Colden, Jane (1724–1766)

First American woman botanist who was an early student of the Linnaean method of plant classification. Name variations: Jenny Colden. Born on March 27, 1724, in New York City; died on March 10, 1766, in New York City; daughter of Cadwallader Colden (surveyor general, lieutenant governor, and acting governor of the Province of New York) and Alice (Christy) Colden; sister of Alice Colden and Alexander Colden, who succeeded his father as surveyor general; educated by her scholar father and her well-educated gardener mother with the help of the scientific library at the family estate of Coldengham in Ulster (now Orange) County, New York; married Dr. William Farquhar, in 1759; children: one (died in infancy).

Considered to have been "the first lady on either side of the Atlantic" to master the new Linnaean method of plant nomenclature; created Flora—Nov Eboracensis (Botanic Manuscript), a compendium of drawings and descriptions of some 340 plants observed in Ulster County, possibly the most extensive botanical study of a single area carried out up to that time; corresponded with Dr. Alexander Garden, John Bartram, Peter Collinson, and other leading botanists of the period; contributed to Edinburgh Essays.

With some 300,000 plants known to modern botany, modern-day taxonomy (the classification of plants and animals) is a minor branch of the science. In the 18th century, when whole continents were accessible for the first time to Western students, the search for new and exotic plants and for their orderly classification was a worldwide passion. Long years of hardship, fortunes, and sometimes even life itself were sacrificed in the pursuit. "This was a great time for the science," H.W. Rickett has written, "when, upon the stimulus of [Linnaeus'] writing, many persons all over the world were contributing descriptions of species previously unknown. It is safe to say that Jane Colden was the only feminine member of that company."

Of the family into which Jane Colden, the first American woman botanist, was born, an early historian wrote that they "rose up like some mountain elevation, clad with the evergreens of wealth and adorned with the stately trees of honorable station." The wealth and honorable station were won by Jane Colden's father, Cadwallader, the son of an obscure Scotch dominie (schoolmaster). Sent to the University of Edinburgh to prepare himself for a clerical life, Cadwallader quickly turned to science. With a medical training gained in Edinburgh and London, he set out in 1716 to seek his fortune in the New World. He joined an aunt in Philadelphia where he proceeded to "practice physic" and engage in trade in the Indies.

In 1718, he abandoned active medical practice and accepted the position of surveyor general of the Province of New York and was soon thereafter granted a 3,000-acre wilderness estate, making him one of the great landowners of the colony. For more than half a century, he served as surveyor general, lieutenant governor and, for brief periods during the Stamp Act Protests, acting governor.

During his long years of political activity, Cadwallader wrote the still useful History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, thought and wrote extensively on a wide range of medical and scientific subjects, and corresponded voluminously with leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. His interests ranged from the cause and treatment of diseases such as cancer, smallpox, and yellow fever to sanitation, education, physics, chemistry, and what is now called psychology. He was America's first materialist philosopher, a Deist who believed in a Guiding Intelligence that did not intervene in or break established material laws. Benjamin Franklin once warned Cadwallader that if his religious views were generally known he would share the fate of Galileo.

This doughty and omnivorously curious little man, quintessentially American in so many ways, was in politics a Tory and, according to Alice Keys , a "martinet." His goal as a colonial administrator was to drive, not lead. Through all the tumultuous years preceding the American Revolution, he remained implacably loyal to the king of England. His written oath of allegiance, still preserved by the Historical Society of Newburgh, was signed in a bold and resolute hand. His sons were to pay a price for their Tory allegiance, but he himself died in 1776 before the outbreak of full-scale war.

Notable women of the 18th century were characteristically the daughters of notable and sympathetic fathers. Jane Colden had a strong and congenial mother as well. Alice Christy Colden was, like her husband, a Scottish parson's child, a capable and cultivated woman. She gave birth to ten children, raised eight to adulthood, educated them all without help of schools or tutors, managed the family affairs during her husband's long absences as surveyor and politician, kept his voluminous records, and aided in the lively flow of his correspondence. Her "free" time she seems to have spent in her garden.

Jane, her parents' second daughter and fifth child, was born in 1724 in New York City, a metropolis of 8,000 inhabitants. Soon thereafter, Cadwallader moved his wife and family of young children up the Hudson to the remote wilderness estate previously granted him. The manor named Coldengham, which he already had under partial cultivation, was nine miles from the tiny riverside settlement of Newburgh. There, so Dr. Colden claimed, the only neighbors were wolves, bears, and other wild beasts. He seems not to have mentioned the nearby Native Americans who were not yet considered the threat that they would later become.

