Founding Gardeners

by Andrea Wulf

  Now five “ayes” were needed for the Connecticut Plan to be adopted. Tensions rose as the vote swung first one way, then another. When Virginia was called as the seventh state, all small states had cast their “ayes”—four in total—but this would not be enough. As the largest state, Virginia with Madison as their leader voted a predictable “no.” There were three more states left, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia—all slaveholding states that usually voted with Virginia. In the previous days and weeks they all had stood against the Connecticut Plan.

  North Carolina was called next, and—contrary to all expectations—voted “aye.” There must have been a moment of silence, while the implications of this about-turn were fully registered: with North Carolina’s voting with the small states and not with Virginia, the necessary five “ayes” for the Connecticut Plan had been cast. A compromise had finally been reached and the way for a new Constitution was paved. As much as Madison was frustrated about the outcome of the voting, at least the small states were now prepared to consider his grand vision of a stronger national government. And, as he later admitted during the ratification process, it was the Great Compromise that made the government of the United States unique, because the proportional representation in the House of Representatives made the government “national” while at the same time the distribution of the states’ power in the Senate made it “federal.”

  But the question remains—why did North Carolina’s delegates and Caleb Strong change sides? On the afternoon after the visit to Bartram’s Garden, Strong had warned his colleagues that “If no Accommodation takes place, the Union itself must soon be dissolved,” and North Carolina’s delegates must have realized the same truth: that if the Union was to survive, they had to compromise. The smaller states would have never given all the power to the larger states because they needed at least one house that gave each state equal votes, “as a security for their political existence,” one delegate later explained. Like Strong, Williamson and Martin could only have decided this after their visit to Bartram’s Garden because until then they had always voted against one-state-one-vote in the Senate.

  It can only be speculation that a three-hour walk on a cool summer morning among the United States of America’s most glorious trees and shrubs influenced these men. But what we do know is that the three men who changed sides and made the Great Compromise possible that day had all been there and marveled at what they saw. What we also know is that Massachusetts’s and North Carolina’s switch of vote turned the thirteen states into one nation. The young country was like a growing tree, as one contemporary said, and the “Union is the vital sap that nourishes the tree. If we reject the Constitution … we girdle the tree, its leaves will wither, its branches drop off, and the mouldering trunk will be torn down by the tempest.”

  * * *

  1 Delegates were sent by eleven states, with the exception of Rhode Island, which refused to attend altogether, and New Hampshire, which would send delegates later because they couldn’t afford the travel expenses at this time.

  2 Jefferson and Madison had first met in 1776 and had become friends in 1779 when Jefferson was governor of Virginia and Madison his adviser in the Executive Council.

  3 The delegates were scheduled to meet on 14 May 1787, but it was not until 25 May that a quorum was reached.

  4 Jefferson also kept a weather diary in America because Buffon blamed the climate for the degeneracy. In spring 1784, Jefferson encouraged Madison to do the same and both men continued these records for the rest of their lives.

  5 This was Mather Brown’s portrait of Adams, in which he changed the title to Jefferson Hist. of Virginia.

  6 Apart from his own observations, Jefferson also referred to his botanical books in order to compile this list, which included Carl Linnaeus’s work, Frederick Gronovious’s Flora Virginica and Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary. He might have also included local knowledge about medicinal plants as used by Native American tribes.

  7 Today the pecans in Mount Vernon are the oldest trees on the estate.

  8 Hamilton moved into The Grange in 1802. He created a garden and joked, “A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician.” In December of the same year, he asked Peters for some agricultural and horticultural advice for this new arrangement because “I am as little fitted as Jefferson to guide the helm of the UStates.” Peters’s reply was “Spare no Expence to destroy Weeds … Weeds are the Jacobins of Agriculture. If you do not destroy them, they will certainly ruin you.”

  9 When John Rutledge’s son traveled to France, Jefferson instructed, “I must press on you, my dear Sir, a very particular attention to the climate and culture of the Olive tree.”

  10 It became known as the Connecticut Plan because it had originally been suggested by Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman in June when it had been rejected.

  11 Washington went again on 2 September 1787, two weeks before he returned home to Mount Vernon.

  12 Pak•pv•ku•ce is the Creek word for “flower” and is pronounced pakpak-oci—which William Bartram translated as “flower hunter,” although that would be Pak•pv•ku•ce fayv (pronounced pakpak-oci fa:y-a).

  13 Success came only in the nineteenth century, when the Transcendentalists, inspired by the English romantics, turned to William Bartram’s writing. Henry David Thoreau admired William’s work for its balance of poetry and science and Ralph Waldo Emerson was nudged by Thomas Carlyle in 1851 to discover true American nature writing with “a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it.”

  14 Franklin’s name is missing from the list because he had died a few months before the subscription.

  15 When Washington and Vaughan had first met in Philadelphia in December 1783, they had quickly discovered their shared love for gardens and native species. During the summer of the Convention they met regularly—most certainly discussing the designs and plantings of their gardens. In August (while Washington was still in Philadelphia), Vaughan visited Mount Vernon, drawing a plan of Washington’s new gardens and shrubberies (see this image).

