The Environments of 1776

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Today, Professor Blum and I come to you from the English department, but the topic we’re covering today, 1776, and its environment represents a much broader interdisciplinary conversation happening across the environmental humanities, many other disciplines. And so we’re just scratching a tiny bit of the surface and we can obviously talk to you much more about sources and scholars and texts and the q and a afterwards and by email. So let us return to the work of John Trumbull, who you discussed with Professor Schmidt. Let us start by, just take a look at the painting. What do you notice about the way the environment is represented in this painting? Take a look and then love to call on one or two of you to just any instance thoughts. Yeah,
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It looks pretty desolate. No trees or anything in the distance. And there’s a big, big great hot smoke. So
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Yes, desolate smoke, kind of dirt in the foreground. Yeah. Any other observations? Yeah,
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Really the only amount of color you see is in the people and civilization and not so much the natural features. That’s probably dimensional.
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Yes, absolutely. That the humans are where the real color, the vibrancy of the painting is contained, not so much on the setting. Okay, so you guys are hitting the idea I was hoping we would begin with, which is this idea of empty space that the American Revolution unfolded in empty space. It of course did not. This is Yorktown, Virginia, and it was like there’s a meadow and there’s some waterfront and forest and stuff, but the idea of empty space is actually really prevalent throughout early American writing about the environment and it really contributed to a radical transformation of that environment. And we can think about the ways that the novel events of the American Revolution have led us to the novel problem of climate change in the present. That’s a little bit about what we’ll touch on today, but also that what we’ll find and what we’ll be covering isn’t just that the events between the American Revolution and the present are connected, but also that back in the 18th and 19th century that we see people grappling with environmental destruction and even climate change in ways that maybe suggest that the problems that we are dealing with now that we think of as novel problems are perhaps not so not.
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Hi everybody. I love that the first couple of words that we heard from our intellectual gathering here today were words like desolate and the idea of civilization versus the natural world. These are words that we’ll be recurring to throughout our conversation today. And so as we get into thinking about an environmental history of 1776, which is a pre-history, a present history, it’s ongoing history, we thought we’d start by giving you a couple of brief glimpses of how European colonists coming to North America for the first time conceived of these very terms of desolation civilization natural world. Because we think today often about a world like wilderness as being something that humans today are aware of as something that is difficult to access in an industrialized world of something that is gone or passed or is something that could be restored. But wilderness has had a lot of different meanings over the course of human history.
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And we wanted to start by showing you an example from a text that you may have encountered in other contexts, which is the Puritan William Bradford, who upon coming to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, what became the Massachusetts Bay colony and writing about his experience with Plymouth Plantation used a few phrases that have become central to the way Americans have understood their own history in North America. And he’s imagining that the Puritans who’ve come to the so-called new world are encountering what he calls a hideous and desolate wilderness. Wilderness in our contemporary concepts of what it would mean to restore or preserve or maintain a landscape. Hideous and desolate are not usually the terms that we use in thinking about wilderness. Those are not the ambitions of a wilderness to be hideous and desolate. But for Bradford, the idea of hideousness and desolation goes hand in hand with wilderness because the concept of wilderness here is a concept of a natural landscape that is absent the visible trappings of what he considers civilization.
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It doesn’t of course mean that this is an empty land, that wilderness is not necessarily mean the absence of humans. But conceptually for Bradford and for many of his fellow colonists, that wilderness meant the absence of white people of Europeans, of the kind of recognizable colonialism or societal structure that he and his fellow, both religious objectors and countrymen would understand. And he describes this landscape simultaneously as filled with possibility but also hostile. It has a weather beaten face. It doesn’t look with benign virgin growth upon them. And he is himself thinking of what it would mean to have a prospect of some kind of promised land. So he makes a reference to a sgo view from the wilderness, invoking a biblical sense of getting a glimpse of a promised land that you might not eventually get to realize, but it’s an idea of a prospect from which someone on high can look down at a world to come and imagine that kind of futurity.
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And we’ll be looking again at those moments of where we find someone standing on a prospect and imagining the world unfolding before them. And that prospect is often aligned with a sense of a kind of ownership. And we’ll be talking a bit more about that wilderness. We see that as well shortly thereafter in one of the most popular written accounts published in North America, which is the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which is often sometimes called the sovereignty and goodness of God. And this was a woman who is a resident of the Massachusetts Bay colony who was taken captive in the course of an ongoing war between European settlers and indigenous people in the period that’s sometimes called King Philips war or meta comets war. And she has a period of captivity that she documents in her narrative. But you’ll see again, language that recurs the vast and howling wilderness again, hideous and desolate, vast and howling.
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If we are looking for recreation or some kind of natural inspiration today, these, again, not really the words or modifications that we’re using to understand that natural world, but we see again a moment, and these are just two brief examples of Rowlandson standing atop a hill as she’s in what is the sixth remove as she describes her various movements, she’s being removed from her culture, her family, her lifestyle, and sees again a prospect where she sees nothing but Indians. So this is both vast and howling and empty and desolate, but also filled with other people, but people who don’t register for her in the same kind of way. So we see from the earliest contact of the British North American Colonial Project is continually describing weirdly, both an empty world as well as one that is filled with resources and a world that is empty of people, or at least people that count or matter or register. And this very kind of the linkage of people’s residency, occupancy and power with landscape conditions and with the conditions of working the earth is also central to the very earliest of European colonial projects in the new world.
