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Humphry and Moses Marshall papers, 1721-1863

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Summary

Creator:
Marshall, Humphry, 1722-1801 and Marshall, Moses, 1758-1813
Abstract:
The Humphry and Moses Marshall papers primarily document the careers of botanist Humphry Marshall and his nephew and business associate, Moses Marshall.
Extent:
1.25 linear feet
Language:
English
Authors:
Collection processed and finding aid created by Manuscripts Division Staff, 1990; Shannon Wait, March 2010

Background

Scope and Content:

The Humphry and Moses Marshall papers consist of 233 items: 181 letters (including drafts), 15 legal documents, 11 manuscripts, 10 poems, 4 account books, and several each of books, letter books, arithmetic notebooks, and broadsides. The materials span from 1721-1863.

The first series contains correspondence and a few legal documents and writings, arranged chronologically. The correspondence dates from 1733 to 1863 and is predominantly incoming. Humphry Marshall is the recipient of the bulk of the material (approximately 40%), followed by Moses Marshall (approx. 30%). The majority of the outgoing correspondence comes from the two "letterbooks" kept by Moses Marshall in 1791 and 1793. These books contain correspondence from a couple of days each, but provide a record of Marshall's response to inquiries from clients.

The bulk of correspondence prior to 1800 relates to Marshall's horticultural and botanical operations. Substantial numbers of orders are for plants and seeds from clients in other parts of the United States, England, Ireland, France, and Germany, and communications with middle men in the operation detail methods of packaging and shipping. Also of botanical interest is the correspondence with Marshall's "agents" in the field, including Moses Mendenhall, John and James Watson, Matthias King, Samuel Kramsh, and James Kenny. These men were admirers and friends of Humphry Marshall, and provided him with specimens collected from various regions of the country. The unsuccessful search for wild Franklinia alatamaha is mentioned in several letters (April 8, 1788: "There is not a plant of the Franklinia to be found"), and other letters include discussions of scientific expeditions either actualized or planned, mostly involving the participation of Moses Marshall. On November 14, 1786, Humphry described the logistics of tracking down ginseng, providing insight into the duties of plant collectors: "both of you being obliged to…encamp in the mountains strike up a fire & lie by it all night in the morning…climb up the sides of the mountains and dig towards evening…about 20 days in Going and Coming home again & digging the roots packing up &c." The content of the letters does not indicate the Marshalls' scientific interests or abilities, but this correspondence provides documentation for the complex network used by the Marshalls to collect, sell and distribute plants.

Approximately 18 letters relate to the Revolutionary War (see "Subject Index" under "Additional Descriptive Data"). These include letters that indicate Marshall's support for the nonimportation agreements (January 6, 1775), second hand reports of the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 25, 1775) and of Yorktown (August 24, 1781), and an important series of correspondence from Samuel Preston Moore relating to the resignation of the trustees of the General Loan Office when American revolutionaries seized control (June 17 and 21, 1777). Also significant are two letters from Quaker conscientious objectors on the morality of paying taxes to support military activities (undated c. 1780 letter; July 14, 1781), a letter relating to the North Carolina Regulator insurrection (March 3, 1771), and one concerning the arrest by American forces of Quakers suspected of Loyalist sympathies (September 6, 1777). Finally, in the pre-Revolutionary period, the letters of James Kenny provide excellent descriptions of plant collecting and the area around Fort Pitt in 1759-60.

The items from 1840-1863 mainly relate to Moses Marshall, Jr. Most notable in among them are several letters from William Darlington written as he was preparing his Memorial to Humphry and Moses Marshall in 1848 and 1849. Moses, Jr's pro-Confederacy political views are clearly expressed in the series of three speeches written during the Civil War, also included in the series.

The Poetry series includes 10 undated poems. The Bound Materials series comprises the arithmetic notebooks of Jacob Martin, whose relationship to the Marshalls is unclear; Darlington’s manuscript, Historical Introduction to Bartram & Marshall, Marshall's copy of Dover's Useful Miscellanies; and nine uncut and unfolded sets of signatures from Arbustrum Americanum.

Biographical / Historical:

Humphry Marshall

Humphry Marshall was born in West Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1722, the eighth child of Abraham and Mary Hunt Marshall. His parents, Quaker immigrants from Derbyshire, England, provided him with only a rudimentary English education, which ceased altogether at age 12, when he was apprenticed to a stonemason. However, from very early in life, Marshall was drawn to the study of natural history and continued his education on his own, reading widely. With the encouragement of his cousin, the botanist John Bartram, Marshall developed considerable practical skill in botany and natural history, and began to cultivate friendships with other scientists in America and abroad in the 1750s. Eventually, his correspondents included the British botanists John Fothergill, Peter Collinson, Sir Joseph Banks, and John Coakley Lettsom; the American scientists Thomas Parke, Benjamin Franklin, George Logan, Joseph Storrs, Timothy Pickering, John Dickinson, and Caspar Wistar; and French scientists and plant collectors including Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, the Comtesse de Tesse, and Conrad-Alexandre Gérard; a number of German, Dutch, Swedish and Irish plant collectors and scientists.

