies” (1834), his own skepticism is less perceptible amid the romantically poignant sentiments with which he views the past and the faith with which he envisions the “advancing multitudes / Which soon shall fill these deserts.”¹¹ By contrast, in the context of Bartram's experience, whole cultures seem as easily produced as generations of the ephemera fly and just as easily replaced. The process of revolution, Bartram suggests, like its cousin the process of predation, is ongoing, scientifically impersonal, and no respecter of human monuments, human sentiments, or human aspirations to permanence.

As if to give this discovery an unmistakably contemporary pertinence, Bartram describes the current ascendancy of the Creek Indians over their Indian neighbors in such a way that the parallel to contemporary American events would be clear. He had already hinted at this parallel in the pun on Madison's hopeful view of “representation” with which he described the uneasy balance of natural “interests” he found in the paradisal, transparent spring. The parallel with the Creeks is more elaborately drawn. The Creeks, Bartram notes, were recent emigrants to the southeast from “their original native country” west of the Mississippi (68). Having arrived at their current place of residence on the banks of the Oakmulge River, “they were obliged to make a stand, and fortify themselves … as their only remaining hope, being to the last degree persecuted and weakened by their surrounding foes” (68). This last stand proved so successful that the Creeks “recovered their spirits” and conquered their enemies “in a memorable and decisive battle” before forming their own “confederacy” with the vanquished tribes and establishing their rule.

The elements of the correspondence between Creek and American experience would have been particularly clear to Bartram's contemporaries. The Creeks, also an emigrant people, had their own Valley Forge and Yorktown to endure and to celebrate before they, in turn, began to feel the pressure of encroaching Europeans—a pressure that Bartram also documents in the accounts he gives of treaty negotiations which he observed involving the Creeks, their Indian neighbors, and the white governments of the new American states. The parallel is too closely drawn to be accidental, and its implications for the permanence of the American “emigrant” political community were, perhaps, too obvious or too disturbing to bear direct statement. Bartram at least does not state them directly, but he makes it apparent here and elsewhere in the Travels that he means to chasten the exuberance of political life in the postrevolutionary United States with a vision of life's limits and of its obligations.

A recurring rhetorical set piece in the Travels with which Bartram underscores his perception of those limits is the series of descriptions he provides of the sudden, nearly apocalyptic thunderstorms of the southeast that strike without warning, “spread terror and devastation,” and serve to remind mankind of “how vain and uncertain are human expectations” (29). In some ways these resemble the “Tremendous thunders” of the hurricane that temporarily devastates the groves of Philip Freneau's tropical retreat in “The Beauties of Santa Cruz” (1779). Freneau's poem is nearly contemporary with Bartram's Travels and establishes a similar relationship between natural and political turbulence. But Freneau's storm, though a “Daughter of chaos and eternal night,” has little of the biblical gravity of Bartram's, just as Freneau's nature never quite provides him with the sort of admonitory, providential text that Bartram's Quaker sensibility was prepared to find side by side with the nomenclature of Linnaeus.¹² According to Bartram, the skies in one memorable cloudburst that he witnessed “appeared streaked with blood” while lightning “seemed to fill the world with fire” (132), and in another he writes in deliberate evocation of the Eighteenth Psalm, “the mountains tremble” and the “ancient hills” are “shaken to their foundations” (279).

Bartram's most lengthy account of a storm makes explicit a connection between the moral world of mankind and the grand disturbances of nature that is in some respects traditional and in others surprising. The storm itself becomes both a familiar means of chastening human pride and an emblem of human psychology. It is both an inner and an outer phenomenon, an instrument of God and an intrinsic weakness in the “chain” of reasoning in which men too readily come to place their trust. In this inward-looking sense it has a specific bearing upon American experience:

The tempest now relaxed, its impetus being spent, and a calm serenity gradually took place … the steady western wind resumed his peaceful reign. … So it is with the varied and mutable scenes of human events on the stream of life. The higher powers and affections of the soul are so blended and connected with the inferior passions, that the most painful feelings are excited in the mind when the latter are crossed: thus in the moral system, which we have planned for our conduct, as a ladder whereby to mount to the summit of terrestrial glory and happiness, and from whence we perhaps meditated our flight to heaven itself at the very moment when we vainly imagine ourselves to have attained its point, some unforeseen accident intervenes, and surprises us; the chain is violently shaken, we quit our hold and fall: the well-contrived system at once becomes a chaos … and the flattering scene passes quite away. … But let us wait and rely on our God, who in due time will shine forth in brightness, dissipate the envious cloud, and reveal to us how finite and circumscribed is human power, when assuming to itself independent wisdom.

