The American Philosophical Society

Beginnings

In 1743, Benjamin Franklin offered a plan to enact John Bartram’s idea of 1739 to establish an academy of “the most ingenious and curious men.” Bartram was a Philadelphia Quaker farmer and botanist who had been corresponding with botanists in England and on the Continent. Franklin proposed that this academy be called “The American Philosophical Society.” It was to be patterned after the Royal Society of London, in which only nineteen Americans held membership.

The new American Philosophical Society was established in Philadelphia in 1746. The first twenty years were difficult. Interest languished in the face of other tasks facing members in the new nation. However, when a younger group of Philadelphians challenged A.P.S. by establishing a rival group, stalwarts of the original group responded by activating the Society, electing Franklin president, merging with the new group and staging an event of international significance. On 18 April 1768, members gathered to observe Venus over the sun. They published a tract on this viewing, with a list of members present, to other international societies of learning.

The members of the American Philosophical Society took seriously the roots of the word “philosophy” or filo sofo, which means love of knowledge. Knowledge was considered as it had been defined in the Scientific Age, and developed by the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Knowledge was a growing body of empirical findings, and it was especially worthy of pursuit if it could contribute to the well-being of mankind. The program of the American Philosophical Society was not speculative, nor prone to discussion of the relative issues which concerned the social sciences.

Purpose

In 1780, the six committees of A.P.S. well demonstrated the delineation of the Society’s concerns. The committees were:

1. geography, mathematics, natural philosophy and astronomy
2. medicine and anatomy
3. natural history and chemistry
4. trade and commerce
5. mechanics and architecture
6. husbandry and American improvements^[2]Gilbert Chinard, “The American Philosophical Society and the World of Science (1768-1800),” Proceedings Vol. 87, no. 1, 1943, p. 8. [For the present-day delineation, See “Classes … Continue reading

This list reflects the intentions of the Society as they were stated a century later in the first issue of their journal, Transactions, which said,

Knowledge is of little use, when confined to mere speculation: but when speculative truths are reduced to practice, when theories grounded on experiments, are applied to common purposes of life; and when by these agriculture is improved, trade enlarged, the arts of living made more easy and comfortable, and, of course, the increase and happiness of man promoted; knowledge then becomes really useful.^[3]Ibid.

Thus, during the tenure of Benjamin Franklin’s presidency of the Society, from 1769 through 1790, members of A.P.S. corresponded with each other on the description and improvement of newly discovered plants and minerals, cartography, methods of distillation and rendering fruit juices, mechanical inventions, animal breeding and other “philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasure of Life.”^[4]A Brief History of the American Philosophical Society,” Yearbook, 1988 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1988), p. 398.

International Participation

A view of the membership of the early days of A.P. S. shows the strong connections the American Philosophical Society had with the rest of the world. Original members of A.P.S. came from Scotland, England, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Italy, France, Barbados, and other countries.^[5]Gilbert Chinard, “The American Philosophical Society and the World of Science,” p. 1. In 1768, the year that they observed Venus over the sun, there were twenty-one foreign members listed on the report.^[6]Ibid, p. 5. The following year a Russian member was added. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin solicited several French members. It was true that Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had both served in diplomatic posts in France, and she was a strong ally of the colonists during the Revolution. Yet Gilbert Chinard points out that French members were not preponderant in the Society, as J.G. Rosengarten had held in his paper of 18 April 1907.^[7]Ibid, p. 1.

Indeed, of the fifty-five new foreign members elected between 1771 and 1789, just nineteen were French. Between 1786 and 1793 there were sixty-one new foreign members, with twenty-one being French, and twenty-seven being British.^[8]Ibid, p. 4. This clearly proves that science transcended politics, and the world of the intelligentsia followed its agenda in spite of the political strife associated with separation from Great Britain and the creation of a bold new, liberal form of government which had failed in France. The interests of the American Philosophical Society were scientific; its members collaborated in the “republic of the mind.”^[9]Ibid, p. 1. This is a reference to a quote by Abbe Longuerue in 1694.