  16 Most plants in the State House Yard had come from the Bartrams. Vaughan had ordered fifty-five species from the nursery and continued to replace dead trees and shrubs from their stock.

  17 In 1803, less than four decades after John and William Bartram had found the tree in Georgia, it was spotted for the last time in the wild. Humphry Marshall described it as Franklinia alatamaha in his Arbustrum Americanum in 1785, crediting William with naming it.

  4

  “PARTIES AND POLITICKS”

  JAMES MADISON’S AND THOMAS JEFFERSON’S TOUR OF NEW ENGLAND

  AS WINTER PASSED the baton to spring and the lilacs readied themselves for their scented bloom, Thomas Jefferson ached for nature. Every week he wrote from Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United States, to his two girls, twelve-year-old Mary and eighteen-year-old Martha, firing questions about the garden in Monticello—when are the peas up, has the manure been put on the beds, which shrubs and flowers are blooming? “I suppose you are busily engaged in your garden,” he wrote to Martha in March 1791, “I expect full details from you on that subject.” Their descriptions were his lifeline to the place he loved more than any other. “Have you noted the first appearance of these things at Monticello?” he asked Mary, before insisting that she record any leaf or blossom that “indicates the approach of spring.” In return he described the awakening of spring in Philadelphia, sending lists of dates, from the leafing of the willows to the blooms of flowering dogwoods.1 He also dispatched rare seeds of beautiful flowers, reminding them to nourish them with their own hands. “I shall envy your occupations in the feilds [sic] and garden,” he wrote to Martha, “while I am shut up drudging within four walls.” He chided and cajoled them to write more regularly, accusing them of being too “lazy” to fulfill his botanical requests. When little Mary failed to report that the frost had killed some fruits, he complained, “I find I have counted too much
on you as a Botanical and zoological correspondent.”2 If he couldn’t be at Monticello, he at least wanted to follow the unfurling of every leaf and the opening of every bud through Martha’s and Mary’s descriptions—it was as close as he could get to being among his blossoming fruit trees or smelling the sweet scent of guelder rose, for he had to stay in Philadelphia where Congress sat.

  When Jefferson had returned to the United States of America from Paris in late 1789 he had found himself appointed secretary of state—a position he had only reluctantly accepted, for all he wanted was to be in Monticello. Much had changed since he had left the country five years previously. Instead of thirteen states that were only loosely connected through the Articles of Confederation, the new Constitution bound the Union together with a strong central government that for the first time could levy taxes and mint money. It was a government that had authority over America’s foreign affairs and regulated commerce between the states. At the same time the Constitution was a framework that allowed—even encouraged—the continuous negotiation between the states and the federal government because “the seeds of amendment,” as George Washington explained by using a horticultural analogy, were “engrafted in the Constitution.” The ravaged country that Jefferson had left behind after the war was slowly recovering. Foreigners admired the “well-cultivated fields” and the “extensive and industrious farming.” Everywhere in the country mills had been built, and in New England small-scale manufacturers thrived, producing cloth, rope and leather.

  Since March 1789 Washington had stood at the helm of the new United States after unanimously being elected as the first president. John Adams, who had returned from London the previous year, was his vice president, Washington’s former aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton was secretary of the treasury, and Madison remained a leading member of Congress. But it was a reluctant coterie: Washington would have preferred to look after his fields and gardens at Mount Vernon, Jefferson would also have happily exchanged his political life with that of a farmer, and Adams hated his office as vice president, which he described, with characteristic hyperbole, as “the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived.” Only Madison and Hamilton seemed to enjoy their political clout.

  Though Madison was painfully shy among strangers, he had emerged as one of the most brilliant legal minds in the United States. Together with Hamilton, he had been instrumental in the long-drawn-out ratification process of the Constitution when they wrote the Federalist Papers—eighty-five essays that explained and defended the new legal framework of the United States.3 But they were an unlikely pair: the pale Madison and the dashingly handsome Hamilton, born the illegitimate son of a West Indian merchant of Scottish origin. Always dressed in black and sickly looking, Madison was almost invisible next to the charming Hamilton, with his penchant for fine tailored coats and brightly colored clothes. But they shared an obsessive work ethic and were known for their almost frenzied determination. Just as Madison had recorded every word of the Constitutional Convention and devoured all the information he could find on theories of governments, Hamilton had a reputation for working ferociously at a relentless pace. The speed with which they churned out the Federalist Papers in the year after the Constitutional Convention was a testimony to their energy and dedication.

