SOURCE: Moore, Hugh. “The Southern Landscape of William Bartram: A Terrible Beauty.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 10, no. 1 (1981): 41-50.

[In the following essay, Moore argues that Bartram's Travels is powerful and effective because of the writer's ability “to write as a Romantic poet with a sense of wonder, feeling, and imagination and as a scientific Rationalist like his father.”]

William Bartram's Travels (1791) is perhaps the most comprehensive work from early America. It is a pioneering and inclusive natural history of the new world—its botany, zoology, geology, ethnology—with observations on agricultural, industrial, and commercial development. It is a history and a sociological study of the South. It is a philosophical and religious quest attempting to relate man, nature, and God. It is a practical handbook on gardening and the use of plants for food and medicine. It is literature that in its narratives of wilderness adventures and exuberant descriptions of the terrible beauty of the virgin Southern landscape captures the excitement of discovery. But his Travels is also comprehensive in its record of Bartram's remarkable achievement in forming his own ideas and attitudes from a creative fusion of ideas and traditions that impinged upon him. His achievement in consolidating and harmonizing often seemingly contradictory impulses provides an unexpected intellectual tension and depth to his writing just as the range of his interests gives it fullness and diversity.

The effectiveness of his style and technique in this work results from his double vision, an ability to write as a Romantic poet with a sense of wonder, feeling, and imagination and as a scientific Rationalist like his father. So he produced that rarity, in the words of Elsa Allen, “literary prose of true scientific substance.”¹ Poetry and science blend in his descriptions: “I was struck with surprise and delight when beholding its gayity (of the Pinckneya Bracteata) so very singular in its bloom. But that which gives the tree its chiefest gayity is the large Papery Bracteae intersperst among the Thyrsis …”² His exuberant tale of the abundance and ferocity of alligators seemed until recently to be more allied to traveler's stories of exotic strangeness similar to Josselyn's Rareties than to natural history. Yet every detail has since been verified; his study of their life cycle is as valid as his narrative is thrilling.

The informing tension of the Travels derives from Bartram's dream of man and nature in harmony, his attempt to find or create a Utopia in which wilderness and civilization, appreciation and use, the practical and the aesthetic, are balanced so that man could be at home in the natural environment. His philosophy of nature, then, stresses the value of nature in itself and for what it can provide man. Familiar tenets of both Rationalism and Romanticism provide his axioms, but his ideas are an original and well considered fusion. Nature to Bartram meant the out-of-doors, the world of plants, animals—even Indians and other primitives—geological structures, all of which manifest the wisdom, goodness, harmony, and unity of the divinity. Studying nature, he united religion and science: “… my chief happiness consisted in tracing and admiring the infinite power, majesty, and perfection of the great almighty Creator. …”³ Natural Law was the order, morality, and justice he found in nature, which should undergird the conduct of men and the laws of society. “Let us,” he says, “rely on Providence, and by studying and contemplating the works and power of the Creator, learn wisdom and understanding in the economy of nature …” (p. 55).

Abstract theorizing, however, is rare in Bartram's works. His generalizations derive from observation. Such is the case in his radical, exalted view of plants and animals. Their behavior has the same causes as man's whose claim to preeminence results from pride and deficiency of direct observation. As a Rationalist he calls this cause divine or universal intellect, and as a Romanticist he sees this power diffused throughout all the creator's works. Man dominates not by intellect but by power, not a Quaker virtue. At a time when most held to one or the other, Bartram reconciled instinct and intuition with reason by proving with myriad examples that they are identical. “Can any man of sense and candour, who has the use of his eyes, Rational faculty, doubt that animals are rational creatures?”⁴ Accordingly he devotes much space to marvelous accounts of animal behavior to show that they, too, exhibit premeditation, perseverance, resolution, and artifice. Bird migration and song (which he calls language) and the cunning of the butcher spider lead him to conclude that instinct is “not a mere mechanical impulse” and is in no way inferior to reason (xvii).