Foreign members sent specimens, manuscripts, and books for the infant society and its new library. André Michaux served thirty years without pay as the agent of A.P.S. in Europe. Marquis de Lafayette urged his friends to contribute to the new society in America. Enthusiasts of the Enlightenment followed cultural advancements in the new society and generously supported the efforts of American leaders to erect institutions which made possible the realization of their mutual ideas.

A Busy Agenda

For foreigners and Americans alike, there was an exciting gamut of work to be done in the realm of the practical sciences. There was new flora and fauna in America to find, report, and classify. There was land to discover, describe, and paint. There were many Indian tribes with various languages, customs, and characteristics to observe, note, draw, and analyze. For instance, Clark Wissler points out that over 1500 languages were spoken in America by native peoples previously unknown to Europeans. He states that scholars approached anthropology first from a linguistic perspective, then used a comparative anatomical method, followed by archaeological concepts of stratigraphy and, finally, pursued an ethnographic approach.^[10]Clark Wissler, “The American Indian and the A.P.S.,” Proceedings Vol. 86, No. 1, Sept. 1942, p. 189.

Leaders in A.P.S. were also eminent contributors to the intellectual advancement of the new nation. They worked to create schools, libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and networks between each other for educational advancement in the United States at the turn of the century. Of course, there was Benjamin Franklin, who had received an award from the Royal Society of Great Britain for his work in electricity. He was the first president and founder of A. P. S. Charles Willson Peale, an active member of A.P.S., was an artist and historian who created a museum (see Peale’s Museum) out of his large private collection of natural history.

New schools had to be created to advance learning in the colonies. Harvard College began early, in 1620. By 1791, the University of Pennsylvania Medical School was started. Soon after, a New York magazine called Medical Repository was published by Samuel Latham Mitchell, a physician and the fourth president of A.P.S.

Notable Members

The Philadelphia society’s members were educated men who manifested their high interest in the practical philosophy of the period with productive and creative actions. Benjamin Smith Barton was a practicing physician, botanist, and natural historian who wrote Elements of Biology and played an active part in A.P.S. Andrew Ellicott, an astronomer and A.P.S. member, prepared Meriwether Lewis to take celestial observations with a sextant, in order to calculate latitude and longitude on his expedition to the lands beyond the upper reaches of the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Caspar Wistar, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was interested in ethnography and paleontology, and corresponded frequently with Thomas Jefferson. David Rittenhouse, second president of A.P.S., was a disciple of Newton and presented papers in physics to the Society. Thomas Nuttall and Andre Michaux were outstanding botanists.^[11]John Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press. 1984), passim. Nuttall demonstrated his curiosity by venturing up the Missouri River with the Astorians in 1811 to collect new samples on the first leg of their journey west. George Washington, first president of the new republic, was a member of A.P.S. He, along with many other society members, was solicited by Jefferson to contribute to a fund established to send Michaux west in 1793 to explore the vast unknown area by land to the Pacific Ocean, and look for the fabled Northwest Passage. This aborted venture was a full decade before the Lewis and Clark Expedition was successfully launched toward the same ends.^[12]Roy E. Appleman, Lewis and Clark (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1975), pp. 21-23.

Scholars in Boston emulated the Philadelphia example, especially when John Adams reported that Boston was superior in every way to its southern rival, except that it lacked a scientific society. Delaware’s society began at the turn of the century and touted superiority for its revolutionary act of including learned women. Soon the mood for societies of learning spread to the hinterlands, and Cincinnati boasted a society of learning. A dictate of the time was to acquire knowledge and advance the useful arts for man’s learning, happiness and comfort of life. As shown in Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society, the primary exponent for the improvability of man in an ambiance of freedom and opportunity was Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson’s Membership

The coincidence of the birth of the American Philosophical Society and the birth of Thomas Jefferson in the year 1743 is a poetic stroke of time for Enlightenment ideas. If America was the fruition of Plato’s “heavenly city” in the happy realization of the ideal of the Age of Enlightenment, as Brooke Hindle asserts,^[13]Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-89 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1956). then most certainly, Jefferson would be its Plato.