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This is authorized within a Christian tradition through what has been called the Doctrine of discovery, which was published in a paper bowl just a year after Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. And the principle of this doctrine of discovery, and the part that is important here was that European nations had an absolute right to new world lands. And that principle of discovery was because the lands that Europeans were encountering did not contain Christians. And therefore it was biblically, not biblically, but it was decreed by God that these lands were, it was the responsibility of Christians to take them in the name of God, in the name of a Christian God, and that justified their seizure. And that doctrine of discovery has been used for again, many hundreds of years. In fact, it informs some political rhetoric today about whose right to land ownership and sovereignty is justified based on certain kinds of ideological positionings.
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And the way that this idea too about improvement is also taken up. Another important precursor comes from John Locke’s second treatise of government. And this is the famous moment where Locke is talking about what it means for a human to have property, both property in themselves, but property in the sense of ownership of things. And the doctrine of discovery lines up with this right of property in ways again that we’ll be talking about that resonate within the 1776 moment in particular because for Locke, for a Lockian sense of property, you only have a right to ownership if you are improving upon that property and improving on it through a process of subduing it through a kind of agriculture. So what this argument means, and what it was translated to mean was that indigenous people did not have a right to their lands or a right of ownership or of property, which again were terms that would not register in most indigenous worldviews anyway.
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The idea that you could own the land was not a concept that even made sense in that cosmology. But to Europeans, any sense that someone could own that land would mean that indigenous people, because they did not engage in forms of agriculture that were recognized by Europeans, they were not improving the land and therefore didn’t have a right of ownership. It doesn’t mean that there was no indigenous agriculture, there absolutely was. It just did not take the forms that were recognized by Europeans. And as such, the doctrine of discovery and a Lockian sense of property says, we European colonists deserve this land because we are improving it and subduing it and making it profitable, making it productive. And so this concept of how the natural landscape is interacted with humans, the important thing to recognize here is that a distinction between ownership in which humans are in command of a land versus a kind of position of reciprocity of humans and the landscape.
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These are the tensions that we’ll be talking about as we go. And then one final note, a little image that illustrates some of this is from a painting by the Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks, and it’s called “A Peaceable Kingdom.” And it’s a good illustration of some of these theories. In principle, it’s image, it’s an allegorical folk art painting, and he painted about a hundred different versions of this. So you can walk into almost any museum in North America and find yourself a peaceable kingdom. They’re all over the place, and as you can see, and the population and the figures in them change. But this is a pretty indicative one where we have all kinds of beasts and we have beasts that are agricultural beasts like cattle, but then we also have lions with manes. We’ve got some leopard ,jaguars, there’s some lambs, and we have all kinds of babies, swaddled laying down with the animals, petting the lambs, petting the tigers.
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There may not be a tiger in this one. Yeah, there is a tiger. I should not talk so fast because Edward Hicks, who’s always going to include the beast of the jungle here in a kind of naturalized harmony where the natural world is not hostile to our sweet babes in their swaddling here, this is an illustration of a biblical story that I think is from Isaiah, that in which the lamb lies down with the child. But what’s also in the background here on the left is an illustration of a famous treaty that William Penn, the Quaker founder of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is signed with the Lenape. And that treaty happens in the late 17th century and lasts for a few decades until William Penn’s sons violated and sees lenape land that had been peacefully agreed upon through a treaty system. This is, again, a process that repeats itself for many hundreds of years.
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Almost no settler treaties with indigenous people are allowed to stand without violation. But this is an image of a landscape that looks very different than the Trumbull painting that Professor DeWitt showed us at the beginning. We have a greenery and water and plants and trees, the animals are all in harmony with humans. And the allegorical meaning of this treaty of peace that is uniting a landscape in a form that by the time Hicks painted, this was a treaty that had already been long by. So we’ll be taking up these issues and thinking about those interrelations with our next series of slides.
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Okay? Yes. So a land, a nature that can be owned. Let us see where we find that in the literary archives. So here you’ll recognize this poem which you read for your homework, and let’s track these ideas of nature as they are sort of preserved in the poetic archive. So Philip Freneau, often called the poet of the American Revolution. He fought in the war, he talked about independence and his writing, his poetic writings on his essays afterwards. And he is certainly picking up on all of those ideas about nature, which were well established tropes by the time we get to the American Revolution. So just the beginning of the poem, “Fair flower, that dost so comely grow, Hid in this silent, dull retreat, Untouch’d thy honey’d blossoms blow, Unseen thy little branches greet.” First of all, what are you noticing? This is the part where I make you talk a little bit, just a tiny bit, what stands out about nature in even these first four lines that I’ve read? Yeah,
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I have something fragile that needs to be protected.
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It’s fragile, it needs to be protected. So we have a protector, here we are again, ownership. Yes, another observation,
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But it hasn’t been tampered with yet.
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Yes, yes. It needs protection and it has been so far, not bothered, not messed with. And it is fair and it is beautiful and it is perfect. And so these are not just ideas about the North American continent and environment, but also ideas about beauty as perfect, as symmetrical, as geometric. And so this is a great example. This poem is in the neoclassical mode that is a style of poetry and other art forms which prizes order and symmetry, and thus aestheticizes the values of the nation. The ideals that the founders were trying to embed into the nation via their new systems of government are represented here in the structure of the poem. So what seems symmetrical and perfect about the form of the poem in your observations, what do you notice about the AKA, the style or the form of the poem? Yes.
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It seems like the last syllables of every other sentence.