The mental faculties of man and animals are identical, but the uncorrupted simplicity of animals provides moral guidance. Man is “not alone imbued with knowledge of the Creator and in expressing love, gratitude, and homage to the Great Author of Being.”⁵ They are not as likely as man to transgress the natural law of moderation and decency. And their loves and faithfulness—proved by the grief of a bear lamenting its dead mate—are exemplary. Even the rattler is superior in generosity and magnanimity to men. Pushing primitivism further, he finds the same divine reason in plants, likewise animated by sense and instinct. Any sensitive plant, any carnivorous one, was certain to attract Bartram's fascinated attention. Possessing motion and volition, plants, too, are directed by divine impulse. “Can we after viewing this object (the Dionea Muscipula), hesitate a moment to confess that vegetable beings are endued with some sensible faculties or attributes, similar to those that dignify animal nature?” (xiii).

Ignoring neither pole of the conflicts that inform his works, Bartram searched for a resolution that comprehended both. This he achieves in his perception of the terrible beauty of nature. He was able to strengthen his belief in the benevolence of the Creator and his works in the midst of the rapacity he met with on his Southern travels. All creation was a source of wonder and reverence not classifiable as simply fair or foul. He does not ignore unpleasant aspects: rivers exhibit “eternal war or rather slaughter,” rattlers are “dreadful,” winds “furious,” mosquitoes “rapacious,” Indians “fearsome.” Not often does he engage in the typical mental gymnastics of explaining the fearsome away. (He does, however, come close when he thanks Providence for an infestation of mosquitoes because they caused him a tedious, wakeful night, thus preventing roaming alligators from catching him napping.) Nature was wild, savage, awful, grand, even horrible and ferocious—qualities that appealed to his romantic sensibility—but never evil. All was there to be studied and reconciled as part of the mysterious but ultimately beneficent whole. In the tropics amid alligators and hurricanes he forged a Wordsworthian view of nature.

Typically, Bartram presents his reconciliation of horror and beneficence, not by philosophical discourse, but rather by the literary technique of juxtaposing the two, thus giving perspective to both. He follows a depiction of fierce alligators churning the waters into a maelstrom with an idyllic scene of “towering” magnolias and “exalted” palms, described with words like “magnificence,” “elegance,” “gracefulness,” “delicacy,” and “delightful” (p. 129), thus providing counterpoint to the ravenous beasts.

Since nature is on balance beneficent and since man, plants, and animals share the same divine faculties, Bartram constantly implores his readers to recognize this affinity by lovingly protecting all living things. Quaker compassion for suffering—to Bartram cruelty was the worst of sins—and Romantic appreciation of the wild and primitive combine with natural law and rights theories applied not just, as was usually the case, to men, but to all of nature. “Let us,” he writes, “be obedient to the ruling powers … in our duties to each other and to all creatures and concerns that are submitted to our care and control” (p. 55).

The fundamental tension, then, for Bartram, was how man could balance aesthetic and religious appreciation of nature with the practical need to use it. Where does man fit into the environment? Although this conflict remained imperfectly resolved in Bartram's life and work, the evidence suggests that his own predilection was for the Romantic over the practical. The savannah crane provided him a delicious and nourishing meal; “nevertheless as long as I can get any other necessary food I shall prefer their seraphic music in the ethereal skies, and my eyes and understanding gratified in observing their economy and social communities in the expansive green savannas of Florida” (p. 219). Dr. Fothergill had desired William to go north to search out hardy plants useful for English agriculture and gardening, but Bartram insisted on exploration in the romantic, mysterious South, where, he argued, not altogether convincingly, he could find useful productions of nature. Although throughout the Travels Bartram carefully nurtures the impression that he was constantly inconvenienced and endangered from collecting, in actuality, unlike his father, he sent few specimens to England. Fothergill, who had introduced bamboo and cinnamon to the West Indies, was disappointed, for his commission to Bartram was to collect ornamental plants, those scientifically curious, and those useful in the arts or for medicine and food. A practical man, Dr. Fothergill shared the prevailing view that the creator had provided a natural remedy for all the maladies and inconveniences of a region. So plant hunters like Bartram could serve to open up a region for agricultural and commercial development.

Romantic primitivism, a preference for divine simplicity, philosophically unsuited Bartram from wholeheartedly serving purely practical ends. He distrusted luxury and wealth and the intensive agriculture and industry that produced them. Governments wrongly encourage mechanic arts, manufactures, trade, commerce, large scale agriculture, for these lend not to the good of mankind but to an increase of riches, luxury, and effeminacy, all pernicious ends that result in “avarice, contention, and in the end perhaps war. …”⁶ Thus, adjectives like “noble,” “exalted,” “elegant,” “showy,” and “gracious” greatly outnumber ones like “serviceable,” “ornamental,” and “useful.”