Jefferson was elected to membership in A.P.S. in 1779 with George Washington, François Barbé-Marbois (Secretary to the French Embassy), John Jay, John Adams, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben of the U.S. Army, and other dignitaries. In his forty-seven years of membership in A.P.S., he is considered to be second in importance to none, not even Franklin. He had always corresponded and communicated with men of learning. A political philosopher, but not at all an economist, Jefferson was catholic and cosmopolitan in his perspective. Certainly, he was ambitious to diffuse knowledge. This catholic perspective and desire to spread knowledge were mutual concerns of Thomas Jefferson and of the American Philosophical Society.

Jefferson was the third President of the United States (1800–1808) and third president of the American Philosophical Society (1797–1815). Upon his election to the latter, Jefferson wrote in 1797, that it was,

. . . the most flattering incident of my life, and that to which I am the most sensible. . . [I have] no qualification for this distinguished Post, but an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind, that it may at length reach the extremes of Society, beggars, and kings . . . “^[14]Gilbert Chinard, “Jefferson and the A.P.S.,” Proceedings Vol. 87, No. 3, p. 264, 267.

He was a Councillor of A.P.S. from 1781 through 1785, Vice President from 1791 through 1794, President from 1797 through 1815, and a Councillor again from 1815 through 1826, the year of his death. Thus, one can see his almost constant leadership of the Society from his initiation to it until his death. Jefferson had attended few meetings and had retired from office to devote his time to Monticello, when Rittenhouse, the second president of A.P.S., died. Yet Jefferson’s leadership was again solicited.

Instructions for Lewis

Jefferson’s keen interest in accumulating knowledge about America’s aboriginal people is evident in his listing of known tribes of the American Indian in Notes on Virginia.^[15]Ibid, p. 133–150. His letter of instructions to Meriwether Lewis before the Lewis and Clark Expedition demonstrates President Jefferson’s range of interests as well as his thorough administrative capacity. The concerns of “the most ingenious and curious men” in A.P.S. are evident as he wrote on 20 June 1803.

The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knolege (sic) of those people important. You will therefore endeavor to make yourself acquainted, as far as a diligent pursuit of your journey shall admit, with the names of the nations & their numbers;
the extent & limits of their possessions;
their relations with other tribes of nations;
their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these;
their food, clothing, & domestic accommodations;
the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use;
moral & physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know;
peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions;
and articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent.

And, considering the interest which every nation has in extending & strengthening the authority of reason & justice among the people around them, it will be useful to acquire what knolege you can of the state of morality, religion, & infirmation among them; as it may better enable those who may endeavor to civilize & instruct them, to adapt their measure to the existing notions & practices of those on whom they are to operate.”^[16]Ibid, p. 310.

Jefferson’s careful instructions reflect his desire to accumulate as much knowledge as possible for the practical purposes of commerce, science, and national interests. His methodology mirrors that of the American Philosophical Society, and, in fact, they are one in this endeavor. Jefferson deposited all of the Lewis and Clark journals at his disposal in the archives of the American Philosophical Society where they remain. All of the rich material on Indian ethnography collected by the captains is in Philadelphia at the American Philosophical Society. This includes voluminous notes taken at the Fort Mandan at the Knife River Villages in North Dakota where the party wintered in 1804–5, at Fort Clatsop, Oregon where they wintered in 1805–6, and at the Long Camp where they spent a month in the spring of 1806 at Kamiah, Idaho, awaiting the melting of snow on the Bitterroot Mountains.

Conclusion

The American Philosophical Society and Thomas Jefferson were products of the Enlightenment. The purposes of the Society were primarily scientific and not speculative. Its members were held together by their devotion to ideas and the development of science. Jefferson’s concerns always embraced those of the A.P.S. These were evident in his only book, Notes on Virginia, his management of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, his personal activities as a gentleman farmer at Monticello, and his leadership in the Society itself.