The American Philosophical Society was founded in Philadelphia through the collaboration of Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram, the Pennsylvania naturalist. A Franklin press broadside -- a "Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America" -- announced the formation of the society in 1743.1 The APS, consequently, became America's first learned society. Its organization suggested that the colonies had come of age and were eager to participate in the intellectual life of European civilization.
The Philadelphia society was modeled on the Royal Society of London, whose object and subject matter it emulated. Both societies sought to improve knowledge of the natural world and to promote progress in the useful arts. Franklin's American society would encompass "all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniences or Pleasures of Life."2 Subjects for investigation included botany, agriculture, medicine, geology, mathematics, chemistry, geography, husbandry, and the mechanical arts.
Franklin and Bartram's society failed to establish itself and was inactive by 1746. However, Thomas Bond, a Philadelphia physician, began to revive it in 1767, partly to compete with the "American Society for promoting and propagating usefull knowledge," formed in 1766 by Quaker merchants in Philadelphia.3 The two societies were merged under a combined name in December of 1768, establishing the present institution.
The American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia, For Promoting Useful Knowledge was organized around six committees or sections, including: (1) geography, mathematics, natural philosophy, and astronomy; (2) medicine and anatomy; (3) natural history and chemistry; (4) trade and commerce; (5) mechanics and architecture; and (6) husbandry and American improvements.4 Decided emphasis was placed upon the experimental and observational sciences, once again following the lead of the Royal Society. The historical and social (or moral) sciences were not recognized until 1815, when a Committee on History, Moral Science, and General Literature was added.
First notice of the new section is found in the 17 March 1815 "Minutes" of the Society, which briefly noted that a seventh committee had been added to the six established in 1769. Nineteen members, including Peter DuPonceau and Benjamin Smith Barton, who both had a strong interest in the linguistic and ethnographic study of American Indians, attended the meeting. Four months later, on 21 July, the specific objectives of the new "Historical and Literary Committee" were enumerated. The new section was detailed the responsibility of acting to:
(1) ... form a collection of original documents, such as official and private letters, Indian treaties, ancient records, ancient maps, and such other papers as may be calculated to throw light on the History of the United States, but more particularly of this State, to be preserved among the archives of this Society, for the public benefit.
(2) ... to take such measures as to them shall seem most proper, for the purpose of obtaining from able and intelligent persons in the U.S.... correct information on matters connected with the history, geography, topography, and antiquities, and statistics of this country.
(3) ... to select such parts thereof, as they shall think proper, and publish the same in volumes, numbers or in any other form ....5
In effect, the Committee was to serve as the collection, research, and publishing arm of the Society, in the area of historical and social science. A circle of philologist-antiquarians had been active in Philadelphia, from the 1780s. Its members included, among others, Benjamin Smith Barton, Peter Stephen DuPonceau, Albert Gallatin, Constantine Rafinesque, and correspondents Thomas Jefferson and John Heckewelder. They sought to understand the culture and origins of the nation's aborigines, whose numbers and culture were rapidly disappearing under the pressure of European settlement. The activities of these philologist-antiquarians were institutionalized in the Historical and Literary Committee. The Committee's organization postdates by three years the foundation of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, established for the same end.
Under DuPonceau's secretaryship, the Historical and Literary Committee published its first volume of Transactions in 1819. It contains three studies by the Rev. John Heckewelder on the languages and ethnography of American Indians. A second volume, published in sections between 1838 and 1843, included articles by DuPonceau on Chinese writing, the Rev. Joseph Morrone on Cochin Chinese linguistics, Samuel Breck on the history of paper money, Job Tyson on the history of the colony of Pennsylvania, a biography of Edward Livingston by Henry Gilpin, and the effects of imprisonment on producing disease in the Negro, by Benjamin Coates. No further volumes were issued by this Committee. After the organization of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1824, historical and literary studies by APS members became centered in the new society.6 Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of the Committee members and their correspondents, the Society had developed an important manuscript and printed collection relating to the languages, customs, and history of the indigenous American tribes. These documents include comparative grammars by Heckewelder, DuPonceau, Thomas Jefferson, David Zeisberger, and Benjamin Smith Barton, and the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, with extensive remarks on the geography, flora, and Indians of the American west.7
The Lewis and Clark journals came to the APS through the influence of Thomas Jefferson, who was president of the Society from 1797 to 1814 and took a particular interest in the workings of the Historical and Literary Committee. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their voyages of western exploration (1804-06) under Jefferson's presidency and sponsorships.8 Their observations on Indian customs, languages, and earthworks augmented the president's interest in the country's aboriginal inhabitants and their history.