(66-67)

The lesson that Bartram draws from these storms, like those he draws from the predatory wars of animal life and the pervasive presence of ruins even in a “new” world, suggests that the American community faces, in Bartram's view, a choice between a deceptive faith in its own “independent wisdom” and a chastened submission to Providence. The pun on American independence, like Bartram's punning allusion to the “mere representation” of harmony among predators in the paradisal spring, makes it clear that the “moral system” about which he is speculating in this passage is both generically vague and at the same time quite specific in its reference to the system that Americans had in 1791 only recently “planned for our conduct” and from which they too hoped to date their national “terrestrial glory.” All well-contrived systems tend to chaos. The natural world that Bartram describes in his Travels offers little hope that the cycle of life and death will make an exception in favor of any “constitution,” civil or biological. But there is still a kind of covenant available to men that offers a promise of deliverance, provided that human beings and human governments have the humility and the breadth of vision to seize it:

And, O sovereign Lord! since it has pleased thee to endue man with power and pre-eminence here on earth, and establish his dominion over all creatures, may we look up to thee, that our understanding may be so illuminated with wisdom, and our hearts warmed and animated with a due sense of charity, that we may be enabled to do thy will, and perform our duty towards those submitted to our service and protection, and be merciful to them, even as we hope for mercy.

Thus may we be worthy of the dignity and superiority of the high and distinguished station in which thou hast placed us here on earth.

(103)

The “due sense of charity” that Bartram invokes here is every bit as central to the meaning of his Travels as John Winthrop's evocation of Christian charity had been to his earlier vision of a community facing perilous choices and temptations. Like Winthrop, Bartram, too, felt the implicit predicament in his ideal, the conviction that a society without mercy itself could expect none from its judges.

It was by no means clear to William Bartram in 1791 that Americans would embrace this covenant. The reiterative wars, ruins, and apocalyptic storms of his book reflect Bartram's personal attempt to make the dangers of national life clear to his contemporaries. Richard Poirier has observed that “the most interesting American books are an image of the creation of America itself” (Poirier 6). William Bartram dealt in such national images directly, often in remarkably compact form, and on one occasion at least with a sense of literary tradition that identifies his work with one of the most complex pastorals in English poetry, Andrew Marvell's “The Garden.” A similar sense of kinship with seventeenth-century poets had led Freneau to echo Milton and allude to Waller in his praise of the pleasures of retirement on Santa Cruz.¹³ Bartram's use of Marvell's haunting lines underscores his sense of the ethical and spiritual uncertainties of American life. In his account of a tour of Saint Simons Island off the Georgia coast in March of 1774—the month that Parliament passed the Boston Port Act—Bartram reports that he came upon a “delightful habitation” situated in an “excellent bay or cove on the south end of the island,” distinguished by a “spacious avenue” leading inland, lined with beehives that “exhibited a lively image of a colony that has attained to a state of power and affluence, by the practice of virtue and industry” (72). This scale-model America—an imaginative reconstruction of the Port of Boston—is inhabited solely by an enlightened farmer, “reclining on a bear-skin,” enjoying his pipe.

The welcoming words of Bartram's rustic host are a caricature of eighteenth-century secular culture—“Welcome, stranger; I am indulging the rational dictates of nature, taking a little rest, having just come in from the chace and fishing”—but at this point the anecdote ceases to be a portrait of ideal colonial simplicity. A few pages earlier Bartram had already alluded to the moments “when we vainly imagine ourselves” on the point of heavenly triumphs only to be thwarted by unforeseen accidents. Now in the shadow of “Oaks, Palms, and Sweet Bays,” those vain imaginings recur as Bartram and this genial colonist reenact the circumstances of Andrew Marvell's cryptic and disturbing poem, from which Bartram's triad of sheltering trees derives:

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes;
And their uncessant Labours see
Crown'd from some single Herb or Tree
Whose short and narrow verged Shade
Does prudently their Toyles upbraid;
While all Flow'rs and all Trees do close
To weave the Garlands of repose.
Fair quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busie Companies of Men.
Your sacred Plants, if here below,
Only among the Plants will grow
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious Solitude.

(Gardner 255-56)

Like Marvell's lines, Bartram's Travels evokes the society from which they appear to have retreated, the “busie Companies of Men” whose turbulence and passion Marvell's speaker, like William Bartram, seems to repudiate in favor of the world of plants. Even the amorous atmosphere of Marvell's refuge, its improbable fertility, and the music of the Soul that preens and sings like a bird, waving “in its Plumes the various Light,” have wonderfully precise equivalents in the splendid “rural table” with which Bartram's host regales him, to the accompaniment of “the responsive love-lays of the painted nonpareil, and the alert and gay mock-bird; whilst the brilliant humming-bird darted through the flowery groves, suspended in air, and drank nectar from the flowers” (73).

But just as Marvell's vision is chastened by loneliness and by intimations of death, so Bartram's experience with his insistent host is troubled both by a desperation for companionship that drives this instance of wilderness hospitality and by the “solemn sound” of the ocean, beating on the shores of the “trembling island” in a futile attempt to “assail the skies.” The annihilating “Ocean” of the mind in Marvell's poem becomes an annihilating ocean in fact in Bartram's Travels, an image that, for Bartram, proclaims both the durability of the colonies in the face of assaults by “mighty giants” from the sea and the vulnerability of even the most perfectly regulated republic to inner and outer enemies.

