"The Science of Settlement: Western Land Companies and Eastern Scientific Societies in the Early National United States"

This paper examines the relationship between U.S. land companies and scientific societies in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War. It follows Captain Winthrop Sargent and Reverend Manasseh Cutler, each an active member in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society (learned societies based in Massachusetts and Philadelphia, respectively), and the Ohio Company of Associates (a project to develop land in the Ohio River Valley). By examining Sargent and Cutler’s publications, correspondence, and activities on behalf of the land company and the learned society throughout the 1780s and 90s, it shows how the pursuit of natural scientific knowledge in early America was situated within and shaped by the dominant concern of the period: the working out of a competitive national political economy.
Historians have long recognized that late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Americans, following in the steps of their imperial forebears, could turn “Enlightenment inquiry” into a tool of colonial control, or, at the very least, could make their measurements and calculations aspirationally “project the imperial authority of the United States” (Martinko, Historic Real Estate, 18; Strang, Frontiers of Science). As recent works on eighteenth-century political economy have shown, however, imperial authority was itself a science which relied on emulating imperial rivals and learning from their attempts to acquire wealth and power (Reinert, Translating Empire). The natural sciences in general, and natural history in particular, was intellectually subordinated to reasons of state. This paper will unpack the botanical and archaeological contributions of Cutler and Sargent in light of prevailing theories of political economy, and ask how these publications both arose from and reinforced the commercial development of Indigenous lands northwest of the Ohio River.