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Yeah. Or there’s a rhyme scheme that is very even you have an interlocking rhyme. Yes. Is that what you were going to say? Any other observations? I kind of gave you the answer. There’s four iams per line. It’s sort of, it’s a very lulling and very even leader. Okay. So this was a really important aesthetic mode for the early American artists, poets and thinkers. We have a sort of similar level of symmetry reflected in Monticello up there on the top left, that’s Thomas Jefferson’s house where he is using architecture to sort of dwell inside of the same ideals of the nation that he’s helping to found. So it’s important to American art but is not unique to American art. This is a huge trend across Europe and we’ll start to sort of get toward the 19th century in a later generation of artists for whom coming up with novel American forms is really important.
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At this point in the late 18th century, the ideal of perfection and order is what’s most valuable to American artists or American poets like Rene. Okay, so in the first stanza we’ve sort of already touched on nature is pristine and the second stanza, nature starts to decay, but even the decay is a little bit orderly. The charms that must decay, it’s kind of inevitable, the un pitying frosts and autumn’s power. So it’s regimented, it’s regulated, it’s cyclical with the seasons. And then we start to see what all this is working toward in the third stanza. If nothing, once you nothing lose for when you die, you are the same. The space between is about an hour, the mere idea of a flower. Now all beauty in nature will at some point wither. This is a poetic trope I’m sure you’ve seen many times already. And it starts to sound like maybe we’re talking about more than just flowers, that human mortality is what we’re really talking about.
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And so in that sense, the finitude of nature is a way of accessing for Freneau, the finitude of man. And of course finitude was a thing that early Americans knew quite a lot about. So they often spoke of the landscape as a howling wilderness, infinitely vast as in Eden, ready for the nurturement. But they were also very worried about their dependence on its resources and the depletion of those resources. So Europe had sort of deforested itself and moved away from wood as an energy source. But in the colonies, the forests that they encountered were not deforested, they were quite abundant. And so the age of wood extended much longer in North America. But even though this went well into the 19th century, still increasing the increasing distances, people had to go away from settlements to access wood for fuel. This was sort of making it expensive, it was making it difficult to access and there were wood, there was a wood shortage during the Revolutionary War, the sort of access to woods getting a little more precarious and it’s getting colder.
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This is a little ice age. So they thought a lot about climate and they wanted it to be warmer. And there’s sort of this really accelerated deforestation in the northeast in part because people were aware that trees have a cooling effect. And so they were also sort of like, oh, let’s hurry up and get rid of these forests to make the land warmer as a response to, as a way of enacting climate change, which gave some people pause, including Benjamin Franklin, who was noticing that even as the forest were declining, temperatures were declining too, thought of climate as much more complicated. And so was quite motivated to think about the problem of running out of wood scarcity resource and how running out of wood might be a huge problem for the young nation, not just people surviving, but also the economy and progress that he was really invested in.
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And so he designs a series of stoves, many of which run on coal and was really concerned with making combustion as efficient as possible to generate as much heat and as little pollution as possible. And he was pretty good with his inventions such that Bolton and Watt when they’re developing the steam engine or consulting with Franklin. And so that of course leads to Franklin as inventions. That’s more of a domestic application, but the steam engine that becomes really consequential to the industrial revolution. And then you get the explosion of greenhouse gases and the rest is history. So this is all connected to what we really think of as climate history, as we typically think about it, that Americans were concerned or they thought of their environment, that early Americans at the time of the revolution thought about the environment not just as a wilderness or as an Eden, but also as something that they really depended on.
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But more than would and more than coal. The thing that early Americans depended upon was coerced labor. And so the notion of the American landscape as a wilderness and as an Eden depended upon agricultural labor to do that agricultural transformation and that labor was performed by enslaved people. And so the dependency upon the system of chattel slavery fueled anxieties that all of these independent obsessed founders were really worried about, even though regardless of what they chose to do about it, that labor and slavery were always operating alongside their concerns with the scarcity of the environment. So the interconnectedness of the exploitation of enslaved people and the exploitation of non-human nature was not lost on many, including the black radical David Walker who’s scathing pamphlet the appeal to the colored Citizen of the world in 1829 names the way that the extraction of natural resources and the extraction of labor run right to the heart of America. Walker rates, we who have enriched their country with our blood and tears have dug up gold and silver for them and their children from generation to generation and are in more and miseries than any other people under heaven. So Walker is already in 1829 naming the kind of entanglement of capitalism and slavery that was operating in a really significant way in 1776.
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One thing to notice here in the image of David Walker whose appeal circulated wildly and uses the greatest amount of punctuation marks the world has ever seen, if you feel like you have an excessive use of exclamation points or underlining David Walker will blow you away. But what you see in this image here is of walker at the top of a prospect, a mountain prospect, where he’s clearly appealing up to some larger force. And we begin by talking a bit about this idea of the prospect, the view from on high. And the way that that view is articulated through a lot of the visual and the literary imagery of this period has to do again with this idea that is borrowed from a very famous poem written by William Cooper that is about the Robinson Cruso story. And the line is, I am the monarch of all. I survey the idea that in order to have some kind of visionary position where you can see a lot of things that gives you some kind or form of not just ownership of it, but control, command of rule, I’m the monarch of all I survey.
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And the way that the prospects view is articulated in this poem, this painting rather by Thomas Cole who’s associated most strongly with the Hudson River School of American Landscape painting, he’s more or less the founder of that school and is trying to both provide as he did in many paintings, allegorical readings of a growing American nation, but also to represent what for many Europeans would be, what would seem to be the kind of boundlessness of the American Eden that is endlessly regenerative that does not require the same amount of labor. But as Professor Dewitt has just shown us, it’s not endlessly regenerative and the labor that it requires to do that work is often done by enslaved people who have been imported by enslavers specifically to do that kind of work and to erase any visible idea that the American Eden is producing abundance without labor or pain.
