Benjamin Smith Barton

Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815) at 37 years of age was the youngest of the five members of the American Philosophical Society to whom Jefferson referred Lewis. Barton expressed an interest, were his health sufficient, in accompanying Lewis at least part of the way. Initial promise but ultimate failure to fulfill exemplified Barton’s role in the history of the expedition and in other projects he contemplated.

His credentials were impressive. He was vice-president of the APS and an active contributor to its Transactions. His Elements of Botany, the first such text in the country, was just off the press. The second edition of his book, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1798), published a few years earlier, had deduced—from word-similarities—an Asian origin of native American peoples. For fourteen years he had been teaching botany, natural history and especially materia medica at the medical school. The last course, dealing with the substances of practice, was required of all medical students. Those who studied natural history with Barton were likely to become enthusiastic for the subject.

Jefferson’s Trust

Barton had the trust of Jefferson, to whom he had dedicated his book on languages, and for whom he had named a plant. Barton’s standing with his contemporaries in Philadelphia and Edinburgh was less secure. Alexander Wilson and especially Charles Willson Peale accused him of concealing sources of his work. Peale was mistaken in supposing that specimens of Swedish birds intended for the Peale Museum had been appropriated by Barton–the shipment simply had been delayed. Still, perhaps because of Barton’s failure to forward another item–a waxwork–explicitly intended for the museum, Peale did not revise his accusation that Barton “never scrupled to take the feathers of others to enrich his own plumage.”^[2]See Lillian B. Miller, ed., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983-2000), 5:420-24 and 515n. It does appear that on at least two occasions Barton published as his own the observations and discoveries of others. One was the plant commonly known as twinleaf, which André Michaux (1746-1802) had found in Virginia and brought back to John Bartram for his garden. Barton saw it there, made drawings of it and, perhaps on the presumption that having recognized it as a new genus he could claim the privilege of naming it, did so: Jeffersonia diphylla.^[3]Jeanette E. Graustein, “The Eminent Benjamin Smith Barton,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 85 (1985), 423-438. The American Philosophical Society commissioned Michaux, … Continue reading

Having in distinguished fashion nearly completed his studies for the medical degree at Edinburgh, and honored by election as one of the four annual presidents of the Royal Medical Society, he abruptly left—without his degree but with funds of the Society that were repeatedly sought but never returned. The question of whether and where he obtained a degree remained a mystery until records obtained by the APS in 1970 yielded a diploma dated 31 August 1796 from Christian-Albrechts University at Kiel. That date was seven years after Barton’s confession to Benjamin Rush that he had no medical degree, but only three months after Barton’s letter to a German colleague asking help in procuring it. In the letter Barton claimed a degree “from an university which, I confess, I do not much respect,” a condescension that does not accord with the non-selectivity of the request.^[4]Whitfield J. Bell, “Benjamin Smith Barton, M.D.,” Journal of the History of Medicine 26, (1971), 197-203.

Jefferson may well have expected that Lewis’s initial contacts with Barton would have opened up the resources in natural history then available in Philadelphia–for instance in the persons of William Bartram, Charles Willson Peale and Bernard McMahon. But that seems not to have occurred. As open as colleagues’ resources were to Barton–William Bartram was a generous fount of information–his were closed to them. Barton’s old friend Muhlenberg complained of his reluctance to share, mystified that while he has twice shown Barton his herbarium, Barton had never shown his.^[5]Graustein, 431. On the other hand, Barton did thank Bartram effusively in the introduction to Elements of Botany, but his reference to Bartram’s “original genius, and unaspiring science” neglects Bartram’s formal credentials: elected to APS at the age of 28, and the author of a book on natural history (1792) that made him “one of the most widely read American authors in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”^[6]Robert M. Peck, “Barton, Benjamin Smith.” American National Biography Online. Accessed July 8, 2003.

Finally, most important for the history of the scientific accomplishments of the expedition, its first plant specimens were consigned to Barton’s care. As Moulton notes, from this point began “the disassembling of the collection.”^[7]Moulton, Journals, 12:3. The scattered plant specimens were largely recovered, but the natural history volume promised by Barton was never forthcoming. Though Barton was not solely at fault, he contributed to the delay in publishing that allowed others to “carr(y) off the honors that belong by right to Lewis and Clark.”^[8]Elliott Coues, as quoted in David Freeman, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 260.

In 1803, the Woodlands, the country estate and botanical garden of William Hamilton, had as its gardener a young man who had come from Germany in 1799—Frederick Traugott Pursh. In the dozen years he spent in the United States he was employed by some of the country’s leading botanists, including William Bartram, Bernard McMahon and Benjamin Smith Barton.

Under Barton’s sponsorship Pursh made two botanical explorations in 1806-07, and planned to provide the illustrations and descriptions for the natural history volume Barton was to provide for the Lewis and Clark specimens. Barton’s dilatoriness in providing for his needs—Pursh had become progressively more desperate, failing to find letters from Barton forwarding funds for sustenance—perhaps prompted Pursh to conclude that the volume was unlikely to be forthcoming. In any case, he left Barton, working first in Philadelphia with McMahon, who also had specimens from the Expedition, and then moving to New York. After two expeditions to the West Indies, he left for England, carrying with him the materials he had gathered and some of the specimens from the Lewis and Clark Expedition that Clark had given him to classify.

To the dismay of American naturalists, the resulting treatise describing and depicting 130 of Lewis’s specimens was published in Europe. Pursh made no attempt to disguise his indebtedness to the work of the two explorers, but on the other hand made no effort to return the specimens he had carried away. He returned to North America—to Montreal—in 1816, where a fire destroyed materials he had collected for a projected volume on the flora of Canada. He died in poverty at age 46.