There is greater cause for optimism than for despair in this short interlude, for as Bartram returns from the home of his “sylvan friend” he notes the ruins of a once extensive English colony and fortress on Saint Simons Island that are slowly being replaced by a “few neat houses” which owe their prosperity to the mercantile vigor of the island's “president.” This is a scale-model revolution that sustains and vivifies the miniature America Bartram had discovered on Saint Simons, incorporating the new Constitution into the pattern of significances. But the same ocean that represents England's imperial futility represents as well the inescapable empire of death, always at war with life, even in the most captivating and apparently inexhaustible of national gardens.¹⁴

Notes

1. Hedges's comment is from his brief introductory essay, “Toward a National Literature” in the Columbia Literary History.

2. The essays of Silver and Arner are the most substantial treatments of Bartram in recent years. Robert Lawson-Peebles's book on landscape rhetoric during the revolutionary period offers a suggestive intellectual context for reading the Travels but he does not touch directly on Bartram's work.

3. See Silver's essay for a representative view of Bartram's “apolitical” character (597).

4. Harper's detailed examination of the chronology of Bartram's trips is contained in the textual commentary to the Yale edition, though Harper does profess surprise at Bartram's apparent indifference to the Revolution in his report to the American Philosophical Society: “One of [Bartram's] amazing achievements was to have published an account of travels extending all the way from Pennsylvania to Florida and the Mississippi, and including nearly two years of the Revolution, without once referring to that momentous conflict” (Harper, Proceedings 574).

5. This is the thrust of Silver's argument.

6. Harper's blind spot is the more interesting here because his own careful scholarship suggests the likelihood that Bartram had enlisted in a detachment of revolutionary soldiers on a mission during one of his trips into Georgia in 1776. Harper discusses the bases for his conclusion in Proceedings 572-73.

7. Richard Slotkin discusses Bartram's chance meeting with one Indian in particular as an example of his unusually humane attitude toward Indians and as part of an emerging tradition of American frontier consciousness. The discussion of Bartram's work in particular, however, is quite brief. See Slotkin 320-34.

8. Arner's view of the pastoral pattern in the Travels involves this sense on Bartram's part of nature's ambiguity, but Arner presents the pattern as part of a psychological development within Bartram himself, not as a rhetorical tactic that Bartram might employ (Arner 140-44).

9. Philbrick discusses Crèvecoeur's use of natural imagery as a psychological vocabulary in the Letters.

10. May's categories are distinguished in many respects by their chief literary spokesmen: Pope and Locke for the Moderate Enlightenment, Rousseau and Paine for the Radical. Crèvecoeur quotes two lines from the “Essay on Man” inscribed above a barn door as emblems of the benign morality of the Bartrams, whose farm is the topic of one of the last optimistic chapters in the Letters.

11. Bryant does, it is true, lose this heartening glimpse of the future to a “fresher wind” that passes and leaves him alone “in the wilderness,” troubled by the vision of imperial violence that his own lines have evoked. But the sense of Bryant's text remains distinctly anticipatory. Bartram on the other hand is much closer to the sensibility of “Ozymandias.”

12. Emory Elliott argues that Freneau follows “Lycidas” in returning to the poet's moral calling in the world, but I do not think a reading of any version of Freneau's poem can resolve the question of the speaker's status and commitment to public responsibility, particularly the earliest untitled version of the text (Freneau 41-47). The final version, with the title “The Beauties of Santa Cruz,” is more troubled by the presence of slavery in the poet's refuge, but even this version has little of the moral urgency of Bartram's prose. See Eberwein 206-21. In her article on the poem, Eberwein makes a persuasive case for the complexity of Freneau's lines, though there too she recognized their fundamentally descriptive nature.

13. Emory Elliott notes the echoes of Milton. Freneau compares his own blissful condition on Santa Cruz to the less blessed exile of Waller.

14. Both Emory Elliott and William Hedges argue for the contradictions confronted by writers in the postrevolutionary decades. Bartram in fact expresses perfectly in this passage one of the “biformities” that Michael Kammen finds endemic in the cultural life of America in the last third of the eighteenth century: that of optimistic pessimism (Kammen 157-68).

Works Cited

Arner, Robert D. “Pastoral Patterns in William Bartram's Travels.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 18 (1973): 133-45.

Bartram, William. Travels of William Bartram. Ed. Mark Van Doren. New York: Dover, 1955.

Bryant, William Cullen. “The Prairies.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Gottesman et al. Vol. I. New York: Norton, 1979.

Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Ed. Albert E. Stone. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1981.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue, ed. Early American Poetry. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

———. “Freneau's ‘Beauties of Santa Cruz.’” Early American Literature 12 (Winter 1977/78): 271-76.

Elliott, Emory. Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982.

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