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And we wanted to show you this painting called The Oxbow, which is one of Thomas Cole’s better-known paintings. Because what we see in this particular prospect in the left foreground is an image of the natural world that looks more like what we might think of as a wilderness. We have trees that have not been pruned or paired, they’re thickly clustered. It doesn’t seem to admit of human passage. We see a tree that is both mossy and grown over but also has been fractured by weather, perhaps lightning, some kind of wear and tear. And what’s allied with that sense of the wildness of that prospect is a storm, some kind of cloud cover and rain. But what gets resolved in this allegorical example of a certain kind of progress, and one of the things that we want to stress to you all is that conversations about environmental conditions which seem to proceed along a linear trajectory do not.
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In fact that does not reflect the variability of human interactions with the land and with the land and with ecological conditions, nor does it reflect where futurity inevitably will take us. So we want to kind of disrupt a sense that things are moving in a straight line as this painting in fact is trying to do in its own way. And what we can see off in the background of this painting looks much calmer. It’s sunny, there’s gentle cloud cover, the things are green, but not in a way that looks too wild. And what you may be able to discern depending on how good your vision is, is that part of what makes that prospect on the right look. So orderly and appealing and calm is the presence of fields of agriculturally worked fields. There are plots of land, there’s some evidence of what seems to be smaller scale agriculture here that is presented as if it’s a kind of pastoral ideal or ill.
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And the one indication that we have of the painter is in this, oh, I have a laser pointer I can use. Look at me. You see here there’s a little umbrella and there’s a stool and an easel. And that’s where Thomas Cole has put himself in the painting to show his own view. He’s associating himself with that wild natural world, but he’s looking out over a prospect that is going to eventuate into the peaceful pastoral landscape in which we don’t see any laborers of any kind. We don’t see the infrastructure that would allow the goods and proceeds of these farms to circulate or move. It’s an idealized vision of this kind of nature, which takes us to first part of our Jefferson, this is a portion of the reading that we didn’t in fact actually give you, but it’s from the same text of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.
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If you’ve, I imagine in a class in 1776, Thomas Jefferson has come up a few times. This is a different view of Jefferson than we would have otherwise. But we wanted to give you this brief moment from one of the other queries in Jefferson’s notes on the state of Virginia, which is a text that he is using to respond to European interlocutors to people he’s in correspondence with who have asked him, can you describe the nature of the land of Virginia? Can you describe the new world to us? Can you describe what you see here? And so notes on the state of Virginia is Jefferson’s attempt to document this through the rhetorical. It’s not really a fiction because he is in correspondence with people, but it’s an opportunity to say, I’m going to tell you all these things about Virginia because my friends in Europe really want to know about it.
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And he’s in the sections that you did read for today, especially responding to a European scientist named Buffon whose thesis, and we’ll get into this in a minute, is that everything in America is degenerating and Jefferson does not like the sound of that. But in this particular moment he’s describing coming through the Blue Ridge mountains and standing at a top of a prospect. And it’s a weird moment because he changes his mode of address. He’s not just reporting here. There’s a kind of invitation to the reader to participate in this scene. If you come through the passage of the Potomac River, which he spells in a slightly unfamiliar way here through the Blue Ridge, it’s a stupendous scene. You stand on a very high prospect of land. This is not Jefferson saying, I am standing here describing this. It’s a way to recruit his reader into a sense of being with him at the top of this mountain, being the monarch of all he bases.
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He describes the Shenandoah, that Potomac’s coming, these rivers are rushing together, passing off to the sea. And the first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time. And it’s important here to recognize that what Jefferson is aware of is that it’s taken geological ages for this river to have carved this passage through the mountains that he’s looking at a scene of nature that is not recent, that is not one that exists within any possible human memory. But the scientific aspect of Jefferson here is showing an awareness of how geological time has shaped this prospect. But then he makes another strange move where he’s talking about this again as an actual thing that he has experienced at the top of this mountain, but then he switches to the language of painting the distant finishing, which nature has given to the picture.
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So the idea that again, nature itself has decided to turn this into a painting for his viewpoint is a different character. That finishing is something that makes it look placid and delightful as well as wild and tremendous. We’ve talked about the difference between a wilderness and a garden or a farm, keeping in play. Both of these concepts is important for Jefferson and the mountain is cloven as under by these rivers. And then the mountain presents the mountain who’s gendered as she presents to your eye through the cleft, a small catch of blue horizon inviting you as it were. So the mountain herself is addressing the man at the top of the mountain and inviting that eye to travel in this prospect monarch of all. I survey from the riot and tumult of what you would see for example, on the left side of the top of the mountain to the riot and tumult around to the calm below.
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And then Jefferson says here, the eye ultimately composes itself even though he’s told us all along, bring your eye with me. This is where the eye’s going. Come along with me. And then says, and that way too, the road happens actually to lead as if the road just sort of organically emerged, just so happens to be in this place. So what he’s doing here, strangely, is presenting as if it’s an absolutely natural process for the I and the prospect here to come to this moment where, oh, how did the road get here? Who built that road? Why is the road there? What do we need it for? It’s taking a process by which humans create infrastructure on a landscape to enable the movement of humans, the movement of goods, circulation and transit and transportation and economic success as something that becomes as natural as moving from a mountaintop down into a valley.