Yet on his travels he by no means ignores the useful, the other pole of his study of nature. Custard apples could provide agreeable, innocent food for settlers; other plants yield dye; still others insecticide, and cypress abundant lumber. He duly records lands favorable for cotton, indigo, tobacco, rice, potatoes and notes their proximity to navigable rivers. Like less poetic travelers he could tote up mercantile advantages: the “productive manure” of the South Carolina Islands could be mined and exported (p. 10); the savannas of Capola are abundant with “that most useful metal,” iron ore (p. 221); the white clay of the Jore Mountains could be shipped to England for the manufacture of porcelain (p. 361), and on and on. And he was genuinely impressed with the resourcefulness of the Irish entrepreneur with his grandiose plans for agriculture and industry: the production of wine, raisins, silk, and citrus in Georgia, all enterprises that have had since then a long history of unrelieved failure.

“To promote the happiness and convenience of mankind” (p. viii) is Bartram's stated purpose for his exploration of the South, but his ideas on what this entails is more inclusive than most of his day, including his father, Peter Collinson, and Dr. Fothergill. His definition of what exactly constitutes happiness and convenience partakes of the ideas both of Franklin and of Thoreau. The practical, it is clear, has second priority:

… My chief happiness consisted in tracing and admiring the infinite power, majesty, and perfection of the great Almighty Creator, and in the contemplation, that through divine aid and permission, I might be instrumental in discovering and introducing into my native country, some original products of nature, which might be useful to society.

(pp. 71-72).

Typically, he awards first place in the vegetable kingdom to a plant with no practical uses, the mimosa strigilossa, because of its beauty, delicacy, and “extreme sensibility.”⁷

The terrible beauty of Bartram's Southern landscape thus arises from a combination of his love of untamed nature with his more qualified appreciation of the values of civilization. They seemed mutually exclusive, for destruction inevitably followed progress. His Southern Utopia could not last. This sense of doom gives urgency to his fears of the extinction of species, his imprecations against impious and wanton destruction by the settlers, and his praise of primitive, unmodified nature. He beheld with “rapture and astonishment” (p. 360) this Edenic world which possessed “an almost inexpressible air of grandeur” (p. 97). The devastation wrought at Mt. Royal by intensive, careless agriculture produces an inferno-like landscape with “a mournful, sallow countenance.” The few remaining trees seem “violated, defaced, and torn to pieces by the bleak winds, scorched by the burning sun beams in summer and chilled by the winter frosts” (pp. 251-2).

Yet Bartram's praise for the civilization that produced such a scene can at times be enthusiastic. Commercial zeal could lead him to write like a projector as in this passage on the Alachua region:

… the exuberant green meadows, with the fertile fields which immediately encircle it, would if peopled and cultivated after the manner of the civilized countries of Europe without crowding or incommoding families, at a reasonable estimation, accomodate in the happiest manner above one hundred thousand human inhabitants, besides millions of domestic animals, and I make no doubt that this place will at some future day be one of the most populous and delightful seats on earth.

(p. 249).

One is hard pressed to explain statements like this: “by the arts of agriculture and commerce, almost every desirable thing in life might be produced and made plentiful here …” (p. 232). Rational practicality can thus occasionally overwhelm the naturalist-poet.

Not for long does Bartram forget the glory of snakes, Indian simplicity, and untamed lands. Characteristically he forges a resolution, fragile though it may be, that for him reconciles civilization with wilderness, man with his environment. This reconciliation, however, is only implied, never discussed, and may be one of which Bartram was not completely aware, a subconscious fusion of opposing forces. In the majority of the passages praising agricultural development the Indian use of the land rather than the European provided the model. Indians, lacking greed, used the native orange groves, cultivated vegetables rather than cash crops, and disturbed little the awful and sublime forests, which, perceptively, Bartram saw as ameliorating the climate thus serving practical as well as aesthetic ends.

