Andre Michaux: Botaniste Extraordinaire

To have a flower named after you is an honor to any botanist. To have traveled in Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Africa and to have catalogued over 700 plants, have your name on several flowers and ferns as well as a species of oak tree and have an 85,000 state forest in Pennsylvania named after you is extraordinary.

Andre Michaux was born on March 6, 1746 on a 400-acre farm near Versailles that his father managed for King Louis XVI of France. From his father he learned agricultural practices and how to successfully grow a number of plants. Unfortunately, his father died when Andre was 17, and his mother three years later. At age 23 he married Cecile Claye, daughter of a prosperous farmer. They had only eleven months together when she died a week after giving birth to their son, Francois.

Distraught over his great losses but driven by a strong desire to pursue the study of botany and discover and catalogue new plants, he temporarily left the young Francois with family members and went to study under the renowned botanist Bernard de Jussieu at the Jardin de Plantes in Paris. There he learned plant identification and cataloging, knowledge that would in time make him one of the most noted botanists in history.

His talents and love of plants drove him to start on a series of excursions that would take him to parts of the world where he discovered many species of plants that had never been studied. One of his first trips was to Auvergne in south-central France and the Pyrenees Mountains on the border of France and Spain. These trips, relatively close to home, whetted his appetite for more.

His first international excursion was in 1782 when he accompanied a French political official to Persia (today’s Iran) where he did research on desert flora. While there he was robbed by Bedouin nomads and held prisoner until the French consulate paid a ransom for his release.

In spite of his political intrigues in Persia, he was able to return safely to France where his reputation as an excellent botanist reached the court of King Louis XVI. Desiring to enhance his garden at Versailles with plants from around the world, in 1784, the king appointed Michaux Royal Botanist and the next year outfitted him for an exploratory journey to North America with the mandate to send plants and seeds back to France.

Michaux and his son Francois, who was 15 at the time, landed in New York in November 1785 and established a garden in New Jersey. But finding the climate a little too cold to grow many of the species of plants he wanted to grow, in September 1786 he left the garden under a caretaker while he and Francois moved south to the warmer climate of Charleston, South Carolina. There he bought a 110-acre plantation and set up a garden where he grew and transplanted plants and seeds to be shipped to France. Leaving the garden under the care of Francios, Andre then traveled to Florida, Georgia, both Carolinas, and as far away as the Bahamas searching for plants and seeds to ship to Charleston, New Jersey and then on to France.

Then in 1792 he returned temporarily to New York and used it as a base for an excursion into New England and Canada. Obviously, his wanderlust and energy were strong and he never seemed to stay in one place more than a few months.

Although not a political person, in 1793 his life took an unusual turn that led him into a political situation. He had mentioned to Dr. Benjamin Rush and naturalist Benjamin Barton his desire to explore America all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They mentioned this to Thomas Jefferson who was then secretary of state under George Washington. Jefferson was interested in finding a trade route to the Pacific and encouraged Michaux to pursue the exploration.

At that time, what is now the United States was a patchwork of territories. In the east were 15 states, the original 13 plus Vermont and Kentucky. The Mississippi River and west to the Pacific Ocean was largely controlled by Spain. Spain also still controlled Florida at that time. The Great Lakes area was French territory and Canada had been occupied by Britain. So, any explorations west of the United States could have political implications as well as economic. But in Jefferson’s view, Michaux as a French citizen and naturalist could take a northern route mainly through territory controlled by France and not be a threat to Spanish forces on the Mississippi River.

To many Americans at the time, Spain was not considered a good neighbor since it restricted access to the Mississippi River and hindered trade with the port at New Orleans. One person who wanted to see Spain leave the area was General George Rogers Clark who had won fame as a Revolutionary War commander. While living in Kentucky in 1792, he came up with a scheme to raise an army of frontiersmen to attack the Spanish and force them to allow open trade on the Mississippi.

Although many settlers living near the river were in favor of confronting Spain, word of his scheme was not looked on favorably by the US government which was not eager to get into a war with Spain even though access to New Orleans would benefit the western US states and territories.

Then in May 1793 Edmond-Charles Genet arrived in Philadelphia as a French envoy. Upon hearing of Clark’s scheme and since at that time France was officially at war with Spain, Genet decided he would back Rogers in his plan to run the Spanish out of the Mississippi River. To do this he pulled his fellow countryman Andre Michaux into the plot.

The reason for Michaux’s decision to join with Genet and become involved in Clark’s plan to raise an army against the Spanish is still being debated. Although Thomas Jefferson wanted to send Michaux to explore the west and many Americans agreed with him in principle, George Washington and other government officials were too busy coping with the day-to-day activities of creating the new United States of America to give their wholehearted support to the mission. Many people, especially those who had settled in the western states and territories thought that exploring the part of the continent beyond the Mississippi was a good idea, however, given the politics of the day, it was decided that perhaps this was not the right time to do it.

In spite of not having the backing of the American government, Genet was persistent and persuaded Michaux to go to Kentucky to let Clark know that he had French help in his undertaking against the Spanish. However, being first and foremost a botanist and not a military envoy, Michaux made several stops to study plants on his way from Philadelphia to Clark’s residence in Danville, Kentucky. By the time he reached Clark in September 1793, the enthusiasm for the military mission had subsided. Even though Genet offered some money to finance the adventure and bestowed on Clark the fancy title of Major General in the Armies of France and Commander-in-Chief of the French Revolutionary Legion on the Mississippi River, Clark decided that since winter was coming on, he would wait until spring to pursue the matter further.