Jefferson had excavated tumuli on his Virginia estate in the early 1780s and started collecting Indian vocabularies during the same period. He described the opening of an Indian barrow near the Rivanna River in Notes on Virginia, and concluded his description by rhetorically asking " ... whence came those aboriginals of America... A knowledge of their several languages would be the most certain evidence of their derivation which could be produced. In fact, it is the best proof of the affinity of nations which ever can be referred to."9 To answer such questions, Jefferson called for the systematic collection of the vocabularies of American Indians for linguistic comparison. Linguistic affinities implied historical connections. A comparison of Indian languages would be the essential basis from which their history could be surmised. The library of the Philosophical Society became the archive where the results of such collecting could be deposited.
In his linguistic researches, Jefferson compiled a vocabulary list to be used in comparative studies. A printed version of the list came out in the early 1790s and was subsequently sent to correspondents.l0 Several copies were dispatched with Lewis and Clark, along with detailed instructions regarding the observations Jefferson wished the members of the expedition to collect on geography, natural history, and the native inhabitants. In regard to the latter, the explorers were directed to gather information on the following:
[the] names of the nations & their numbers; the extent & limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes or nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these; their food, clothing, & domestic accomodations, the diseases prevalent among them, & the remedies they use; moral & physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs & dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent.11
Linguistics, archeology, and ethnography were all regarded as critical scientific tools for explicating the history and origins of man in the new world.
Jefferson's contemporaries and fellow APS members Benjamin Smith Barton, John Heckewelder, and Peter S. DuPonceau were also avid observers of the American Indian and collectors of comparative grammars and ethnographic data. Barton was elected to the Society in 1789, served as curator of the cabinet from 1790 to 1800 and as vice-president from 1802 until his death in 1815. Heckewelder was elected to membership in 1797 and was a member of the Historical and Literary Committee from its inception until 1823.
The first article on archeology published in the APS Transactions was a contribution by Barton entitled "Observations and Conjectures concerning certain Articles which were taken out of an Ancient Tumulus, or Grave, at Cincinnati, ...."12 Barton had received from Winthrop Sargent, U. S. Secretary for the Northwest Territory, a description and sketch of artifacts removed from the Ohio tumulus in 1794. He concluded from them that "some of the present races of North-American Indians are the descendants of nations much more populous and polished than themselves.13 The rude state of the American tribes suggested that only distant ancestors could have produced the earthworks and artifacts described by Sargent.
Barton suggested an Asiatic origin for the new world's native inhabitants, a hypothesis he supported through his writings on linguistics. New Views of the Origin and the Tribes and Nations of America (1797) compared Indian, Asiatic, and European vocabularies, showing connections between the languages. Barton argued that the use of similar words for similar purposes demonstrated that Indian languages had many affinities to each other. Another comparison revealed affinities to the languages of Europe and Asia. Although Barton declared that his study indicated an Asiatic origin for language, and hence for man, he admitted that further evidence would be required to illustrate the point adequately.
Barton's colleague and correspondent, John Heckewelder, was a Moravlan from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. From 1762 to 1786 he traveled and lived extensively among the Indians in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. In his youth Heckewelder had served as a messenger for the Moravian community to various Indian settlements. In 1771 he joined David Zeisberger's mission work on the Beaver River in northwestern Pennsylvania. Subsequently he served as envoy and consultant for the United States government on Indian affairs. At Caspar Wistar's invitation, Heckewelder recorded his accumulated knowledge of the Indians in an "Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States" for publication in the Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee.14 He simultaneously served as an important correspondent and informant on Indian languages for Peter S. DuPonceau.
DuPonceau immigrated to the United States in 1777 and served as assistant to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1781. Subsequently he took up law and established practice in Philadelphia. DuPonceau was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1791, and was made corresponding secretary of the Historical and Literary Committee, in 1815. His long-term interest in languages flourished through association with the circle of philologist-antiquarians in the Society. DuPonceau became an avid collector of Indian language grammars and accumulated a large collection of books on American Indians and languages. This historical and linguistic library passed to the Philosophical Society upon his death in 1844.15
DuPonceau published extensively on Indian languages, and attempted to go beyond etymological comparisons to the study of the "structure and grammatical forms" of the languages themselves. From his studies he concluded "1. That the American languages in general are rich in words and in grammatical forms, and that in their complicated construction, the greatest order, method and regularity prevail. 2. That these complicated forms, which I call polysynthetic, appear to exist in all those languages, from Greenland to Cape Horn. 3. That these forms appear to differ essentially from those of the ancient and modern languages of the old hemisphere."l6 DuPonceau's work attracted considerable attention in Europe and helped stimulate interest in Indian linguistics. He subsequently corresponded with the leading European philologists and was awarded the Volney prize of the French Institute in 1838 for his Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques nations indiennes de l'Amérique du Nord.
