Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (123 page)

By the early nineteenth century, scientists, under pressure to explain their serene detachment from the world, were strenuously subverting the Enlightenment for the sake, in the words of Dr. Thomas Ewell, of “the dignity of independence and the glory of usefulness” and urging each other to turn their backs on the generalities of European science in the name of American particularities.
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The contemplative and cosmopolitan sciences of the eighteenth century, physics and astronomy, now gave way to the more vital and patriotic sciences of biology and chemistry.

The eighteenth-century abstractions of the Enlightenment no longer seemed relevant. As the Jeffersonian chemist and émigré from England Thomas Cooper declared in 1817, “The days of metaphysical philosophy when the learned argued from generals to particulars . . . are gone by.” Knowledge was acquired from the bottom up and could no longer deal “in abstract propositions” and be the exclusive business of the learned, elevated few; it belonged to everyone and had to enter “into our everyday comforts and conveniences.” Cooper even justified the study of chemistry for its usefulness in the preparing and marinating of food.
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He was not alone in this desire to give chemistry a down-home usefulness, a peculiarly American desire that British critics enjoyed mocking. Jefferson urged Cooper to apply his chemistry “to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider, to fermentation and distillation generally, to the making of bread, butter, cheese, soap, to the incubation of eggs, etc.” John Adams agreed. He told John Gorham, professor of chemistry at Harvard, that chemists ought to forget about “deep discovery” and instead concentrate on giving “us the best possible bread, butter, cheese, wine, beer, and cider.”
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In its search for some sort of foundation in the popular mass, science kept sinking into curiosity-hunting and gimmickry. Charles Willson Peale, despite his devotion to the taxonomic and contemplative majesty of the natural world, nevertheless loved novelties and used all sorts of amusements to attract customers to his museum. He eventually resorted to hiring a popular musical performer who played five different instruments simultaneously, using all parts of his body. Following Peale’s death the museum passed into the enterprising hands of P. T. Barnum, becoming part of his traveling circus—a romantic ending for an Enlightenment institution.

Others too had sought in a good Enlightenment manner to find a taxo-nomic principle under which a multitude of phenomena could be gathered. Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill thought he had discovered an element, which he called septon, that was the cause of decay and of most diseases, including cancer, leprosy, scurvy, and ringworm. But no physician went as far as Dr. Benjamin Rush in seeking the universal theory that would purge medicine of its complexities and mysteries.

Rush had inherited a system of medicine that numbered diseases in the hundreds. Dr. William Cullen, Rush’s teacher in Edinburgh, for example, recorded 1, 387 diseases and remedies. Rush came to equate this complicated array of diseases with the ancien régime of monarchy. He wanted to severely systemize his nosology and create an enlightened medicine that ordinary people would find as reasonable and comprehensible as they found republican government. “It is no more necessary that a patient should be ignorant of the medicine he takes, to be cured by it,” he said, “than that the business of government should be conducted with secrecy, in order to insure obedience to the laws.” If the Old World’s medicine were sufficiently simplified and republicanized, he argued, medicine could be “taught with less trouble than is taken to teach boys to draw, upon paper or slate, the figures of Euclid.” Even nurses and wives could be taught to administer remedies. Rush lectured his students in English, urged an end to the prescribing of medicines and writing of dissertations in the “dead language” of Latin, and even took to prescribing medicines and remedies by direct mail and through the newspapers.

But he let his enlightened reform of medicine get out of hand. Influ-enced by his classmate at Edinburgh John Brown, who had reduced the number of diseases to two, Rush carried the simplification to its ultimate conclusion and reduced all the hundreds of diseases to only one—fever, caused by convulsive tension in the blood vessels. As a good advocate for the Enlightenment, Rush believed that “truth is an unit. It is the same thing in war—philosophy—medicine—morals—religion—and government; and in proportion as we arrive at it in one science, we shall discover
it in others.” Just as there was but one God and one source of sovereignty in government, the people, so, Rush contended, there had to be only one source of disease, with the cure being purging and bleeding.