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That this is the kind of ultimate realization of being in nature is to end up at a road that just so happens to be there. And we see another example of this just quickly here too, in a very famous image that circulated and was hung on the walls of many homes in America because it was circulated as a courier and i’s lithograph, which similarly presents what is called the course of empire taking its way as an example. This is just before the Transcontinental Railroad is complete, and the forest that Professor Dewitt was talking about here have now been cut down to make these log cabins. The train, the exhaust, the noxious smoke from the train is literally choking the two native figures who are on horseback and being left behind by the train in the right foreground. And this is a prospect that is extending into an area of the landscape where there are no human habitations that have been built by the settlers yet. But yet that way too, the road happens to lead the train tracks is already there. So it’s just an inevitability that the train’s going to get there. How did the train tracks get there that it’s been erased, the labor has been erased. That has brought us to this particular prospect, which then brings us to Jefferson’s weird obsessions in the bit that we read for today.
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Professor DeWitt has just touched on what has to go in to making the perspective, which is a very specific perspective that Jefferson is writing from to make it seem like no perspective at all, but perfectly objective. And to kind of erase all that material context so that his observations can really stand as scientific truth which he wants them to. And so in a minute, professor Blum is going to sort of unpack a little bit what those observations contain, but before we just wanted to give you all a chance to share a little bit what, having read this somewhat strange document that was obviously really important and circulated widely but is quite striking, what were you coming up with in your mind as what Jefferson needed this to do? As in what did was Jefferson trying to manage in writing what he wrote in the passage and the queries that we condensed for you? So what were, in your mind, you’re like weird Jefferson’s writing stuff to you. Did you see him going on in his mind, explanations you came up with as you’re doing your homework in your head?
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Or would you have predicted this Jefferson from whatever other aspects of Jefferson you may have heard about in class so far?
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Right. Yeah. Perhaps a better starting question is how does that differ from the, how does this Jefferson differ from the Jefferson we have met previously in this very grow? Was that who you expected to find on the page now that you’re actually reading him or was it surprising? Is it what you expected? Yeah,
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I actually feel like it’s on par with what we’ve discussed about Jefferson because he’s such a multifaceted figure that he says he’ll say something that you’re like, yes, that’s so true. And then you’ll be like, whoa. And that’s kind of a pattern we see with him. And he demonstrates such a wide range of complex thought and thoughtfulness that I actually think it’s kind of expected from him.
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Okay, cool. Yes, I mean that makes a lot of sense. And did anyone have a slightly different take in their mind as they’re sort of dealing these page after page of observation
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And your take may not be about Jefferson, your take may be what were the two of us thinking and asking you to read at great length about mammoth bones and whether or not Native Americans have art for their female? Right.
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Yeah, I think about how much money was tied up because he invested so much
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In the, so it would be important to him to sell him, right? It’s a crucial, but
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Yeah, that the material contingency is not just in what perspective he has, where his perspective is situated in this prospect, but also actual household accounting, his debts where he put his money and then thus felt really compelled to have succeed. That’s such a good point. Yeah. Yeah,
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We, we’ve kind of talked about Jefferson and his religion, his and how he saw God a creator, made everything in a certain way almost. And I saw a lot of that way he described created purposes, certain goals and stuff like that. I don’t know, I don’t really know how, but I think it definitely speaks to almost like a machine, everything working in conjunction, everything made
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In a certain way. Yeah. I love the idea of nature as a machine here because another way of thinking about this is a kind of environmental determinism. The idea that things are going in a certain way because they have been engineered to do so, whether that’s by God, whether that’s by some other force, by which nature is engineering itself to produce a certain kind of result. And we see this here with the idea that the obsession with why is a mammoth an elephant? Is it bigger, is it smaller? Does the heat of North America produce mammoths while South America or the southern hemisphere produces elephants? How big are their tusks? It’s this really kind of obsessive attention to whether or not things in the new world in North America are getting smaller or things are getting bigger. Or as he talks about here, whether there’s impotence in the new world that the idea of a kind of growth or success which is lined up with sexual potency is something that is a real question.
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If you are a colonist coming to a new continent and have to have a sense of will this environment continue to produce value, will this environment continue to produce growth or is this an environment that’s going to produce degeneracy? This is a real question for Jefferson and for his contemporaries and the charge that he’s responding to by Buffon is, Buffon is saying things in America are smaller and weirder and worse, and Jefferson is multiplying examples of how they’re much, much better and only growing and only getting bigger. And this is again, part of the sense of an environmental determinism that is going to affect not just the way things grow in North America, but whether or not humans by which is meant here, European colonists, settlers to this land will continue to thrive or if they will degenerate a lot of conversations about this kind of degeneracy happening in this period.
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And Jefferson then turns them to talk not just about the animal world, but to talk the brute animals as he calls versus man of America, indigenous people in America. So making a transition that we can find to be an awkward one with the brute animals versus Native Americans, which is a kind of presumption of, or an association with another form of ity here. And Buffon is saying everything gets smaller on the continent and is also talking about smaller organs of generation. These are literally talking about genitalia, no arter for his female. He talked about impotence when discussing the mammoth, no vivacity of mind. There’s a real connectedness here, not just in what the environment will produce, but how it affects humans and how it affects humans for generations to come in regeneration. There’s such an emphasis here on a sexual potency that can only, I mean there’s other reasons perhaps for this emphasis, but one of them is about what it will mean for future generations for breeding.
