CHAPTER I 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 



William Bartram was an unassuming Quaker whose life, in 

 spite of his travel record, can hardly be called adventurous. 

 He was born at Kingsessing, on the Schuylkill, near Philadel- 

 phia, on February 9, 1739, and he died at the same place on 

 July 22, 1823. From the very beginning the greatest single 

 influence that moulded his life and character was his father, 

 John Bartram. 



It is rather singular, in view of the services both father and 

 son have rendered to early American natural science, that they 

 should have been so unaccountably neglected by students of 

 American cultural history. This long neglect has made the dis- 

 covery of the exact facts of their lives difficult; legends have 

 grown around them, as legends will grow around the memory 

 of men who have been dead a century and more. The very 

 ancestry of the Bartrams has developed a legendary tinge. Cre- 

 vecoeur, in his famous Letters from an American Farmer, re- 

 ported John Bartram (or Bertram) as saying to his mythical 

 Russian visitor: " Thee must know that my father was a French- 

 man, he brought this piece of painting over with him; I keep it 

 as a piece of family furniture, and as a memorial of his removal 

 hither." ^ As a matter of fact, however, it was John Bartram's 

 grandfather, also named John, who had removed to America, 

 in 1683, and not from France but from Derbyshire, England.^ 



^ Letter XI, p. 187, Everyman ed. "' The ' letter of a Russian gentleman ' in 

 relation to a visit to John Bartram, bears intrinsic evidence of its fictitious char- 

 acter." (" History of John Bartram," Meehan's Monthly, Philadelphia, IX 

 [1899], 96.) 



^ D. C. Peattie in his sketch of John Bartram {Dictionary of American Biogra- 

 phy, II, 26-28) gives 1682 as the year in which John Bartram's grandfather emi- 

 grated to America. He also accepts William Bartram's article on his father in 

 the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, 1804, as " the best authority." 

 Yet the article begins with '" Richard Bartram, the grandfather of the subject of 

 this sketch. ..." and continues with other genealogical details which differ 



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