by Andrea Wulf
Animals, plants and their environment were in an equilibrium, Madison realized, and brilliantly linked these ideas to Priestley’s and Ingenhousz’s theories of plant respiration. Animals respired air that was “unfitted for their further uses,” he explained, but plants reversed the process. If the “whole class of vegetables were extinguished,” Madison concluded, animals would not survive, as they were dependent upon each other. The “economy of nature,” Madison told the members of the Agricultural Society, was an “admirable arrangement” and a “beautiful feature.” Never before had an American so vividly explained how to learn from nature.
Having established the principle of the balance of nature, Madison now added a Malthusian flavor. Having just read Malthus’s three volumes on the limits of the growth of populations—which included his famously gloomy prediction that human populations would grow faster than their food supply—Madison asserted that, left alone, nature guarded against “excessive multiplication” of one species over another. Overcrowding of one species always resulted in its eventual reduction through epidemics and the demise of its food supply and habitat. Enter man, Madison said, and the equation changed dramatically. Man had increased certain plants and animals—crops and livestock—“beyond their natural amount,” thereby tipping the scales toward his own advantage. The danger was that it could also swing the other way.
Today, Madison’s thoughts on nature’s balance and ecology are all but forgotten, but at the time his approach was radically new. Decades before Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau called for the protection of America’s nature, Madison warned about man’s destructive force. The preservation of the environment was essential for the survival of mankind, Madison believed, not so much in order to live in romantic harmony with nature but to live off it without destroying it. The reasons were economic rather than idealistic, but the goal was the same.
Madison ended his speech by discussing what he believed to be man’s most calamitous error: “the excessive destruction of timber.” What was left of the woodlands had to be preserved, he insisted, and what was destroyed had to be replanted. Early colonists had regarded trees with “antipathy” and had seen the forest as “the great obstacle to their settlement,” but this attitude needed to change, Madison explained—it was essential to deal with it now. He was not the first to worry about the destruction of trees and to articulate ideas about forest conservation, but he was the first politician (albeit a retired one) to make a public speech about it, and it was this aspect of his address more than any other that seems to have had the most impact. Until this point there had been isolated voices in America, but the discussion had never strayed beyond the realm of private letters and conversations. Madison lifted it onto the public stage, bringing together opinions of friends, acquaintances and writers into one concerted plea, arguing his case with the best possible evidence.
Although there were only some thirty people in the audience that day, Madison’s visionary call for change was published as a pamphlet and in major newspapers across the country, as well as in the journals of other agricultural societies. Over the next year every enlightened farmer in the United States of America read Madison’s Address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, and dozens of letters arrived at Montpelier from across the United States and Europe.
“I see, after a long night of darkness & obscurity, the Dawn of agricultural Light & Prosperity,” the Pennsylvania farmer and agricultural writer Richard Peters wrote after reading Madison’s Address. A London bookseller inquired if he could publish a British edition of it and the Portuguese minister in America, José Corrèa de Serra—a talented naturalist and friend of Madison and Jefferson—was sure that Madison’s words would “produce the same sensation” in Europe as Jefferson’s innovative and award-winning moldboard had done. Richard Rush, the American minister in London, forwarded the pamphlet to John Sinclair, the former president of the British Board of Agriculture, and it was also deposited at the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Madison did not see nature through a romantic lens of transcendent beauty but as a fragile ecological system that could be easily destroyed by mankind. As such the origin of the notion of conservation arguably lies not, as generally assumed, in the mid-nineteenth century with Henry David Thoreau or George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864)—a publication that has been hailed as the beginning of the environmental movement—but in the previous century with men like John Bartram and the founding fathers. Already in 1737 Bartram had written about the “wonderfull order and balance that is maintain’d between ye vegetable and Animal Oeconomy,”12 and a decade later lamented that “timber will soon be very much destroyed.” By the early 1760s, he mourned the disappearance of animals and increasing scarcity of trees “as most of ye land is cleared.” Benjamin Franklin expressed the same sentiment when he talked of the “loss for wood”—and as always he tried to tackle the problem with a practical solution, designing the fuel-efficient Pennsylvania fireplace in order to reduce timber consumption. Similarly, Washington had complained that “the waste which has been committed on my timber and Wood hitherto, has really been shameful” while Jefferson had written to his overseer that “we must use a good deal of economy in our wood.”