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This is part of a kind of racialized logic of natural growth that Jefferson’s being very attentive to here. And so he keeps trying to defend indigenous Americans from any charge of degeneracy, not because Jefferson has any particular care for indigenous people. In fact, he goes shortly after this point to identify mounds, which we’ll get to in a second as burial devices and then will cheerfully violate them. So he’s doing this in order to say that things are going to be good for the European settlers, things are going to continue to grow, they have good family lives. And this is all a kind of model for why Jefferson is upholding indigenous people as a part of a system of growth. And so we wanted to move now into the other bit of literature we’ve asked you to read, which is a poem by the fireside poet William Cullen Bryant, a romantic poet who had a lot of popularity and success, but who’s describing an area where we’re standing.
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Essentially he’s describing grassland prairies. This where we are standing right here was a grassland prairie. The grassland prairies are now no longer, and he’s describing a mound building community like the Hokie mounds across the river. Again, where we’re standing would be the suburbs of what was the largest city in North America in the middle of the second millennium. And we see a lot of the language that we’ve talked about here, the gardens of the desert, seemingly contradictory terms. But the desert here doesn’t mean like sandy, no water, no vegetation desert means an absence of humans who are recognized as developing the land. I’m going to move a little quickly through some of this, but we see a lot of the same language here that we’ve been describing. And in the poem there’s a speaker who’s in the grassland prairies and thinking about where human agency comes in.
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And in Byant’s vision here, God is a farmer, God is working agriculture man doesn’t have power here. The hand that builds this smooths the swells, so has sown the fields with herbage hedged them. Round hedges are part of agricultural development. So the God figure here that’s shaping the landscape is doing it in a form of a kind of agriculture. And then there’s this invocation of the mound builders, which is widely recognized in the 1776 broader environmental moment are the broader architectural traces of indigenous thriving over the course of thousands of years. But then the poem does something weird. This is a photo of Cahokia Mounds. Again, if you haven’t visited yet in your time in WashU it’s important to do. But what he imagines is that the builders of the mounds were not in fact Native Americans. Part of what’s so strange about the fantasy of this poem is that a race that has long passed away built them a disciplined and populous race that is using agriculture in the form of yoked oxen, which again is not a native practice and is imagining that there was this earlier European-ish race that was then annihilated and massacred by indigenous people.
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“The red man came” warlike and fierce. The mound builders vanished from the earth. So rather than can attribute any kind of long-term civilization building to indigenous people, the poet here is imagining that whoever had built the mounds had been annihilated by Native Americans. This is akin to saying that the pyramids were built by aliens because they couldn’t possibly have been built by Egyptians, that the Mayan temples were built by aliens. That Machu Picchu is built by aliens, the idea of not being able to credit the people of the land for that kind of work. And so to finish up with this poem here too, another image of naturalizing processes that are in fact actually active moments of genocide, of erasing futurity and presence and making it seem as if it’s natural. This is part of a myth of a vanishing native, which we can talk about in the Q and A if you would like, and naturalizing instead the kind of colonization that white Europeans did, which is figured as like a beehive.
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And the beehives in which you’ve got your drone workers who are all in service to a monarch of all. She surveys at the top of that hide. And the vision that the poem ends with is a vision of settlers coming in waves to settle this land and to create it for agriculture. And the poet ends this vision, which is a vision he’s embracing by saying that he’s in the wilderness alone and nobody’s ever been in the wilderness alone. There’s never been a wilderness and you’ve never been alone. The inter penetration of humans and the landscape and the things that humans build on those is a present concern throughout human history. And there’s never been someone in the wilderness alone.
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We have thrown a lot out in a short period of time. And I guess the point that we want to end on is that the fraught and contradicting and sometimes self-reflective ways that people have thought about the nation’s founding and its environment that it sets in motion a lot that sort of reverberates in our present. So we began with Trumbull’s painting of this, the barren battlefield oil painting, and sort of this idea that that could be in some way connected to The New York Times climate photojournalism, that those are just sort of like two examples. And then along the way, many more instances where the sort of thinking about the American revolution as a kind of environmental revolution that has traces in agriculture and industry and transportation technologies. We didn’t even touch on the postal service or the Stamp Act or the Sugar Act. There are so much more to say and to learn about.
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But that, and then most especially the traces of this environmental American revolution are born out in the social inequality that continues to threaten the coherence of the nation. So to end with Bryant’s poem, Bryant’s poem is a, to sort of point to an irony, he is appropriating the mark that Native Americans left on the landscape so as to justify or lend more authority to him and his contemporaries in the transformations that they were affecting in their moment in the early 19th century. And that moment is very clearly tied to the industrial revolution and on and on toward the present, the environment that we all live in today. But that part of what we want to show is the history of this is much longer.
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There’s an irony that the people Bryant was working to erase are the ones who knew most of all the kind of precarity and vulnerability that we often describe as what it’s like to live in 2026 with extreme weather events and then eroding coastline and all these problems that these environmental problems were something that the indigenous Americans at Bryant is actively erasing, were well acquainted with. And so this takes us to a really important point that’s made by a scholar environmental philosopher, an indigenous studies scholar who named Kyle Poets White, who makes the point that colonizers today from settlers to imperialists are concerned about climate change, suggests that they are now being affected by the seismic waves of massive ecosystem transformation that began over 500 years ago. And then a sort of similar idea is articulated by Heather Davis and Zoe Todd who are connecting this idea to the Anthropocene.
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The Anthropocene, as many of you probably already know, is this idea that we are now in the geologic epic defined by impacts of humans in the geologic record that’s the human age of geology and that this is a word that is new, but their point is that it is actually not a new concept. The Anthropocene is not a new event, but only the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, which has been under operation for the last 500 years. So what White and Davis and Todd all remind us that we wanted to end today with is that the intersection of that the present context of the environment today in America is part of a much longer environmental narrative in which 1776 is a very brief but very resounding part. So thank you all so much and we are done. Thank you.
