The Invention of Nature

In 1804 Thomas Jefferson was at the pinnacle of his career. He had written the Declaration of Independence, was the President of the United States and by the end of the year he would win a landslide election, securing his second term. With Jefferson’s recent purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French, the foundation was laid for the nation’s expansion to the west.¹ For a mere US $15 million, Jefferson had doubled the nation’s size, adding more than 800,000 square miles that stretched west from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. Jefferson had also just dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first overland journey across the whole of the North American continent. This expedition brought together all the subjects that interested Jefferson: he had personally briefed the explorers to collect plants, seeds and animals; they were to report on the soils and the agricultural practices of the Native Americans; and they were to survey land and rivers.

Humboldt’s arrival could not have been better timed. The American consul in Cuba, Vincent Gray, had already written to Madison, urging him to meet Humboldt because he had useful information about Mexico, their new southern neighbour since the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory.

Once Humboldt had disembarked in Philadelphia, he and the President exchanged letters, and Jefferson invited Humboldt to Washington. He was excited, Jefferson wrote to Humboldt, because he regarded ‘this new world with more partial hope of its exhibiting an ameliorated state of the human condition’. And so, on 29 May, Humboldt, Bonpland and Montúfar boarded the mail stage in Philadelphia to make their way to Washington, DC, some 150 miles south-west.

The landscape through which they passed was one of well-tended fields with straight lines of crops and scattered farms surrounded by orchards and neat vegetable plots. This was the epitome of Jefferson’s ideas for the economic and political future of the United States: a nation of independent yeomen with small self-sufficient farms.

With the Napoleonic Wars tearing Europe apart, America’s economy was booming because as a neutral nation – at least for the moment – it was shipping much of the world’s goods. American vessels loaded with spices, cocoa, cotton, coffee and sugar zigzagged the oceans from North America to the Caribbean to Europe and to the East Indies. The export markets for their own agricultural produce were also expanding. It seemed that Jefferson was leading the country towards prosperity and happiness.

Yet America had changed in the three decades since the revolution. Old revolutionary friends had fallen out over their different visions for the republic and had turned to vicious partisan fighting. Divisions had arisen over what the various factions believed ought to be the fabric of American society. Should they be a nation of farmers, or one of merchants? There were those, like Jefferson, who envisaged the United States as an agrarian republic with an emphasis on individual liberty and the rights of the individual states, but also those who favoured trade and a strong central government.

Their differences were maybe most vividly expressed in the different designs that had been proposed for the new capital, Washington, DC – the brand-new city that had been wrested from the swampy land and wilderness on the Potomac River. The different parties believed that the capital should reflect the government and its power (or its lack of power). The first President of the United States, George Washington, a proponent of a strong federal government, had wanted a grand capital with sweeping avenues criss-crossing the city, a palatial President’s house and imposing gardens. By contrast, Jefferson and his fellow Republicans had insisted that the central government should have as little power as possible. They preferred a small capital – a rural republican town.

Washington, DC, at the time when Humboldt visited (Illustration Credit 8.2)

Although George Washington’s ideas had prevailed – and on paper the capital looked magnificent – in reality little had been achieved by the time Humboldt arrived in summer 1804. With only 4,500 inhabitants, Washington was about the same size as Jena when Humboldt had first met Goethe there – and not what foreigners associated with the capital of a huge country such as the United States. The roads were in a terrible state, and so littered with rocks and tree stumps that carriages regularly overturned. Red mud stuck to wheels and axles like glue, and anyone who walked risked sinking knee-deep into the ubiquitous puddles.