The collected vocabularies of DuPonceau were used by Albert Gallatin (APS, 1791) in his comparative linguistic study: "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States ..." (1836).17 Best remembered for his political career during the Jefferson, Madison, and Adams administrations, Gallatin was also an active student of American Indian ethnography and linguistics, carrying on the tradition of Jefferson, Barton, and DuPonceau. He was a central figure in the establishment of the American Ethnological Society (1842). The APS remained a center for linguistic studies in the post-Jacksonian era, but never again was the study of American linguistics so largely concentrated within its walls.
In addition to its library, the Philosophical Society maintained a cabinet, in which were deposited various inventions, scientific instruments, curies, and American antiquities, as well as plants, animals, and minerals collected by naturalists. The first large-scale donation of Indian artifacts was made by Joel R. Poinsett and William Keating in 1820 and 1830.18 Poinsett (APS, 1827) was a member of Congress from South Carolina, 1821-25; first U. S. Minister to Mexico, 1825-34; and U. S. Secretary of War under Van Buren, 1837-41. During his tenure as U. S. Minister in Mexico he gathered a large collection of Indian artifacts. Other Mexican materials were collected by William Keating (APS, 1822), a mineralogist and former professor of mineralogy and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Addition of stone-age implements from Europe and America by Benjamin Franklin Peale (APS, 1833) and Indian arrowheads by S. S. Haldeman (APS, 1844) made the cabinet one of the finest in America. The artifact collection was transferred to the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1878.
Philadelphia was the nation's capital from 1790 to 1800 and continued to be the largest city of the United States until almost 1830. It maintained its commercial pre-eminence well into the nineteenth century. The Philosophical Society's intellectual status in both Philadelphia and the nation in the first four decades of the nineteenth century settled upon it an important scientific advisory role. André Michaux consulted Society members in 1793, when planning his exploratory expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Similarly, Meriwether Lewis sought advice at the APS during a visit to Philadelphia in 1803. Upon request by Mahlon Dickerson, Secretary of the Navy, a detailed report on scientific researches was prepared by a committee of Society members for the Wilkes exploring expedition of 1838-42.19 The Society made recommendations for observations in physics and astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, geology and mineralogy, philology, ethnography, and medicine. Peter S. DuPonceau issued the reports for philology and ethnography. As Whitfield Bell has suggested, the Philosophical Society filled the functions of a national academy of sciences during the first half of the nineteenth century.20 Its members advised the government and government expeditions on scientific matters, and in return, the Society received research journals, records of observations, and artifact collections. Later, when the Smithsonian Institution, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Bureau of American Ethnology were founded, the advisory functions were shifted to these Washington-based institutions.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Philosophical Society had lost much of its national role and prominence. Its membership continued to confer local prestige and it was an important adjunct of Philadelphia social life, but rival scientific societies and specialized scientific organizations, such as the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, became the premier centers for research and publication. The APS Proceedings continued to be an important publishing source in anthropology: over one hundred contributions appeared in its pages between 1840 and 1900.21 The Society conferred membership on successful and recognized American and European scientists. In apparent catch-up attempts, whole slates of foreign members were elected at one time. For example, in 1863 Max Mueller, Sir David Wilson, Boucher des Perthes, Ernest Renan, and Jacob Grimm were all made members. Many of the prominent anthropologists and archeologists of the age were brought into the Society in this way. They included George Rolleston (1869), J.J.A. Worsaee (1865), T.H. Huxley (1869), Charles Darwin (1869), Carl Vogt (1869), Carl L. Ruetimeyer (1869), Paul Broca (1872), A. R Wallace (1873), Sir John Lubbock (1884), Leopold von Ranke (1885), Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1886), Paul Topinard (1886), and others. These new members never played an active scientific role in the Philosophical Society, however, and their election reflected belated recognition of well-established scientific reputations. Charles Darwin was not elected until 1869, ten years after the publication of The Origin of Species and thirty years after his election to the Royal Society.