(00:54:55):
Hi, thank you so much. I’m curious, obviously I’m imposing maybe more of an American idea of progress in this question that I’m about to ask, but how do we square ideas of progress in 2026, looking back 250 years ago with this ongoing relationship of the environment and in an idea of progress that was, I don’t know, still present even if through myths that we were creating,
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Help me understand the kind of progress that we’re thinking about here.
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I guess progress in the way of like, wow, we can do some amazing things right now. We can send people to the moon. I think I’d rather live now just by virtue of modern medicine and such, but it’s all interconnected to this idea of progress, I would say.
(00:55:55):
No, thank you. That’s a great and helpful clarification. Yeah,
(00:55:59):
It’s a great question. And the part of what is difficult to square at this moment is that the kinds of things that you mentioned like sending someone to the moon, certain kinds of medical advances and technologies are the very things that are extracting the most kind of energy right now and causing accelerations of ecological destruction. And so the same engines that allow that kind of progress to advance are the same ones that are feeding into a cycle that is increasingly ruinous. And that’s why it’s hard to have these kinds of conversations because in order to step back and in order to make any kind of broad scale changes that have to be structural changes across really wide prospects, it’s in the interest of many people to think of climate remediation as something that individuals can solve, right? Talking about individual recycling as something that is a responsibility of all of us, and it’s all great, but on the broader scale of what of course affects climate systems, individual recycling has almost nothing to do with anything.
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But it’s also very, very hard to move from individual notions of comfort and happiness and success in thriving and progress and medicine and ability to move throughout the world. It’s very hard to take those individual benefits and understand them as part of a much broader system. And so one of the challenges of the environmental humanities as a field, and this is a class that Grace King and I are currently co-teaching, which is a class on climate storytelling, is how difficult it is to translate those kinds of ideas in ways that neither feel impossible or filled with despair or feel as if they are something that no human can possibly have any kind of investment in or sense of ownership of.
(00:58:09):
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful answer. And I guess the only thing I’ll add to that, which is that I have that question all the time and there isn’t a good answer for it in the way that it’s like, oh, progress. I rely on it and I appreciate it and I’m benefiting from it, and yet I’m learning all the ways in which it is authorized some horrible stuff, and that the alternatives, I guess I am energized in this work of reading and learning because the alternative is to not even know and not even acknowledge. And so it’s not like acknowledgement. It’s not like we find the answers to your question and okay, let’s name what happened in the past, but it’s certainly better than not naming it for me personally. So slowly. Yeah, I think I’ll add to that.
(00:59:06):
Thank you guys for coming in today. Really enjoyed this lecture, and I just had some questions about the beehive metaphor. I was just wondering, so who’s the queen bee in this scenario?
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Good question.
(00:59:18):
God, it’s so good. So the bee metaphor emerges in the 17th century because honeybees are not indigenous to North America. They’re imported by British colonists. And so the idea of the hive of industry that is British colonial immigration to North America, there’s a real reliance on that metaphor as a way of saying not just like, oh, we have found a new metaphor in this landscape to understand our own sense of a buzzing hive of industry, but this is the model of something that has been brought to North America by British settlers. So in part, the honeybee metaphor, which shows up all over the colonial period and well through the revolution and afterward, there’s a lot of images in early republic stationary or signs above stores are always this kind of hive of industry. The queen bee question is, it’s a little incoherent because on the one hand this is moving and I don’t want to lean against it.
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On the other hand, the incoherence of it is that the emphasis is less on the idea that there is a queen that is giving any kind of orders, but more on the sense that the hive itself can function only if it’s working all together. I don’t know that there’s a lot of pressure put on the metaphor by those who are using it, only that the idea of the hive of industry works within a certain kind of particularly Puritan ideal, Calvinist ideal of hard work as eventuated into success in life. I wish I had a more coherent answer. Do you have a better sense of it?
(01:01:02):
Do you guys think that the queen bee could perhaps be, I mean, I remember that you guys were talking about the appeal to religion, which a lot of colonists use to justify their expansion. Do you think that maybe the queen bee could kind of be God in a sense, like God is giving us this right to continue expansion and continue taking land and continue using the land?
(01:01:24):
I love that reading. I think that’s great. I think that works really beautifully in the earliest of these colonial moments. You’ve got Queen Elizabeth there, so the bee is part of that. England does not maintain a female monarch for very long throughout that period, although there’s some fluctuation. So that may be part of it, but it doesn’t account for the later articulation of it. So I like your reading very much there.
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I was just curious to what degree these American landscapes that are dissimilar to more European ones led to the development of a unique American culture?
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Do I steal that one?
(01:01:58):
Sure. Yeah. So the question is to what extent did the uniqueness of the landscape sort of show up in American ideas about nature that the need to articulate what’s special about North America, about the landscape and the art forms and the people. We see it in Jefferson, of course, as we discuss, but it’s really more of a 19th century, mid 19th century obsession. And that’s sort of where you get the American renaissance, like the stereotypically goes with people like Ralph Aldo, Emerson and Walt Whitman are trying to think about what’s special about this landscape. And so their writing is full of references to nature. Emerson’s early book is called Nature.
