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Natural Affinities: The Political Economy and Ecology of Desire in William Bartram’s Southern Gulf

The end of the colonial era and the rise of the United States nation state brought drastic changes to the borderland regions of the American Southeast. For much of the eighteenth century, the Southeast was a decidedly intercolonial space, with England, France, and Spain seeking to establish lucrative trade arrangements and routes among the powerful Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek nations that dominated the region. Despite these colonial pressures, many native groups sustained a measure of political and economic autonomy by continually repositioning themselves at the center of a delicate balance of power, often playing one empire off another. With American independence, however, international involvement in the region waned, trading options disappeared, and southeastern native groups and confederacies increasingly found themselves facing off with the U.S.: a single nation that was far more interested in land speculation and westward expansion than it was in equitable trade and diplomacy. As historians such as Robbie Ethridge and Claudio Saunt have demonstrated, the native populations of the Southeast faced a new world of changing market desires, where colonial systems of hospitality, gift-giving, and cross-cultural affiliation were quickly diminishing under the growing shadow of the U.S. and its prospects of empire. Between 1773 and 1777, the Quaker botanist William Bartram traveled and lived among southeastern native peoples. This article presents his account of that journey, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, as a literary effort to envision a world in which the older, colonial modes of economic association and affiliation could persist despite the discourses of assimilation and conquest that, by the time Bartram finally published his book in 1791, had come to dominate the national conversation. Existing historical and critical works by Douglas Anderson, Edward J. Cashin, Erica Hannickel, and others have done much to connect the Travels to Bartram's concerns--clearly voiced elsewhere in his manuscripts--about the larger issues and events pertaining to independence and U.S. nationhood during these tumultuous years. This scholarship has shown that although the Travels sometimes seems to offer a romantic, even disconnected, view of the period, it is actually in dialogue with many of the debates and emerging ideologies surrounding early U.S. imperialism, Indian policy, and the structure of the Federal state. The humble botanist, after all, composed and edited much of his book while the U.S. Constitution was taking shape not far from his home in Philadelphia. He was also conscious of enjoying some public authority--due, in part, to the legacy of William's father, the botanist John Bartram, and his transatlantic plant and seed business, which continued to make the Bartram name well-known among the learned and prominent men of the age. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Secretary of War Henry Knox number among the many who sought out the younger Bartram's advice or visited him at his garden. Here, I hope to expand our understanding of the political dimension and purpose of Bartram's book by considering the Travels as a work of applied economic theory: an intermixing of political economy and ecology wherein the modes of affiliation and friendship that Bartram valued (quite highly) between whites and natives would remain essential to the social order of the Southeast. While Bartram's political-economic vision in Travels encompasses southeastern peoples and regions rather widely (as did the actual route of his journey), the narrative particularly presents the lower-Seminole towns of Cuscowilla and Talahasochte--located on Florida's central plain and the western coast of the peninsula respectively--as shining examples of a fluid and equitable trade economy. Bartram's account of the region surrounding these towns describes a porous, near-fantastical natural landscape of subterranean waterways, crystalline rivers, and flowing trade routes. …