  Since the early days of the revolution, the founding fathers had fought together for the future of their country. But in the years since, divisions had slowly begun to form between them that, once hardened, would lead to the formation of the United States of America’s first political parties. Key to their emergence were fundamental differences in what the revolutionary generation believed ought to be the fabric of American society—the dream of a nation of farmers versus the vision of a merchant and trader elite. On the one side were the so-called Federalists such as Hamilton and Adams, who favored a strong central government and commercial links with Britain, and on the other Jefferson’s and Madison’s Republicans, with an emphasis on the rights and powers of states and a promotion of individual liberty.4

  The first fissures appeared in January 1790, when Hamilton as secretary of the treasury introduced a financial strategy that would deal with domestic and international debts, and which favored merchants and speculators as the gatekeepers to a healthy economy. The proposal seemed to have its provenance in Hamilton’s own background. Unlike the landowners Madison and Jefferson, Hamilton had to work as a lawyer to earn a living and had long been part of the mercantile world of New York. With trade in his blood, Hamilton’s idea of the future of the United States of America was unsurprisingly industrial: “The spirit of enterprise,” he said, “be less in a nation of mere cultivators, than in a nation of cultivators and merchants.” An entrepreneurial urban elite, he believed, should be the backbone of America’s society, because the wealth of the country depended on commerce and, crucially, on close trading relationships with Britain.

  The core of Hamilton’s Assumption Plan was to consolidate the separate debts of the thirteen states into one that was to be controlled by the government, making it more powerful than ever before. This would also ensure that the nation’s numerous wealthy merchants would support the new government. When Hamilton announced his intention to place the fiscal levers of the whole country in the hands of the federal government and move the United States of America closer to Britain, Madison publicly denounced the plan, and one of the most inspired political partnerships of the era ended.

  As these divisions appeared, the political landscape changed forever. Today we believe that political parties are the foundation of democratic societies, but most of the revolutionaries thought that their emergence threatened the very existence of republics. Madison had vehemently condemned the division of the republic into two parties, while Adams stressed that there “is nothing which I dread So much.”

  But with the specter of commerce looming over the country, Madison saw no other choice than to fight Hamilton and his vision of America. This shift from fervently defending the idea of a strong central government during the Constitutional Convention to leading an opposition that favored the rights and powers of the individual states might seem like a retraction of Madison’s political beliefs, but when viewed through the lens of agriculture and his background as the son of a Virginia planter, it was a logical position. Madison was not so much opposing a strong government per se but the idea of a mercantile empire bound to Britain (and to merchants that had shackled Virginia tobacco farmers in a spiral of debts before the revolution). The old enemy, Madison said, would put the new nation “in commercial manacles.”

  Madison’s comrade in this battle was his old friend and fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson. Like Madison, Jefferson was dismayed by Hamilton’s financial plans and worried about the fate of agriculture in Hamilton’s world of speculators and “stock-jobbers.” “Wealth acquired by speculation,” Jefferson said, “is fugacious … and fills society with the spirit of gambling.”5 Both Madison and Jefferson defended their vision of the United States of America as an agrarian republic—a country of independent farmers untainted by the corrupting influence of Britain. Botany would play a prominent role in this battle because useful crops would ensure America’s independence and self-sufficiency. Madison insisted that “Experiments for introducing these valuable productions are strongly recommended,” while Jefferson went even further, claiming that the “greatest service which can be rendered any country, is to add an useful plant to it’s culture.” Botany “I rank with the most valuable sciences,” he continued, because it bettered life—culinary, medical, economic and aesthetic.

  Jefferson now sought to apply the agricultural lessons that he had learned in Europe in the United States of America. One example was his effort to change rice cultivation in the South. Ever since the day he had courageously smuggled some grains out of Italy in 1787, Jefferson had believed that upland rice—grown in dry fields instead of flooded paddy fields—would enable southern farmers to leave their malaria-infested swamps and mov
e up onto the healthier plateaus to the west. Every opportunity was therefore explored to procure it. Correspondents from England and the West Indies sent the precious grains, a seven-year-old prince from Cochinchina (part of today’s Vietnam) also promised to provide some, and Jefferson even received rice that Captain William Bligh had managed to bring back to London from his treacherous voyage after the mutiny on the Bounty in the South Pacific.

  In June 1790, in the midst of the disputes over Hamilton’s financial plans, Jefferson planted the prized grains in flowerpots on the windowsills in the house he had rented in New York, where Congress was temporarily meeting. He also gave some to Madison, who forwarded them on to his father with detailed planting instructions and later gave some African rice to William Bartram and to the members of the South Carolina Agricultural Society. More often than not they failed to germinate, but Jefferson never gave up, understanding that “Botany is the school for patience.” If he managed to cultivate one new species out of one hundred that he procured, Jefferson told one of his botanical correspondents, then “the ninety nine found otherwise are more than paid for.” And so he distributed the rice as widely as he could.6

  Now, with the increasing threat of Hamilton’s mercantilism and a nation once again tied to Britain, his botanical projects gained greater urgency. If America’s orchards were laden with fruits and the fields groaning with crops, the country would be wealthy and young men would not be tempted to turn to commerce. As he peered into the little earthen pots to see the first green blades of the rice plants pushing through the soil, his mind was on the propagation of the nation. And though his own rice experiments failed, the seeds that he distributed to the farmers in Georgia flourished. This success, he insisted when judging his services to the country later, was so important that he added it to the same list that also included the Declaration of Independence (as well as the introduction of olive tree saplings).