Rush had acquired much of his reputation as a physician by his heroic participation in the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Despite his courageous devotion to his patients during the epidemic, however, Rush had lost many of them, largely because of his routine bleeding. Rush tended to bleed all his patients regardless of the nature of their illnesses. From consumption to cancer, he treated all diseases by reducing tension through purging and blood-letting. Unfortunately for his patients, he overestimated the amount of blood in the human body. He thought most people had twelve quarts of blood, double the six quarts in the average person. Since he often took from his patients as many as five quarts of blood in a day and a half, it is not surprising that so many of them died. The Federalist journalist William Cobbett termed Rush’s method of bleeding “one of those great discoveries which are made from time to time for the depopulation of the earth.” This became one of the statements that Rush used in his successful suit for libel against Cobbett.
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Rush even came to believe that mental illness was caused by excessive fever in the brain, with bleeding as the remedy. But Rush’s eighteenth-century simplification turned out to be too extreme. Inevitably, many physicians and scientists became disillusioned with such Enlightenment a priori theories, and they reacted by swinging to the opposite extreme, leaving medicine and other sciences drowning in a sea of empiricism and Baconian fact-gathering.
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By the early nineteenth century old-fashioned enlightened scientists were criticized for their “careless flights of fancy” when all they needed was “an accumulation of well ascertained facts”—facts that could be gathered democratically by everyone and that would speak for themselves. Theories did not matter anymore; just gather the facts, and knowledge would automatically emerge. “In composing a work like the present,” said physician James Mease of his
Picture of Philadelphia
(1811), “the author is of opinion that the chief object ought to be the multiplication of facts, and the reflections arising out of them ought to be left to the reader.” Mease told his readers that 14, 355 gallons of oil were used in
city lamps per year and that 8, 328 printed sheets were put out by the eight daily newspapers. In setting forth facts in this manner, Mease intended his readers to reach their own conclusions about the character of Philadelphia.
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If everything were being left to the reader in this way, then perhaps everyone, in good republican or democratic fashion, could become his own expert and make his own decisions about everything. Charles Nisbet, the president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, saw his worst nightmare being realized. With Americans relying so much on individual judgment, he fully expected, he said, to see soon such books as “Every Man his own Lawyer,” “Every Man his own Physician,” and “Every Man his own Clergyman and Confessor.”
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Dr. Daniel Drake in fact concluded that specialized medical knowledge was no longer the preserve of a few. “Hitherto,” Drake told a group of Ohio medical students in the early nineteenth century, “the philosophers have formed a distinct caste from the people; and the like kinds have been supposed to possess a divine right of superiority. But this delusion should be dispelled, indeed is fast disappearing, and the distinction between scientific and the unscientific dissolved. . . . All men to a certain extent may become philosophers.”
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With every ordinary person now being told that his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art and government, were as good as if not better than those of “connoisseurs” and “speculative men” who were “college learnt,” it is not surprising that truth and knowledge, which had seemed so palpable and attainable to the enlightened late eighteenth century, now became elusive and difficult to pin down.
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As popular knowledge came to seem as accurate as the knowledge of experts, the borders the enlightened eighteenth century had painstakingly worked out between religion and magic, science and superstition, naturalism and supernatural-ism, became blurred. Animal magnetism now seemed as legitimate as gravity. Popular speculations about the lost tribes of Israel seemed as plausible as scholarly studies of the origins of the Indian mounds of the Northwest. Dowsing for hidden metals appeared as rational as the workings of
electricity. And crude folk remedies were even thought to be as scientific as the bleeding cures of enlightened medicine.