Philadelphia scientists who played an active role in the Society during this period included Samuel George Morton, Samuel Haldeman, Benjamin Franklin Peale, and Daniel Garrison Brinton. Morton (APS, 1828) and Brinton (APS, 1869) both had established national reputations, while Haldeman and Peale had more localized careers. Morton's work overlapped with that of DuPonceau and Gallatin, but was distinct in subject matter and conclusions. A physician by trade, Morton published on a variety of topics, including anatomy, medicine, paleontology, geology, and craniology. He began collecting crania in the 1820s and subsequently, with the publication of Crania Americana in 1839, became America's leading recognized authority on craniology. Morton carefully measured and classified his crania, using thirteen different measurements. Through comparison of the resulting data, he concluded that racial differences were consistent, persistent, primordial in origin, and not the result of environmental influences. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon used his work to support their arguments for the separate origins and basic inequality of human races.22 Two distinct traditions within anthropology thus were represented simultaneously in the work of Society members. Whereas, Jefferson and DuPonceau, had sought for historical, linguistic links uniting the various races, Morton's research attempted to establish racial distinctions based upon morphology.
Benjamin Franklin Peale (APS, 1833) was a convinced monogenist, who collected Stone Age artifacts as a means of demonstrating the unity of the human species. A son of Charles Willson Peale, he came of a polymath family important in the intellectual life of Philadelphia and the early republic. Both Samuel S. Haldeman (APS, 1844) and Daniel Garrison Brinton were Philadelphia linguists. Haldeman published on natural history, before concentrating his later efforts on comparative linguistics. He was professor of comparative philology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1868 to 1880, where Brinton also taught, as professor of American linguistics and archeology, from 1886 to 1898. Brinton worked within the tradition of later nineteenth-century evolutionism, tracing the development of culture and civilization through archeological, ethnographic, and linguistic research. Although he was a central figure, along with John Wesley Powell (1889), in nineteenth-century American evolutionary anthropology, Brinton had no institutional or intellectual successors.23 His work was deemed outdated by Franz Boas and his students who succeeded to a disciplinary hegemony in American anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century.
By the turn of the century, Society members represented the leadership of the American anthropological and archeological community. Zelia Nuttall (APS, 1895), an Americanist and archeologist at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, was a member, as was her colleague Frederick Ward Putnam (APS, 1895). Washington anthropology was represented by Otis Mason (APS, 1899) of the U.S. National Museum, and Frank Hamilton Gushing (APS, 1896) and John Wesley Powell (APS, 1889) of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Franz Boas of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History was elected to membership in 1903. Charles Davenport (APS, 1907), Henry Fairfield Osborn (APS, 1887), and Edwin G. Conklin (APS, 1897), eugenicists and race theorists, were also members. The Philosophical Society had become an omnium gatherum of conflicting viewpoints and research styles.
The Society's most important function remained the promotion of research through its publications, the Transactions, Proceedings, and later the Memoirs (1935). The bequests of Richard Penrose in 1931 and Eldridge Johnson in 1937 greatly expanded the Society's financial support of scholarship. From 1933 onwards the Philosophical Society began to extensively fund research in the sciences and humanities. From 1933 to 1940 $13,500 was awarded for projects in physical anthropology; $37,900 in archeology; $9,450 in ethnology; and $6,700 in linguistics.24 In 1960 $11,735 was given to support research in cultural anthropology; $13,080 in archeology; and $7,800 in linguistics (no mention is made in the Society Yearbook of awards given for physical anthropology).25 Its much improved financial situation helped the APS to more actively promote scientific and humanistic research and made it a more visible force in American science and academics.
Beginning in 1936, the Society reorganized its membership into four classes: (1) mathematical and physical sciences, (2) geological and biological sciences, (3) social sciences, and (4) humanities. Physical anthropology, reflecting general disciplinary developments, became a division of the biological sciences. Archeology, ethnology or cultural anthropology, and linguistics became separate sections within the humanities. Elections were made along sectional lines. Membership election remained conservative: of Boas' students or close associates who were elected to membership (Clark Wissler, 1924; Edward Sapir, 1937; Alfred Kroeber, 1941; Robert Lowie, 1942; Leslie Spier, 1946), all were men and were well established in their profession. The APS has continued to view itself as a national academy of scientists and humanists which recognizes professional excellence and brings together the nation's foremost scholars. In quality, its membership once again approaches the intellectual preeminence it achieved during the first third of the nineteenth century.
In addition to building its collections of published journals and monographs, the Society library within the last forty years has actively collected the papers and correspondence of its members. The Boas papers came to the Library from 1961 to 1964; the Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguistics in 1945; the Sapir papers in 1972-73; the William Foxwell Albright papers in 1979; etc. Thus, the American Philosophical Society has become a leading research center for scholars exploring the history and development of anthropology and archeology in America.