The impact of fathers on the Founding Fathers

SALISBURY — George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among others, were scientists in addition to being revolutionaries.

And this is an overlooked aspect of the careers of these remarkable men.

So says Tom Shachtman, author of “Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment,” who spoke at the Scoville Memorial Library on Nov. 16.

Of the “founding fathers” group — Washington, John Adams and Jefferson (the first three presidents); James Madison, James Monroe, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton — almost all were fatherless.

Five of the founders’ fathers died before the boys were in puberty.

“Only Madison and Adams had reasonable relationships with their fathers.”

This meant these men had to learn to fend for themselves at an early age and that they were more open than others to new ideas, Shachtman said.

The young Benjamin Franklin made his fortune with his printing shop and by publishing his popular almanacs.

But upward social mobility eluded Franklin.

In 1743 he began the American Philosophical Society with botanist John Bartram and John Logan, who tutored Franklin in the sciences.

It didn’t have the immediate effect of elevating Franklin into the upper crust, but over time the society became extremely influential. Franklin, eventually, became the best-known man in the Western world, especially with his experiments involving electricity.

Washington, at age 16, was working as a surveyor, with all the mathematical knowledge that profession demanded.

He was also in a position of command — which came in handy later on, obviously.

John Adams, in 1755, was at Harvard reluctantly studying to become a minister. He met John Winthrop III, an astronomer and the second full professor of science at Harvard, and instantly became enamored of watching the skies though Winthrop’s telescopes.

Shachtman said Adams decided to train as a scientist, but then “talked himself out of it” and went to law school instead.

Jefferson, whose father died when he was 14, “had to take charge of his own education.”

While attending William and Mary, he met Dr. William Small and formed a quartet, with the lieutenant governor of Virginia, Francis Fauquier, and George Witt. The group met to talk philosophy and science, to play musical instruments and to eat and drink.

Shachtman said he was fond of an image of Adams and Jefferson, the future presidents, “on top of the highest buildings looking at far distant stars through their collegiate telescopes.”

Jefferson also engaged in an international scientific dispute. The French Comte de Buffon, an influential writer about natural history and science, believed the world was created perfect, and was subsequently spoiled by mankind.

The farther mankind got from Eden, the closer it got to degeneracy.

And America, so far from any conventionally recognizable Eden, was very degenerate indeed.

The Comte de Buffon took it further. American flora and fauna were small and weak, and the small sexual organs of the American Indians were representative of their small souls.

“It’s kind of odd but this was supposed to be science,” said Shachtman.

After the Revolution, Jefferson replaced Franklin as the American envoy in France. Still smarting decades later from the Comte de Buffon’s remarks about small American fauna, he had his hunter friends find, kill, stuff and ship the biggest moose they could find to France.

Not that he got an apology or a retraction — just a grudging acknowledgment that there might be something of interest in America after all.

Washington, who took command of the revolutionary army in 1775, was confronted with a smallpox epidemic.

It was serious. Shachtman said that in the first year of the war a whopping 17 percent of the American troops died from smallpox.

Washington did everything short of vaccination and isolation to combat the disease. He knew about vaccination, but there was a widespread prejudice against the technique, and both Congress and colonial legislatures had enacted laws forbidding it.

Not to mention it was difficult to make a case for isolating people for 21 days in the middle of a war.

By the end of 1776, the war was going badly, Shachtman said; but when Washington pulled off his crossing of the Delaware, the resulting political clout allowed him to go ahead with the smallpox prevention regimen.

Shachtman said the troops and recruits were ordered to be inoculated and isolated; this was done in a low-key manner. 

“They’d take them to out-of-the-way places, like Kingston.”

He added that, “Historians have said that Washington dealing with smallpox was the single most important strategic decision” of the Revolution.

James Madison had the misfortune to attend Princeton at a time when science was not taught at that institution.

“But he was scientific in how he went around selling the Constitution,” Shachtman observed. Madison’s selling pitch included his research on “what worked and what didn’t work in democratic societies.”

Since Madison read Greek, Latin and Hebrew, he was able to fortify his argument with citations from the ancient texts — the primary source material.

Meanwhile, bored delegates at the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia could amuse themselves by watching a competition to launch the first practical steamboat, between two inventors, John Fitch (an ancestor of Lime Rock’s own John Fitch) and James Rumsey.

Jefferson was the most scientific-minded of the early presidents, Shachtman said. “He nearly bankrupted himself buying scientific instruments.”

He wrote a three-volume treatise on scientific instruments for his master’s degree and, when he became president in 1801, he “put smallpox to bed” by advocating for the Jenner vaccine, developed from the observation that milkmaids rarely got smallpox, instead contracting cowpox, a milder form of the disease. After exposure, they were immune to the more virulent version.

And, of course, Jefferson sponsored the Lewis and Clark expedition, a continuation of an earlier attempt at exploring the West during the previous administration, of John Adams.

Lewis and Clark brought the Jenner vaccine and equipment along.

“It was very much a scientific expedition,” Shachtman said. They found 150 previously unknown animal species and 1,000 new plants.

As the reports from the expedition came back, “Jefferson had copies made for every member of Congress.”