The result was an odd mixture of credulity and skepticism among many middling Americans. Where everything was believable, everything could be doubted. Since all claims to expert knowledge were suspect, people tended to mistrust anything outside of the immediate impact of their senses. They picked up the Lockean sensationalist epistemology and ran with it. They were a democratic people who judged by their senses only and who doubted everything that they had not seen, felt, heard, tasted, or smelled. Yet because people prided themselves on their shrewdness and believed that they were now capable of understanding so much from their senses, they could be easily impressed by what they sensed but could not comprehend. A few strange words spoken by a preacher, or hieroglyphics displayed on a document, or anything written in highfalutin language could carry great credibility. In such an atmosphere hoaxes of various kinds and charlatanism and quackery in all fields flourished.
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I
N THE NEW DOWN-TO-EARTH
populist world of the nineteenth century, the previous century’s idea of the benefaction of science to mankind inevitably became identified with hardheaded utilitarianism. The rush of technological inventions in these years—steamboats, clocks, lamps, and numerous machines for doing everything from carding wool to cutting nails—was not unanticipated by Enlightenment philosophers like Jefferson, but the new business significance given to them was. While some of the devices of these years, like Jefferson’s moldboard, were the result of the detached ingenuity of enlightened gentlemen-scientists, most inventions were the products of middling men of humble origins, such as Oliver Evans and Thomas Blanchard, seeking not fame but more efficient and more profitable ways of doing things.
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Oliver Evans, perhaps the most important inventor of his generation, was born in Delaware in 1755 and apprenticed to a wheelwright at age sixteen. With labor costs so high compared to those in England, clever young Americans like Evans immediately sought to devise machines that would cut down on the use of manual labor. Like other middling inventors in these years, Evans, once he got going inventing one thing, quickly
thought of other machines for saving time and money. He first developed a carding machine for combing fibers for spinning and later a grain-grinding machine that led to a fully automated flour mill—setting the standards for flour-milling for the next several generations. After 1800 he concentrated on what became his most important invention, his high-pressure steam engine. In 1806 he opened his Mars Works in Philadelphia, and during the following decade he supervised the construction of dozens of steam engines and boilers, which became the driving force for most steamboats and factory machinery throughout the country.
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Thomas Blanchard was born in Sutton, Massachusetts, in 1788. He disliked both farming and the little schooling he had, but by concocting an apple-paring machine at age thirteen he demonstrated an early aptitude for inventiveness. Working in his older brother’s tack-making shop, he created a tack-counting device and later a machine that cut and headed five hundred tacks per minute, which he was able to sell for five thousand dollars. Blanchard’s experience, like that of other middling inventors of these years, demonstrates that most of the many inventions of the period were based not on any rare technical expertise or on extensive financial resources but rather on commonly available knowledge that an ordinary worker with some ingenuity and modest amounts of capital could apply to a specific problem. Among Blanchard’s numerous inventions the most important was his unusual turning lathe that allowed for the production of irregular wooden shapes, including gun stocks. He took out over two dozen patents for his many inventions.
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With example after example of middling people like these becoming rich and successful, it was hard to think of scientific education as anything other than a means of releasing individual talents for the individual’s profit, which was increasingly a pecuniary one. In Europe, said the
North American Review
in 1816, wealth was a prerequisite for new discoveries in science. In America, however, “we do all these as a means of acquiring wealth.” Lacking the “large establishments and expansive endowments” of the Europeans, Americans, said Jacob Bigelow, in his 1816 inaugural lecture as Rumford Professor of the Application of Science to the Useful Arts at Harvard, had fundamentally altered the nature and sociology of scientific investigation. In Europe, the branches of the physical sciences were “pursued by learned men” interested in abstract theory. By contrast, the sciences in America have been pursued by ordinary
“ingenious men” who, “unambitious of fame” and possessed with “a spirit or enterprise and perseverance” and “a talent of invention,” have mainly “had utility for their object.” Consequently, said Bigelow, who went on to develop what was labeled the science of technology, “we have had few learned men, but many useful ones,” which “has entitled us to the character of a nation of inventors.”
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