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Every Farmer a Reader. At that moment in American history when Parson Weems decided to write his biography of Washington, the American mind had begun to find itself. It had been regional, New England or Southern, and highly conscious of differences between states. It was becoming the mind of a nation. A sense of the worth of American life swept over the country with the force of a discovery in science.
Those were the days when a traveler could write: "I have traveled more than four thousand miles about this country, and I never met with one single insolent or rude American. There are very few really ignorant men in America of native growth. Every farmer is more or less a reader. . . . They are all well-informed, modest without shyness, always free to communicate what they know, and never ashamed to acknowledge what they have yet to learn. . . . They have all been readers from their youth up; and there are few subjects upon which they cannot converse with you, whether of a political or a scientific nature."
Daisy and Forest. One such farmer was John Bartram. A gentle, mystical Quaker, Bartram was plowing one day when he first noticed a daisy. As he studied its petals, he thought of how many plants and blossoms, of whose uses he knew nothing, he had destroyed in his years of tilling the soil. Bartram hired a man to plow for him, went to Philadelphia, bought a Latin grammar, studied it until he could read the naturalists, then set about classifying the native growths of the woods near home. He was responsible for the naturalization in England of more than 150 American plants.
His son William carried on his work in the building of the Bartram Botanical Gardens on the banks of the Schuylkill outside Philadelphia. There foreign travelers stopped (70 volumes of travels in America were written in these years by French authors alone) before venturing into the forest which, with scarcely three consecutive miles of cleared land and only five cities of more than 10,000 people, lay in a vast ocean of green the length and breadth of the continent.
First U.S. Novelist. The greatest American city, Philadelphia, with 70,000 people and the memory of Benjamin Franklin, was rich and orderly, but shocking to idealists from abroad in its spendthrift luxury. Ladies of fashion paid their hairdressers as much as £200 a year, and Statesman Gouverneur Morris had "two French valets and a man to buckle his hair in papillotes." But Philadelphia was also the home of many a scientist, painter and writer, including Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist, who inspired Keats, Shelley, Scott, Poe, Hazlitt, Cooper, Hawthorne.