William Maclure and the Louisiana Purchase Between 1800 and 1815, the philanthropist geologist William Maclure traveled around Europe,
trying to understand the geological structure of the old continent while preparing for "the great object of his ambition,"
a detailed study of the Northeastern United States.
A member of the American Philosophical Society, he published his first geological map of the area that stretches from the Saint Lawrence River to the Gulf of
Mexico in 1809. In 1803 President Jefferson instructed Maclure to convey to the French authorities the claims of American citizens
who had incurred damages between 1798 and 1799 during
the undeclared naval war. Maclure lived in Paris for one
and a half years and bought a house on 20 rue des Brodeurs,
faubourg Saint-Germain. Maclure's mission immediately followed the United
States' efforts to acquire Louisiana. Robert
R. Livingston, U.S. Minister to France, and James Monroe,
Envoy Extraordinary, had agreed to proceed with the
purchase of this immense territory in the spring of 1803. Jefferson hoped, however, to use the occasion to get the
Treaty of Mortefontaine implemented and sent a special
commission, made up of John Fenton Mercer, Isaac Cox
Barnet and William Maclure, to work out the details. In the fall of 1804, just before
the end of the negotiations, Maclure met Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and he invited him to dinner at his home to talk about Lesueur's travels with Captain Nicolas Baudin to Australia and Tasmania (1800-1804). In 1815, Maclure proposed to employ Lesueur for at least two
years to travel to America and help him finish the revised version of his geological map of the United States.
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Portrait of William Maclure - by Thomas James Northcote (1795) |
Map of the United States of America - with boundary lines, roads, distances and proposed canals - designed to illustrate the geological memoir of William Maclure. Published by John Melish, Philadelphia (1817)
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Why did Maclure contract Lesueur? Charles-Alexandre Lesueur's extensive knowledge of plants and animals living on the earth's surface and in the deep oceans enabled him to identify fossil remains with great
precision - something very few mineralogists were capable
of doing. Lesueur was a great zoologist, ornithologist,
entomologist, conchologist, ichthyologist, and even botanist. His contributions to Maclure's geological investigations
and American paleontology should not be underestimated. Maclure and Lesueur were very much ahead of their time. Both forerunners of modern geology and paleontology, they were perfectly aware that
by correlating their knowledge of biology with the geological record, they could analyze the earth's crust with more precision. Fossils, which were by then largely recognized
as organic remains, became the key for interpreting the
geological register, particularly after Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) and his assistant Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847)
explored the Paris Basin at the beginning of the 1800s. Cuvier, who became the international expert in comparative anatomy, demonstrated the structural differences between fossils and existing animals, which led to an awareness of the great age of the strata. In 1819 Lesueur's technical skills brought him to the frontier between Canada and the United States, having been commissioned by the American government to establish the dividing line between the two countries. This allowed him to meet geologist Amos Eaton, the protégé of Stephen Van Rensselaer, in Albany, New York.
About this chapter of Eaton's life, historian John M. Clarke wrote in 1921: Quoted from B. R. Rinsma, Eyewitness to Utopia: Scientific Conquest and Communal Settlement in C.-A. Lesueur's Sketches of the Frontier, 48-49. |
William Maclure's Growing Fortune William Maclure came from Ayr, in
Scotland, and later lived in Glasgow and then in Liverpool
to facilitate his father's trade with New York. From the age of
fifteen, David McClure's oldest son James went with him on his trips to the United States, and, in 1782, James became a partner in the London-based firm Miller, Hart & Company. He worked for this multinational for fourteen years and, in June 1796, cofounded McClure, Brydie & Company, establishing
himself in Richmond, Virginia, to export tobacco. He started
to enjoy the leisure his growing fortune afforded him. That
same year, James McClure became a naturalized American
citizen, altering the spelling of his surname to Maclure, and -
though he had been baptized James - changed his first name to William. Maclure's mother gave birth
to at least twelve children, but in 1815, only five of them were still alive: Anna and Margaret in Great Britain, and William, Alexander and John in the United States. The other siblings had died before reaching adulthood, with the exception of his sister Helen who died in 1810. She was the spouse of David Hunter, a wealthy merchant from London. Anna
and Margaret lived on the generous pension that William allotted to them, and Alexander managed his brother's
timber company in Norfolk, on the coast of Virginia. |
Maclure's Concern for the Working ClassesMaclure expressed deep concern about the fate of the workers. Of all the motivations that impelled him, the inequality in the distribution of wealth was probably the strongest. "Knowledge is Power," he often exclaimed, appropriating Francis Bacon's maxim, and he actively sought to give this power to the new generation of working-class children. Maclure considered utilitarian knowledge to be "the legitimate source of power and riches." According to him, fair reapportionment would be the only just act: "Whatever tends to equalize knowledge, divides and equalizes in the same proportion power and riches, and, of course, injures those who have by force or fraud obtained a monopoly of both."
Jeremy Bentham William Maclure was greatly inspired by the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, who preached that society's only legitimate pursuit should be "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."