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The thinking about Americanness as emerging out of the landscape is a really big 19th century idea too, in this more unique way that your question leads to. But it is also the Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of Paintings, which we already did touch on here. That is one of the principle concerns of that painting movement, that what is so special about America is the dramatic scale of its landscape that is our mountains are bigger than yours. Our wilderness is less. We can have better thoughts and better democracy because our landscape isn’t dotted with villages, isn’t dotted with villages obviously are a lot of the things we’ve been touching on. But that kind is a need that grows later, actually after the revolutionary period. Does that anything?
(01:04:01):
Yeah, no, that’s great. Just one little brief example of this. Something that many writers recur to the idea that, okay, in London you’ve got the Thames River, which at this point is completely industrialized, it’s dirty, it’s not a place of recreation. And American writers would say, how can we even use the same language to describe the Thames once we’ve seen Niagara Falls? The scalar difference and the Niagara Falls example is used all the time as a stand-in for the difference between the North American landscape and that of Europe. The scale is so much bigger and it produces effects. Those are sublime effects, but they’re also effects of scale, that there’s a hope for the translation that those scales will only become bigger.
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And I guess it’s worth noting the time of the revolution. The scale was still a bit of a liability, and that’s what all the lengths Jefferson’s going to are to manage that and Rolands in and it’s like, oh, this is really wild. Oh, this might be a problem for our civilization. And that just really changes a little bit later, only a couple decades later.
(01:05:14):
You guys mentioned a little bit about an Ice Age when the colonists first got here. Could you please elaborate on said Ice Age
(01:05:22):
With pleasure. Sure. Okay. There were little ice ages in the mid 15th century in the mid 14 hundreds, but the more relevant one for the early Republic was a little ice age that happened in the first half of the 19th century, and probably the most famous product of those moments of climate change. You’ve probably all heard of a book called Frankenstein. So because these were anomalous years in which a little ice age globally produced lower temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, coupled within this particular instance, there had been an eruption of Mount Tempura in Indonesia, and that produced in the summer of 1817, which was called “The Year Without a Summer” across the northern hemisphere, not the case in the South, but across the northern hemisphere. Temperatures did not get above freezing in what is now the US and across northern Europe for most of the summer because of the combination of this volcanic eruption and the ice age. And so a pleasure party that the Shelleys were on, along with Byron to enjoy the fruits of the summer, and the weather was so terrible that they stayed in and told ghost stories and that’s where Frankenstein came from. But that little ice age also had a lot of effects on agriculture throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
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It’s part of a cyclical movement of climate, as I’m sure the anthropogenic climate change that is part of the anthrop and the human cause. Climate change is different in scale and duration and effects than earlier changes in climate, but climate has always fluctuated, and that’s a particular moment that has been widely recorded within human history as having real material effects. It changed migration patterns across Europe and North America, and really big changes in migration patterns and in the capacity of people to build and store food, but is also at a moment of industrialization in which the accelerated burning of fossil fuels provided more comfort for those who were experiencing those effects. But then of course, in turn accelerating those depredations of those environmental things.
(01:07:41):
Thank you. So we covered how David Walker had his enslaved person’s perspective and response to this, and how modern indigenous scholars have had their response to this, but what were the indigenous responses at the times kind of viewpoint of the paintings and the works that are constantly being published
(01:07:59):
That’s a great question.
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They can
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Start.
(01:08:03):
Sure. Yeah. So there are many responses. One of the things, I’m not going to lean on this again. During the treaty, for example, that William Penn signed with the Lenape, the chief of the Lenape at the time said, this treaty will stay in place as long as the waters run. I’m paraphrasing as long as the waters run clear and as long as the mountains survive and language like that is put in a lot of treaty making with indigenous people. But then there’s also a kind of recognition that those conditions are not permanent. There’s a hope that this degree of reciprocity with the landscape and tying human development and indigenous survival and surveillance to the landscape is something that should be indefinite. But part of those terms are also recognizing those kinds of transformations. And so the things like language about depletion that Professor Dewitt was talking about is widely used in the same way that, for example, you may have seen lots of articles that say, Everyone complains now about our attention span with screens on phones.
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But here’s an article from 1950 that talks about the attention span that people had because there’s too many publications. And here’s an article from 1801 complaining about everyone’s reading newspapers. They don’t have the attention span. And this sort of goes backwards for hundreds and hundreds of years. The same thing is true for people talking about climate, what’s the word? That one? Degradation. Degradation, thank you. Of climate degradation, of forms of depletion and exhaustion that every generation has its own version of we’re losing all our resources and this is all happening. And so those conversations are happening within black and indigenous communities all throughout. They’re not being invoked in a similar way that they’re not always invoked for an indigenous science today to talk about climate change. But those records exist. They just are not taken up by scientists like Jefferson, for example, in any way other than what serves his own narrative of what this will mean for the Europeans in the North America.
(01:10:11):
It’s also a really amazing question because they kind of appear as similar illusions in our talk today. But the plight and the archive of indigenous writers and the plight and the archive of African-American writers in the period are very different archives. And they are different stories and experiences and so they’re like similarly alighted by these revolutionary guys, but we can access them actually very differently. And so Walker is part of the Black print culture of which there are many other wonderful texts that we could point you to. And that is happening in connection with by the mid 19th century abolitionism and the Civil War. And that becomes much more central to a lot of civic conversations than in the case with the experience of indigenous Americans, which is not to say that there aren’t texts we could have excerpted. One that comes to mind is, William Apess’ A Son of the Forest or some of his other texts too. So there is definitely an archive, a record of reaction and objection, though, a consider belief in our one in terms of the papers that survive. That’s a great question.
(01:11:44):
Thank you both so much for coming and we’ll see you next week.