The agricultural practices of the Marshall Plantation, for example, he deems exemplary for their cultivation of corn and indigo left intact “groves of floriferous and fragrant trees and shrubs” (p. 10). Similarly, plantations in the Charleston area admirably combined the wild with the tame.

This ancient sublime forest, frequently intersected with extensive avenues, vistas, and green lawns, opening to extensive savannas and far distant rice plantations, agreeably employs the imagination, and captures the senses by scenes of magnificence and grandeur.

(p. 307).

Once again Bartram travels the perilous middle course between conflicting values as he implies a resolution that denies the validity of neither side. Wilderness and civilization both have their beauty and their terror, and, he implies, these could perhaps coexist. Early in his travels he observes, a bit wistfully, “birds are not numerous in desert forests; they draw near to the habitations of men …” (p. 20).

Indians, too, were an important part of Bartram's Southern landscape, the terrible beauty of the wilderness. His conflicting traditions and ideas find a nearly perfect synthesis in his passionate championing of humane treatment for Indians, an attitude at odds with his father's hatred of savages and with the prevailing opinion of the time. Repelled at the cruelty of their persecution, Bartram based his support on the rationalistic argument of fundamental principles of equality and natural rights, on a romantic appreciation of innocence and simplicity, and on Fox's doctrine that heathens also possessed the inward light of innate moral principles. As a scientist he studied Indian cultures systematically and described them accurately, always distinguishing observed fact from hearsay, so that his observations have scientific merit. He was, for instance, among the first to differentiate the customs and languages of various tribes. His theory of a vanished race of mound builders was formed from a weight of evidence and was accepted for over one hundred years. Taking Indian knowledge of nature seriously, he included Indian lore as part of his botanical descriptions.

His purpose in studying the Indians, he explains, was to ascertain if they would adopt white civilization, and if integration would benefit them. From the evidence he meticulously gathered, he concluded that persecution is unmerited and that Indians desired a closer association with whites as long as their culture could be preserved. Bartram proposed a reasonable and humane plan. The government should study Indian customs and manners prior to forming a policy. Again he reconciles both polarities.

Indians further merit study for the moral guidance that their conduct provides whites. In Indian simplicity he found a happy reconciliation of reason and intuition that stands as a corrective to greed, luxury, vice, and cruelty. Savages possess an innate “moral principle” that directs individual conduct to virtuous actions and wisdom (p. 21) and their government to peace, love, equality, and happiness (p. 111). “Divine wisdom dictates and they obey” (p. 493). Their bold ferocity is reasonable, for it stems from a virtuous tenacity in holding to the “liberties and natural rights of man” (p. 483).

Just as he dreaded the consequences of the taming of the wilderness, Bartram feared the corrupting effect of the white man upon the Indian. The primitive state, “Peacable, contented, and sociable” (p. 109), can be fearsomely altered by the onslaught of civilization. “Foreign superfluities” (p. 212) and “artificial refinements” (p. 351) can so bedazzle their “divine simplicity” (p. 351) that Indians, too, plunder the land. And worse, the tyranny, cruelty, and licentiousness of the traders can turn the Indian respect for his natural rights into fierce savagery. Indian society and customs provided the human part of Bartram's Southern Utopia, and like the wilderness, they, too, possessed a terrible beauty. Bartram's inclusive vision could encompass both his own culture and that of the Indian.

William Bartram reconciled and balanced opposing forces in his own life even more effectively than he did in the Travels. To many his life has appeared disjointed, drifting, even inexplicable, yet it derives directly form his creative fusion of seemingly contradictory tensions. More than most men, he lived his philosophy. Self-effacing and modest, he minutely describes and classifies plants, animals, Indians, landscapes, but tells his audience little of himself, nothing at all about his reasons for often puzzling choices. Even so, a consistent, integrated, and forceful identity emerges from his writing and from the facts of his biography.

What to do about talented young Billy and his prospects in life was a constant worry to his father and his friends Peter Collinson and Benjamin Franklin. Apprenticeship to a Philadelphia merchant failed to bring success or fulfillment. Nor was his management, with relatives, of a trading store at Cape Fear, North Carolina, from 1761-1765, more than a dutiful attempt to placate his father. In 1765-66, William accompanied his father, serving as artist and botanical apprentice on a pioneering exploration of St. John's River.