But many Americans by this time, especially those in government, were beginning to be leery of Genet and his ambitious scheme to involve Americans in his intrigue against the Spanish. Having worn out his welcome, he returned to France in 1794. Moving on from the Genet intrigue, Michaux returned to Charleston where he resumed his botanical work.

It is interesting that it was not just General Clark and a few frontiersmen who were interested in ousting the Spanish from the Mississippi River. A few years after the Clark intrigue, in 1797, William Blount, a prominent politician from North Carolina who had been one of the signers of the United States Constitution, also came up with a scheme to clear the Mississippi of Spanish control.

In 1790, North Carolina had ceded its territory west of the Appalachian Mountains to the United States government creating the United States Territory South of the River Ohio or the Southwest Territory. President Washington appointed William Blount to be its governor. While governor, Blount participated in land speculation by buying up thousands of acres of land in the western part of the territory adjoining the Mississippi River. Having put a good deal of money into the project, Blount became frustrated that Spanish control of the river prevented settlers from moving onto the area and buying his land.

To solve the problem, Blount and others hatched a scheme to stir up trouble between Spain and the British in hopes that the British would launch a military venture to run the Spanish out of the area.

When the Southwest Territory was made the State of Tennessee in June 1796, Blount was elected its first senator. Not long after he arrived in Philadelphia, a letter he had written to a colleague outlining his plan to stir up a conflict found its way to George Washington who adamantly opposed the plan. A hearing was held in the senate and Blount was expelled. Although ousted from the federal government, he was still a popular figure in Tennessee and was easily elected to the state senate. His scheme to start a war between Spain and Britain, however, ceased.

Michaux’s next trip was to North Carolina, where in August 1784 he became the first explorer to reach the summit of Grandfather Mountain, which at 5,946 feet is one of the highest mountains in the eastern United States. There he documented several plants, two of which, the Pleopeltis michauxiana, an epiphyte better known as resurrection fern, and the Michaux saxifrage, Micranthes petiolaris, a small beautiful white wildflower, still carry his name. He later went on to Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana. In the meantime, France and Spain had reached a truce which again sparked in Michaux the urge to seek a route to the Pacific Ocean. But at that time government funding was not available and he had depleted his funds.

In August 1796 Michaux left Charleston and sailed back to France where he was disappointed to learn that many of the many thousands of plants and seeds he had sent to Paris had not survived the chaos of the French Revolution. But he still had most of his notes and for the next 4 years worked on two books that would turn out to be two of the foremost books on North American plants. They are The Oaks of America and The Flora of America. One of the oaks he described came to be called the Quercus Michauxii or chestnut swamp oak, a large oak in the white oak family found in the US southeast and Midwest.

What turned out to be Andre’s last voyage was when he joined as senior botanist an expedition headed for Australia that had been financed by French ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte. Having left France in 1800, the ship made a stop at Mauritius where Michaux decided to leave the ship and pursue his botanical studies on his own as he had been doing for years. After a restful stay at Mauritius, Michaux boarded a ship and sail some 500 miles west to Madagascar, where French settlers had established settlements and trading posts.

Michaux found Madagascar to be rich in flora and his journals report that he enjoyed his time there. But the area was infested with malaria-carrying mosquitos. Michaux was bitten and died of the disease in October 1802 in the east coast city of Tamatave. Upon hearing of his father’s death, Francois sailed to South Carolina and sold the garden there. The garden in New Jersey was kept open for a few more years.

Francois obviously learned carefully from his father and also became a renowned botanist. A major contribution to American botany was his book North American Sylva: A Description of the Forest Trees of the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia published in 1813. Like his father’s books on American oaks and flora, Francois’s book became a very important book in the study of American trees, and other plants. Today, the three Michaux books are considered not only botanical classics but literary classics as well. Even today, foresters and botanists are grateful for the groundbreaking work this father and son team did for the study of American flora.

Francois made several trips back and forth from France to America making significant contributions to the botany of Europe and America. It is interesting that on one of his trips to the US, he met and became friends with inventor Robert Fulton and was a passenger on the historic voyage of the Clearmont, the world’s first steam boat, from New York City up the Hudson River to Albany, New York and back.

It is interesting that in light of Andre Michaux’s involvement in General Clark’s scheme to go to war against the Spanish and Michaux’s desire to explore America all the way to the Pacific Ocean, neither of which worked out, it was Clark’s younger brother, William, who, along with Meriwether Lewis, managed to successfully blaze a path through the wilderness all the way to the Pacific.

This expedition came about because by the late 1700s, Spain’s dominance as a European power was waning. In Louisiana, the Spanish actually had more territory than they could adequately control. So, when the French leader Napoleon Bonaparte offered to trade territories in Tuscany for Louisiana, the Spanish accepted the deal. Thus, in 1800 the Louisiana territory reverted to French control. Three years later, President Thomas Jefferson bought the vast territory from France for fifteen million dollars.

The Lewis and Clark expedition through what had now become US territory was a monumental journey that lasted from May 1804 to September 1806. Sponsored by President Jefferson with the help of his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, the Corps of Discovery journey as it was called, was very important in the history of the growth of the United States.

Although Michaux died in 1802, his legacy lives on. In the nearly 11 years Andre Michaux spent in North America, he laid the groundwork for future explorations and botanical research in the young nation from its coastal marshes to the heights of its mountains. His findings were extremely valuable to those who came after him in his time as well as today.

Ted McCormack