Although the site was remote and undramatic, much of it under dense forest cover, it was an ideal setting for botanical exploration. From the blood-root and Jack-in-the-pulpit of early spring through summer's brilliant loose strife to the golden rod of autumn—all to be seen in modern-day Orange County—a succession of flowering plants awaited a talented observer.

At Coldengham, Jane grew up in a self-sufficient, close-knit family. She early learned from her mother to practice "economy and virtue." There still exists a "Memorandum of Cheese Making in 1756," written in Alice's hand on five sheets of foolscap. It is a careful and painstakingly detailed account of a year's cheese-making, including methods, purchases, and amounts bought, also failures. The latter must have been rare, since one guest to the manor wrote, "She makes the best cheese I have eaten in America."

Cadwallader had further plans for his diligent Jane. "I have a daughter," he wrote to a European correspondent, "who has an inclination to reading and a curiosity for natural philosophy or natural history and a sufficient capacity for attaining a competent knowledge." To Gronovius, the noted Dutch botanist, he wrote:

I (often) thought that Botany is an amusement which may be made greater to the Ladies who are often at a loss to fill up their time (and that) it would be made agreeable to them (it would prevent their employing so much of their time in trifling amusements as they do). Their natural curiosity and the pleasure they take in the beauty and variety of dress seems to fit them for it (far more than men). The chief reason that few or none of them have hitherto applied themselves to this study I believe is because all the books of any value are wrote in Latin and so filled with technical words that the obtaining the necessary previous knowledge (attended with) so (much) tiresome and disagreeable that they are discouraged at the first set out and give it over before they can receive any pleasure in the pursuit.

Although he opined that Latin was not for women, Cadwallader ordered Tournefort's Institutiones Herbariae and Morison's Historia Plantarum from Peter Collinson in Edinburgh. These he must have translated into English for Jane as he translated botanical terminology and parts of Linnaeus' work. He found his pupil "ingenious," quick to learn and apply the new Linnaean system.

Only 17 years Jane's senior, Carl Linnaeus had become famous well beyond his native Sweden by the age of 30. Like a number of other botanists, Cadwallader among them, Linnaeus was a physician by training and a close student of Aristotle. He took from the Greek philosopher the idea of an orderly pattern of plant and animal life, but he rejected the early 18th-century chaos of nomenclature, including the many religious names inherited from the monastery gardens of the Middle Ages. Rational naming he considered essential to any true scientific study, and he created a system by which each plant was to be identified by a universally accepted two-part Latin name, first the genus, second the species. Plants could for the first time be traced from author to author and botanical knowledge be reliably exchanged.

Linnaeus' taxonomy has been modified with time, but the brilliance of his basic concept reached round the scientific world. A pre-Darwinian, like his contemporaries, Linnaeus had no notion of evolving species, believing that God had created animals and plants in an unchanging, coherent, and beautiful pattern. He considered himself blessed in having the ability and opportunity to observe and reveal the divine mysteries through his explorations and writings. In Pennsylvania, Quaker John Bartram, whom Linnaeus considered the world's greatest natural botanist, wrote, "It is through this telescope, I see God in his glory." Cadwallader must have shared this point of view and transmitted it to his daughter.

Confident of Jane's facility in observation and classification, he wrote to numerous scientist friends offering her services in procuring and exchanging seeds and dried plants. Soon Colden herself was carrying on correspondence with the leading botanists of the day. By the 1750s, though she had never been as far from home as Bartram's botanical gardens in Philadelphia, she had become something of an international phenomenon.

Earlier Cadwallader had written Plantae Coldenghamiae, a paper on the plants at Coldengham, which Linnaeus had published. Colden set about expanding her father's work. She outlined for herself a project by which she would report on some 340 local plants, sketching and classifying each by the Linnaean system. Although never quite completed, Colden's was probably the most extensive botanical study of a single area accomplished up to that time. The drawings were done in pen and ink, washed with neutral tints. Simple, even crude in execution, they are not useful for identification, but some remain useful for confirmation. Any representations in color, which one visitor to Coldengham claimed to have seen and admired, have vanished.

