Deep History, Deep South

During the 1830s, slavery shaped the practice, patronage, and application of geology in America. Plantation slavery—and the labor, patronage, and networks it provided—enabled collections and observations that defined the Gulf South’s geohistory while emerging geotheories inspired new means of justifying and furthering slavery. Slavery allowed Charles and Sarah Tait to offer patronage and recognition to northeastern naturalists, excavate and package the fossils needed to characterize the Gulf South’s geohistory, and circulate specimens and data through the networks built around the cotton trade. Rush Nutt drew on uniformitarian geotheory to legitimate African American slavery and proposed new geo-engineering techniques that would encourage the expansion of plantation agriculture. These case studies suggest some of the ways that slavery and science strengthened each other in the early United States.

Violence, Competition, and Exchange in the Early Colonial Era

This chapter examines natural knowledge among natives and newcomers from the 1500s to the mid-1700s. It suggests that European-Indian encounters generated new knowledge, patronage relationships, and webs of exchange that affected intellectual life among both groups. The chapter includes sections on conquistadors in sixteenth-century Florida, patronage networks in Florida’s mission communities, cartography and the Indian slave trade, and the networks through which Europeans and Indians exchanged specimens and commodities. In short, Europeans and natives valued knowledge and the experts who produced it as sources of power and, from the 1500s through the 1700s, learned about their mutually new world during encounters involving violence, geopolitical competition, and exchange.

Ethnography and Intelligence in the Time of Conquest

This chapter analyzes ethnographic writings about and by the diverse peoples of the Gulf South in the early 1800s. It argues that ethnography in the United States developed amid the encounters brought about by U.S. imperialism and defined contested hierarchies of mental ability that Anglo-Americans used to legitimate their supremacy. Many Anglo-Americans performed ethnographic observations during and after the United States’ conquest of the Gulf South that seemed to reinforce the hypothesis that nonwhites had inherently inferior brains and could never achieve equality in the nation’s political and intellectual communities. However, blacks, natives, creoles, and even a few Anglo-Americans used ethnography to challenge the new order that U.S. rule was making, and they tended to favor the increasingly old-fashioned perspective that all men were created equal.

The Significance of the Frontier in American Knowledge

This chapter introduces the history of knowledge in the Gulf South and why it matters to American intellectual history on the whole. It also presents the book’s main argument, which is that encounters in America’s borderlands shaped the production, circulation, and application of natural knowledge within these contested regions and, more broadly, throughout the empires and nations competing for them. The expansion of European powers and the United States were the primary motors that drove these encounters. Between the 1500s and the mid-1800s, Spanish, British, French, and U.S. imperialism brought hitherto unconnected individuals, nations, and environments into intellectually productive (though often physically destructive) contact. These expansion-instigated encounters, moreover, resulted in new material, social, and political circumstances that influenced how people created and shared natural knowledge.

How the West Was Known

Although the Second Seminole War marked the effective end of the Gulf South as a borderland, encounters instigated by imperialism in the Southwest continued to affect the pursuit of knowledge in America. The rise of the Smithsonian Institution and the extension of U.S. governance into the West were interrelated processes: territorial expansion influenced the Smithsonian’s foundational mandate and early activities, while the Smithsonian organized, facilitated, and patronized an array of expansion-promoting scientific projects in collaboration with federal officials. The relationship between the conquest of the Southwest and the emergence of the Smithsonian reflects that violence, competition, exchange, and encounters with the environment and history were still inextricable from knowledge production at both the local and imperial levels.

Knowledge, Weakness, and Narrative in the Late Eighteenth Century

This chapter covers intellectual life among European, native, and African-descended peoples in the Gulf South from the 1760s to the 1790s. Spain had sovereignty from Florida to Louisiana during this period, yet Spaniards were also one of many groups in the region that were too weak to control the flow of information or reliably benefit from it. The chapter’s first two sections analyze how Spanish officials struggled to understand the region and use its resources to bolster imperial power. The three following cases concern, respectively, the trial of enslaved blacks accused of poisoning an overseer, the efforts of a Florida planter to control the circulation of botanical knowledge, and a mineralogical expedition in which a Hitchiti Indian shaped scientific knowledge through monster stories. All of these individuals packaged knowledge in narratives that reflected and perpetuated the crossing of cultural boundaries.

Skulls, Scalps, and Seminoles

This chapter focuses on the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and how whites and natives both developed new knowledge about the Seminoles as a unique ethnic group through violence against each other’s dead. On the one hand, Euro-Americans looked to native skulls to add scientific legitimacy to assertions that the Seminoles were a clearly defined ethnicity whose supposed predisposition for violence and lack of ancestral bonds to Florida justified their removal. On the other hand, the collection and circulation of white scalps strengthened the Seminoles’ understanding of themselves as a distinct people and allowed them to rebuild complete communities—ones that integrated the living, the multiethnic dead, and Floridian land—despite the trauma of the war.

Astronomy and U.S. Expansion in the Lower Mississippi Valley

U.S. expansion into the lower Mississippi Valley from 1795 to 1810 evinced and inspired many of the ways that officials and experts in the early United States used astronomy to promote territorial growth. Yet Anglo-Americans did not simply export scientific practices to the United States’ new territories. Peaceful and violent encounters among Spaniards and Anglos, masters and slaves, inhabitants and administrators, and whites and Indians all shaped the practice of astronomy in the Gulf South and, moreover, influenced how astronomy and imperialism overlapped in the United States on the whole. Geopolitical competition motivated the work of the Spanish and U.S. commissions of the Florida boundary survey (1798–1800), violence against slaves enabled astronomers like William Dunbar to perform disciplined observations, and interimperial exchanges of data made José Joaquín de Ferrer y Cafranga a prominent figure in the United States’ scientific community.

Allegiance, Identities, and National Scientific Communities

This chapter studies how individuals in the lower Mississippi Valley fashioned identities as men of science. It focuses on the 1790s to the 1810s, an era when several empires and other groups competed for power in the region. Local experts tried to benefit from circulating information among a variety of actual and potential patrons, and, in the process, they manipulated and blurred the boundaries between the United States’ scientific community and those of other polities competing for the borderlands. The chapter includes case studies of the Spanish naturalist and spy Thomas Power, the Scottish planter and astronomer William Dunbar, and the French engineer and slave trader Barthélémy Lafon. Their stories reveal how territorial expansion both added to, and exacerbated deep tensions within, the United States’ scientific community.