Within their own lifetime attitudes to woodlands had been slowly changing, reflecting the progress the country had made from being mere colonies that served Britain to becoming a strong independent nation. As the colonies became the United States, and as settlers became patriots, trees that had been regarded as obstacles were now imbued with patriotic pride. In the 1750s, the twenty-year-old John Adams had still hoped that the forests would be removed and boasted that the country had been transformed from “dismall Wilderness” to cornfields and laden fruit trees. Three decades later, as he negotiated with Britain and France after the victorious War of Independence, he wrote to Abigail, with palpable concern, “Pray dont let a Single Tree be cutt” when she had purchased a grove that he admired—“I would not part with it, for Gold.” A decade later, in the summer of 1796, Adams recorded in his diary that the villagers who had stripped an ancient walnut tree of its bark to use as dye had “murdered” it. Similarly, Madison complained to a visitor that in his forests “Great depredations are committed” by neighboring tanners who left his trees naked when they scoured the forest for bark, which they needed for the manufacturing of leather, while Jefferson had been shocked about the felling of trees in Washington, D.C.13
These isolated concerns about American trees became stronger with increasing deforestation. People had initially believed that axing America’s wilderness into fields had improved its climate, as summers apparently became cooler and winters less harsh. Hugh Williamson, for example—one of the delegates who had visited Bartram’s garden during the Constitutional Convention—had, in 1770, told the members of the American Philosophical Society that forests created an air “charged with a gross putrescent fluid,” creating a desperately unhealthy atmosphere for mankind. As the new century dawned, however, opinions were slowly changing. Where Williamson had believed that “Every friend to humanity must rejoice” in the advantages gained from cultivation, Jefferson’s and Adams’s old revolutionary friend Benjamin Rush traced the increasing number of sick people in Philadelphia to “the cutting down of wood.” He advised that more trees should be planted for they “absorb unhealthy air, and discharge a highly purified air.”14
Three decades later, some Americans had become so worried about the destruction of the native flora that they felt the need to collect and preserve them. Madison had called for “plantations of the trees” in his Address and four years previously, in 1814, William Thornton had written to Madison that he feared that “by clearing Lands, whole Families of plants are likely to be lost.” To safeguard them, America needed a national botanic garden, he insisted, knowing that Madison had long supported the idea. Yet the country had not been ready for such drastic measures—all four founding fathers had tried
, but failed, to establish a botanic garden in Washington, D.C., during their presidencies. In a twist of irony, it was only in the year after Madison retired that Congress gave the charter to the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences to create a five-acre garden at the foot of Capitol Hill.
“Our stately forests are a national treasure,” a lone voice had declared after the War of Independence, “deserving the solicitous care of the patriotic philosopher and politician”—but nothing had been done. It would take until the 1870s for the first national park to be created. But in terms of conservation Madison made the first step by preserving some of his own forest. Proud of his very own piece of conservation propaganda, which proved that he “had been at great pains to preserve some fine trees,” as one visitor enthused, he always ensured that tours of Montpelier featured this part of the estate. At the same time Madison remained a plantation owner who had to turn a profit, and to do so he continued to fell trees to bring new fields into cultivation. But today the James Madison Landmark Forest—a stately, 200-acre deciduous forest of soaring tulip poplars, hickories and several species of oak—still stands as a testimony to his vision.
Madison’s Address that day in May 1818 didn’t turn Americans into innovative farmers and environmentalists overnight. Many Americans, as one English traveler observed in 1820, continued to regard every acre wrestled from the wilderness as “a conquest of civilized man over uncivilized nature.” But attitudes did gradually change. Ten years after Madison’s Address, the members of the new Horticultural Society in New York were asked to ensure “the preservation and the culture of plants indigenous to our soil.” Native American plants were now under the “guardianship” of the people. In the same year the naturalist John James Audubon yearned for the time when Ohio’s forests had been “unmolested by the axe of settlers.” By 1832 the North American Review reported that “a better taste is growing among us” since increasing numbers of Americans had begun to agree that their forests were worthy of protection and celebration. “Our forests offer us treasures, such as few lands can rival,” the article continued.
By the 1830s Madison’s rallying call was reverberating across the country, and writers were calling for the “necessity of economizing” and protecting what was left. “Wherever they [trees] perish, the earth suffers,” the North American Review declared. In the same year the New York Daily Commercial Advertiser published a letter from the painter George Catlin, calling for “A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty.”
By this time, of course, the revolutionary generation had gone but they had left a legacy that continues to this day. Not only did they create the United States in a political sense, they had also understood the importance of nature for their country. The American landscape, forests, soil and plants made the nation. Nature was the backbone to her economy, feeding, clothing and sheltering the people. The United States was a republic of farmers, and the opening of the West extended the vision of an agrarian people across a whole continent. At the same time the vast landscapes and stately forests became monuments of the country’s national identity.