During his stay in Russia, in 1810, Maclure visited one of Bentham's projects, the panopticon; an experimental factory for thieves, who worked under hidden surveillance with the aim of making them more honest. In December 1813 Bentham became Robert Owen's associate in the New Lanark factories in Scotland. In 1824 Maclure described one of his meetings with Bentham as follows: "[I] called on J. Bentham in the evening and spent a few hours with him. [He is] a cheerful old man full of good ideas and [a] liberal. [He] lives in the midst of a large wellcultivated Garden adjoining St. James's Park and [he] has [a] door opening into the Birdcage Walk into which we walked in the evening. He jestingly told me the lamps were an ilumination [sic] that he contrived to receive me. He has been immensely before his age but at present by nature must at least be at a stand[still] when all around
him are in motion. This Karlswood School is his hobby." |
William Maclure's geological map of 1809 |
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Maclure's Radical Friends William Maclure did not act alone, and his contacts with the utilitarian and rationalist circles of Britain emphasize his leanings. In Maclure's 1824 journal we find the following names: John Black (1783-1855), editor of the London opposition paper The Morning Chronicle; John Bowring (1792-1872), co-editor of the quite radical Westminster Review; Francis Place (1771-1854), union leader and social reformer; James Pierrepont Greaves (1777-1842), socialist educator and founder of several Pestalozzian schools in England; William Allen (1770-1843), chemist in the Royal Society and editor of The Philanthropist; and George Birkbeck (1776-1841), professor of natural history and founder of the Glasgow and London Mechanics' Institutes. Maclure's efforts not only encouraged utilitarian education; they were an integral part of the school of thought initiated by Jeremy Bentham. This link with radical English circles would later facilitate his connection with Robert Owen, who asked for Maclure's help in assuring the success of his utopian enterprise in New Harmony, Indiana. |
Maclure and PestalozziIn 1805 Maclure traveled to Yverdon, Switzerland, to
meet Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a reformer in the field
of education who was continuing the efforts begun by the Moravian pastor Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670) and the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). A forerunner of Montessori education, Pestalozzi proposed an alternative to traditional teaching that, according to him, put too much emphasis on grammar and literature and did not prepare working-class children appropriately for their future role in society. Pestalozzi received numerous illustrious visitors, such as Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852), who is considered the
founder of the Kindergarten, and Andrew Bell (1753-1832), proponent of the mutual system that advocated using the best students as tutors for the others. |
Thomas Jefferson's Letter to William Maclure"I thank you, dear Sir, for the copy of your Geology of the U.S. which you have been so kind as to send me. I have read it with as much pleasure as I could expect to receive from writings in a branch of science with which I am so little familiar. Considering how little the scratches of 100 feet deep into the crust of a globe of 8000 miles diameter could authorize conjectures as to its internal structure, & the history of its formation. I have neglected these theories, believing them to be as superficial as the foundations on which they were built. Much too of what has been claimed by geology belongs equally to minerology and chemistry. You have wisely therefore confined yourself to the truly useful part of this science, the relative positions of the different kinds of rocks, stones, ores & other minerals. And your researches into these give us valuable information as to the treasures of our own country & where to search for them. |
Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History in Ten Centuries |
Maclure's UtopiaWilliam Maclure had close ties with Claude-Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), and they met frequently at his home, 20 rue des Brodeurs, faubourg Saint-
Germain. The French socialist thinker had taken part in the American Revolution before becoming a philosopher and reformist; the precursor of positivism and sociology. In 1816 he started a magazine called L'Industrie, followed by L'Organisateur in 1819, in collaboration with Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Comte, who soon became famous, worked in Maclure's school in Paris with Guillaume Phiquepal from 1821 to 1824. In 1823 Maclure was even planning to send
Comte to Spain as the head of a Lancasterian school in Alicante. Had the young man accepted, his career would certainly have taken a different turn. More about Maclure's Baconian ideas
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The Successes of New Harmony's UtopiaIn early March 1826, William Maclure, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and their colleagues had to unpack some fifty
tons of tools, books and mineralogical samples, brought from Philadelphia to New Harmony by steamboat. Soon the west wing of the brick church would be filled with bones, skeletons and all kinds of instruments, whereas the east wing was to hold the immense library of Maclure and Lesueur. They would make important scientific contributions
from their outpost on the American frontier, the avant-garde colony of New Harmony. |
Church Street, New Harmony – by C.-A. Lesueur, November 15, 1831. This drawing shows all the buildings historically related to the United States Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution. On the left: the immense brick-and-stone Harmonist granary, i.e. the national headquarters of the Geological Survey between 1843 and 1856 (also holding its mineralogical collections and those of the Owen brothers). On the left corner of Church Street: Charles-Alexandre Lesueur's house. On the right: the large Harmonist church, home of William Maclure's library and all the geological collections brought from Europe and North America by Maclure and Lesueur. Most of these collections were moved to the granary in 1843 and remained there until the opening of the Smithsonian building in Washington, D.C., in 1857. Maclure's library was donated to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1835, i.e. the year following Thomas Say's death. See Was New Harmony a Failure? on this website. Read more about the amazing New Harmony experiment in Bauke Ritsert Rinsma, Eyewitness to Utopia: Scientific Conquest and Communal Settlement in C.-A. Lesueur’s Sketches of the Frontier, drawings and sketches by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, foreword by Edouard Philippe, Donald E. Pitzer and Ralph G. Schwarz, translated by Leslie J. Roberts (Heuqueville, France: Heiligon, 2019). |
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