This trip through the Southern wilderness shaped the rest of his life. Here, freed from commercial drudgery, he found his Utopia. His attempt to live there, from 1766-1767, at a time when Dennis Rolle and others were trying, grandly but futilely, the same thing, seems neither surprising nor desperate. His stated purpose—to produce cotton and indigo—was obviously little more than a practical pretext to calm his father's fears. If Henry Laurens, who twice visited him, can be trusted, William clearly was seeking values other than commercial ones. The site twenty-four miles from St. Augustine was, Laurens wrote John, the least agreeable, most unhealthy one he had ever encountered, consisting of swampy, stagnant back waters and pine barrens. In Laurens's view, William seemed to lack the energy for the prodigious labor needed to turn such unpromising land into a profitable plantation. William managed to clear but one acre for rice, and his garden was drowned out. Laurens was effective, for John called his son home from his “forlorn state.”⁸

This venture, called disapprovingly, “Billy's frolic” by Collinson, in reality was a serious and pragmatic working out of the tensions that inform Bartram's writings. He was, by attempting to live in the wilderness, trying to find how man fit into the divine economy. He was empirically testing his faith that man could, after the Indian fashion, live in the wilderness without destroying it. His reluctance to clear and plant thus owes more to his philosophy than to any lack of energy and drive. Whether or not he regarded his experiment as successful, he obeyed his father's summons and returned to Philadelphia, where, for the next five years, he worked as a farm hand and developed his artistic skills by drawing shells and turtles for Dr. Fothergill.

Eagerly accepting his patron's commission to search for plants, for the next four years, 1773-1777, he achieved integration of the practical with the scientist and poet in the Southern wilderness. From this time on his life was settled, his identity secure. He remained, from the age of 38 until his death in 1823, managing and developing his father's farm and garden which had been inherited by his brother. Living a simple and retired life he refused all inducements to leave. In 1782 he declined the Chair of Botany at the University of Pennsylvania; in 1805 he refused Jefferson's invitation to accompany Lewis and Clark; and in 1806 Alexander Wilson's request to explore the Ohio. In his garden he permanently achieved the harmony and wholeness that had eluded him even in Florida. Here he systematically ordered and studied plants, observed animal behavior, wrote his Travels and studies of Indians, as well as an essay attacking slavery which he was preparing at the end of his life. Here he could live as a poet, a natural scientist, a defender of nature as of Indians and Blacks, as well as a farmer and nurseryman. His found Utopia, to which he returned only in memory, was in the Southern wilderness, but his created one, the one he could live in, was in Philadelphia.

The Bartram garden was unique. John had created the country's first real botanical garden, the world's largest collection of species from the wilderness. William developed, arranged, enlarged, and nurtured the collection. So renowned did the garden become that a steady stream of luminaries—Governor Martin, Manasseh Cutler, Dr. Clarkson, James Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and Jefferson—visited there. All were invariably impressed with William's knowledge of plants, his simplicity and modesty, and with the large collection of rare species. But most judged that the garden lacked design and order. Too natural for some, it was too much a plant museum to others. Accurately perceiving Bartram's intention, however, Alexander Wilson called it not a garden, but “Bartram's woods,” “a little Paradise.”⁹

William Bartram's most congenial life's work became not taming wild nature, but redeeming an area already civilized and returning it to nature in order to preserve and study endangered species. Anticipating trends in garden design, Bartram was obviously not trying to achieve the formality of European gardens, admired by Washington, Hamilton, and even Jefferson, but was rather trying to recreate and preserve a natural habitat. Plan and order were there, but not rigidly so. The wild beauty of his garden could at least suggest the terror of the Southern wilderness.

Notes

1. Quoted in Joseph Ewan ed., William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788. (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1968), p. 26.

2. Ewan, p. 152.

3. William Bartram, Travels, Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida. (Savannah, Georgia, the Beehive Press). p. 11. All references are to this facsimile of the 1792 London edition.

4. Manuscript letter to Benjamin Barton, December 29, 1792. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

5. Ibid.

6. Bartram Papers. Manuscript Division. Philadelphia Historical Society.

7. Ewan, p. 156.

8. Josephine Herbst, New Green World. (New York, Hastings House Publishers, 1954), pp. 218-220.

9. Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson. (Philadelphia and New York, J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1961) p. 120.