Thomas Jefferson and the A.P.S.

A Time for Enlightenment

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,^[2]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, however, thought Plato’s hierarchy of social and military function in his creation of an ideal society of the mind was “foggy” and unrealistic. To Thomas Jefferson, Bacon, Locke and Newton were,

. . . the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences, I would wish to form them into a knot on the same canvas, that they may not be confounded at all with the herd of other great men.”^[3]Merrill D. Peterson, ed. The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 435.

This judgment places Jefferson, as well as any other can, within a spectrum of philosophical thought. Since he never wrote a treatise on his philosophy, it must be gleaned from the rich array of his letters, public statements and political treatises. In the above quoted letter to John Trumbull from Paris on 15 February 1789, Jefferson adulated a man of letters, a man of science, and a man of political philosophy, each of whom was a pioneer of thought in his own area. Thomas Jefferson’s selection showed that he embraced Empiricism, wanting experience to prove what exists, except that he clung to remnants of Idealism somewhat in his religious references. Jefferson definitely cannot be classified as a Nihilist. He can most accurately be called a Rationalist because he was a student of the French idealists, and the improvability of man was at the base of his thought. However, the direction of his thinking was able to be realized in a more useful way than that of most of the European revolutionaries of the Enlightenment. Jefferson is a Pragmatist in that he was able to live at a place in a time when he could directly apply his thought to action. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, and he fought for the successful implementation of its Rationalist ideas in a new government where the structures were largely copied from the forms he outlined for his own State of Virginia. He was able to send men out to explore the huge new land west of the colonies for the varied purposes of commerce, science and empire.

Like a true adherent of the new American Philosophical Society, his only book, Notes on Virginia, is a collection of useful facts about his native State. This was first written as a response to questions posed by François Barbé-Marbois while Jefferson was governor of Virginia. Written in 1781, it was offered to the public six years later because of its wide appeal to the scientific field. The book is a compendium of information about observable phenomena in Virginia: boundaries, rivers, mountains, climate, education, population, vegetation, animal life, types of people, including descriptions of Blacks and the problem of slavery, and descriptions of Native American Indians. Jefferson was so interested in classifying information that he included a chart showing the difference between quadrupeds in Europe and America in his book.

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.^[4]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.”^[5]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.

A.P.S. Membership

Jefferson was elected to membership in A.P.S. in 1779 with George Washington, Monsieur 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 . . . “^[6]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.

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.