With the maturing of the country from thirteen colonies to a strong and confident United States, the perception of the landscape changed dramatically, from an aversion to the wilderness to a patriotic celebration of it and concern for its preservation. Where once productivity had been the only measure, now nature was also appreciated for its sublime magnificence. At the same time, all over America, farmers were mixing manure and using the same methods of crop rotation that the founding fathers had pioneered, and those in the new states of Tennessee and Ohio were breaking the fertile earth with improved ploughs. As new cities were founded in the West, the gardens of Memphis, Indianapolis and Cincinnati abounded with ornamental and edible plants, plucked from the riches of American soil. Andrew Jackson Downing, the most influential American garden writer of the nineteenth century, advocated native flora and suburban “country” living for city dwellers, as well as suggesting that the Washington Monument on the Mall in the capital be surrounded by a grove of “American trees, of large growth”—an appropriately arboreal symbol to celebrate their greatest hero.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have seen and continue to see the founding fathers’ gardens today. As they walk through the groves and shrubberies that are planted with native species and see ornamental landscapes that incorporate experimental vegetable plots, agricultural elements and the forest, they can still experience the revolutionary ideas of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison. The founding fathers’ vision is indelibly imprinted onto their estates. In no other country, one magazine reported in 1819, would heads of state return to their private lives to promote agriculture, botany and other useful sciences that add “to the welfare of their country and of mankind in general.” Only in America “we have witnessed, and still witness, such examples in the retired lives of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison.”
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1 Like Jefferson, Madison shared his plants with fellow gardeners and botanists, sending for example seeds of the Osage orange to José Corrèa de Serra, the Portuguese minister in America.
2 There had been several reasons for war—Britain had imposed yet more trade restrictions as well as supporting the Native Americans in their fight against western expansion. If the United States wanted to continue to push the Western frontier, they had to oust the British from Canada (from where they supported and supplied the Native Americans). But taking Canada had turned out to be more difficult than many had predicted and by autumn 1814 the Capitol and the White House were nothing more than torched shells. The war had ended in 1815 with the United States winning some decisive battles but no new territories.
3 This prosperous time only lasted until the Panic of 1819, the first major financial crisis in the United States, during which banks failed, harvests rotted in barns, farmers were forced to sell their lands and the burgeoning manufacturing industry collapsed.
4 Bizet must have had some experience with such earthmoving garden schemes because he had injured himself during a previous employment by “blowing a rock.”
5 With the accelerated pace of Enclosure Acts during the second half of the eighteenth century, the poor in Britain had become even poorer. As increasing numbers of cottagers had lost the use of the commons, they couldn’t keep livestock to subsidize their meager incomes.
6 Plantation owners in the West Indies were also improving slave villages by following British agricultural books. In the West Indies, one of the reasons was an increased concern about slave health—with the end of the slave trade, slaves had become a more valuable commodity. There was also a greater worry about security, exacerbated by a slave revolt in the 1820s.
7 Throughout his retirement, Madison gradually sold off his slaves to pay back some debts, reducing their number by nearly two-thirds by the time he died in 1836, but he didn’t free a single one in his will.
8 Another side to this argument was the “diffusion” theory, in which Madison and Jefferson argued that newly admitted states to the Union should be slave states. As slavery was spreading across the expanding United States, they said, the ratio of black to white people would decline (because the slave trade had been abolished). This “diffusion” would therefore ease the tensions between the two races and, Jefferson said, would “dilute the evil.”
9 Earlier in his life Jefferson had been a fierce opponent of slavery. In the 1770s he had drafted a Virginia law that abolished the importation of slaves from Africa, and in the 1780s he suggested banning slavery in the new Northwest territories. He regarded slavery as a stain on the American nation, but at the same time he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that Africans were an inferior race.
10 Seven years after the foundation of the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Madison thought that it did have “a valuable effect in exciting attention”—methods of manuring and “cultivating the soil” had
improved.
11 Madison probably not only read Humphry Davy’s revolutionary Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813), which he had received only a few months previously, but also Erasmus Darwin’s Phytologia (1800), which explained the importance of nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus in plant nutrition. Madison had procured it for a friend and had also, he admitted, “a very unfashionable admiration of Darwin’s poetry,” a publication in which Darwin had turned Linnaeus’s plant classification system into a charming poem.
12 Bartram’s English correspondent Peter Collinson was astounded by the theory, writing that he had never heard anything like it before and that “it Deserved to be read before the Royal Society.”
13 When Jefferson received, however, an essay on forest management that called for “some regulations for the conservation” of timber, he didn’t show any interest—possibly because he disdained a central government that could meddle with local issues of forestry. He was not being honest when he claimed that Virginia had not seen any decline in forests, because only a few months previously he had told Bernard McMahon that the Gloucester hickory nut had almost disappeared from Virginia since the areas where they had grown were “now almost entirely cleared.”
14 Underlying this were Joseph Priestley’s experiments with plants and their release of oxygen. Almost prophetically, Franklin remarked on the restorative power of plants in 1772, “I hope this will give some check to the rage of destroying trees that grow near houses, which has accompanied our late improvements in gardening, from an opinion of their being unwholesome.”