It is Colden's plant descriptions that are remarkable for detail and accuracy. Her father stated that she had noted "particulars" that no other botanist, including himself, had observed. He believed, too, that three or four plants were entirely her new discoveries. Each detailed essay typically used as outline a list of 18th-century botanical terms. Each noted in addition the site where plants grew, their color, time of blooming and fruiting. Also included was occasional medicinal information, some gained from the "Indians" and "our Country People." "This pedicularis is called by the Country People Betony," she wrote, "and they make Thee of the Leaves, et use it for the Fever and Ague et for sikness of the Stomak."

One ounce of the (Asclepius) Root, chiped into small pieces, to which put a pint and a half of boiling water, & let it stew for about one hour, of this Decoction drink half a Tea cup full, every hour or two, and you bin certainly cured from the bloody Flux [dysentery], and better is when you boil the Root in Claret than in Water. This cure was learned from the Indians. [Poke Weed root] is very useful in the treatment of cancirs.

The infrequent images in Colden's writing were plain country images. One leaf was "awlshaped," another "the size of a goose quill," another resembled "the lips of a hare." As candid as her father, who may have lost election to the Royal Society by seeming to disagree with Newton's explanation of gravity, she declared that Linnaeus had missed details that she had noted.

Despite its wilderness location, noted visitors came to Coldengham. Peter Kalm, a Finnish botanist and apostle of Linnaeus, spent a night on his way to plant collecting in Canada. John Bartram, Royal Botanist for the colonies, spent two days and brought with him his teenaged son William. William himself was to become a naturalist and nature writer whose accounts of his travels in the New World would in turn inspire the English Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Dr. Alexander Garden came from South Carolina.

Visits led to correspondence. Bartram wrote to "Respected Friend Jane Colden," discussing plant specimen with her. Garden, after whom the gardenia or Cape Jasmine was named, sent "seeds, mostly Persian … a pretty parcell … from … the Physician to the Prince Royal of Russia." In one letter to Cadwallader, Garden made the mistake of referring to Jane as "your lovely daughter" but apologized profusely when both father and daughter were affronted, on what grounds it is unclear.

In 1748 and 1749, Jane Colden and her sister Alice petitioned and received warrant for a patent for a larger piece of land than their father's original estate. Whether they intended to carve out their own estate or whether this was a legal manoeuvre on Cadwallader's part is not known. Whatever the plans, they did not come to fruition. The threat of Indian raids on the New York frontier increased, and in 1756 Cadwallader moved with his daughters to Spring Hill, an estate on Long Island. There, Jane Colden helped to create, so the sparse records suggest, one of the great gardens in the Colonies.

Colden's scientific studies were apparently at an end. At age 35, in 1759, she married Dr. William Farquhar, "a widower; a very worthy good Scotchman, and for some years before the Revolutionary War a practitioner of medicine, distinguished for his knowledge and ability, in New York City and vicinity." The marriage seems to have been a happy one, though fleeting. In 1766, Colden gave birth; she died, along with her child, soon after.

The adventures of Colden's Botanic Manuscript, labeled Nov Eboracum by Latinists of the period, are shrouded in some mystery. It appears that during the American Revolution, a decade or more after Colden's death, the manuscript fell into the hands of Captain Frederick von Wangenheim, a Hessian officer who happened also to be a Prussian-trained forester. Recognizing the unique quality of the work, von Wangenheim carried the manuscript back across the Atlantic to the University of Göttingen. It passed from there to the University of Marberg, then to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the British Royal Society, and upon his death to its permanent home in the British Museum where it remains today.

A condensed version of the Botanic Manuscript was published in 1963 under the auspices of the Garden Clubs of Dutchess and Orange counties. The original manuscript was on display for the first time in the United States in 1976 as part of the traveling Bicentennial exhibit "Remember the Ladies." A wildflower sanctuary at General Knox headquarters at Vails Gate, New York, bears Jane Colden's name.

sources:

Colden, Jane. Botanic Manuscript. NY: Chanticleer Press, 1963.

Dexter, Elisabeth. Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.

Edward, James, ed. Notable American Women 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Hagberg, Knut. Carl Linnaeus. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.

Keys, Alice. Cadwallader Colden. NY: AMS Press, 1967.

Vail, Anne Murray. "Jane Colden, an Early New York Botanist," in Torreya. 1907.

collections:

The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, N.Y. Historical Society Collections, vols. L–LVI, LXVII–LXVIII, 1917–23, 1934–35.

Margery Evernden , Professor Emerita, English Department, University of Pittsburgh, and freelance writer