Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

"British Travellers and the Question of American Physical Nature: A Challenge to American 'Exceptionalism'"

Joe Eaton
St. Gregory's University

I examine British travellers' comments concerning the physical environment of the United States from the 1770's to the mid-19th century. Travellers frequently expressed their views on the relative benefits and shortcomings of American physical conditions and often questioned whether European life, and civilization, could be successfully transplanted into the New World. Most commonly, Europeans believed that plant, animal, and man degenerated in the New World due to climate. Travellers often made comments about the flowers being less beautiful and fragrant, birds that suffered from aphonia, and the general absence of the marvels of European nature. Other writers, including many travellers, defended nature in the America. Though such comments might be viewed as trivial as compared with more hackneyed comments regarding American politics and manners, I see these observations relating to nature as being an important way of evaluating opinions of the young United States. The Italian historian Antonello Gerbi describes the debate, in its larger European and Pan-American context, as the "dispute of the New World."

Whereas historians have been apt to classify and divide travellers along the lines of European politics into pro-American radicals, rabid anti-American reactionaries, and ambivalent liberals, I see the issue of nature in the New World as an off-beat, yet insightful, means of evaluating opinions of the United States. It is my hypothesis that many comments relating to environment are, in fact, political, and I link, when warranted, these comments and a traveller's larger political views. The question of whether American physical environment was fundamental to whether the Republic would either succeed or, in the extreme, add to the decay of Western Civilization. The idea of American "Exceptionalism" has often come under question by either social historians who stress similarities to the Old World or those who note the existence of slavery in the United States and the lack of a high culture. The question of physical degeneracy in the New World threatened the New Republic with a negative exceptionalism that was often just as damning.

Joe Eaton
Assistant Professor, History
St. Gregory's University
1900 W. MacArthur Dr. #9, Shawnee, Oklahoma 74804
wjeaton@sgc.edu
(405) 878-5108, 878-5183

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Updated May 23, 1999