In 1748, Marshall married Sarah Pennock (ca.1720-1766) and took up the management of his father's farm near the west branch of the Brandywine River. During the next few years, his time was largely consumed by farming; however, he continued to use free moments to pursue his botanical research. By the late 1750s, he began to exchange locally collected specimens with natural historians in other parts of the country and Great Britain, receiving scientific equipment, books, exotic specimens, money, or marketable goods such as linen in exchange. By 1764, when he began a major enlargement of his father's farmhouse, his botanical work had advanced to a stage that, necessitated his adding a conservatory for the culture of rare plants, probably the first such structure in Chester County.

Upon the death of his father in 1767, Marshall was left a substantial inheritance, enabling him to concentrate more time and resources on his botanical work. By this time, his correspondence with the British botanist, John Fothergill, had developed into an especially fruitful relationship, for Fothergill not only encouraged Marshall to collect plants beyond the confines of Chester County, but he paid well for Marshall's efforts. Equally important, Fothergill helped introduce Marshall to other botanists and plant collectors who had the resources to pay for American plants. Within a few years, Marshall found that he could depend almost entirely on horticulture and plant collecting for his income. His business expanded rapidly by means of a network of relationships established through family members, fellow Quakers, and fellow scientists.

In 1772, Marshall established a botanical garden on his estate, stocking it with herbaceous and arboreal representatives of the local flora and as many exotic plants as he could obtain from other parts of the nation and Europe. The following year, he began the construction of a new house adjacent to the garden, handling all phases of the construction by himself, and in that year, he was selected as a trustee of the General Loan Office. Despite pro-Independence sentiments, including long-standing support for the non-importation agreements, Marshall was in a precarious position as a pacifist and Quaker during the early days of the Revolution. He carefully monitored the events of the war as they unfolded, and was himself caught up when, in 1777, the Trustees of the Loan Office resigned as a body. Under the leadership of Samuel Preston Moore, the Trustees felt that to remain true to their affirmations that they would carry out the business of the crown, they should resign rather than follow the new laws.

Marshall's publishing career included contributions on tortoises, sunspots, and agriculture, but he is most remembered for Abrustrum Americanum (1785), the first botanical treatise written by a native American on American plants, produced in America. Despite slow sales in the United States, its use of Linnaean taxonomic nomenclature (though the plants are arranged alphabetically in the text) considerably enhanced Marshall's reputation among his European clientele. His scientific work and service to the scientific community earned Marshall honorary memberships in the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture and the American Philosophical Society.

Following the death of his first wife, Marshall married Margaret Minshall (1744-1823) in 1788. Neither marriage produced children. In the last two years of his life, his vision was greatly impaired by cataracts, for which he underwent an apparently unsuccessful surgery. He died in 1801 and was buried at Bradford Meeting House.

Moses Marshall

Moses Marshall was born in West Bradford, Pennsylvania, on November 30, 1758, to Humphry's younger brother, James Marshall and his wife, Sarah. Moses received an English and classical education, and from 1776 through 1779, he studied medicine in Wilmington, Delaware, under Dr. Nicholas Way. The Revolution, and particularly the nearby Battle of the Brandywine (1777), provided Moses a unique opportunity to sharpen his surgical skills. Moses soon abandoned his medical practice in favor of assisting his uncle in his expanding botanical and horticultural enterprise.

By late 1778, he was participating fully in his uncle's operations, assisting in locating, identifying, propagating, and shipping plant specimens, and he became quite a skilled "practical" botanist in his own right. His most significant contributions were in the preparation of Arbustrum Americanum, and the role he played on numerous exploring expeditions undertaken for the benefit of his uncle and their patrons. Moses appears to have taken great relish in these expeditions, and it was partly for his benefit that his uncle pressed scientific friends, including Franklin, Wistar, Jefferson (albeit indirectly), and members of the American Philosophical Society, to finance and organize a major expedition to the Missouri River region in 1785.

Moses' interest in botany appears to have waned by the mid-1790s. In 1796, Gov. Mifflin appointed him Justice of the Peace in Chester County, and his duties in this capacity occupied a great deal of his time. Moses' focus seems further to have shifted away from botany upon his marriage to Alice Pennock in 1797. The couple had six children. By the time of his uncle's death, Marshall had more or less washed his hands of the botanical and horticultural business, suggesting that he no longer had any time to fill orders for patrons and that his uncle's notes probably held little information of value to other botanists. Moses Marshall died in Philadelphia on October 13th, 1813.

Moses Marshall, Jr.

The life of Moses Marshall, Jr., is considerably less well known than that of his father or his great uncle. Moses, Jr., studied medicine in Philadelphia during the 1830s, and established a general practice in West Bradford shortly thereafter. Apparently he lectured publicly on scientific subjects, at least periodically, during the 1840s or 50s. Politically, Moses, Jr., aligned himself with the Democratic Party during the Civil War period, opposed actions to keep the South in the Union by force, and (unlike his mildly abolitionist great uncle), did not seem to consider slavery a major evil.

Acquisition Information:
1990, 1999. M-2549; M-4048 .
Processing information:

Cataloging funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the "We the People" project.

Arrangement:

The collection is arranged into three series: "Correspondence, Writings, and Documents," "Poetry," and "Bound Materials."

Rules or Conventions:
Finding aid prepared using Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)

Contents

Using These Materials

Info for Visitors

How to Request

Ordering Reproductions

Download PDF Finding Aid
RESTRICTIONS:

The collection is open for research.

USE & PERMISSIONS:

Copyright status is unknown

PREFERRED CITATION:

Humphry and Moses Marshall Papers, William L. Clements Library, The University of Michigan

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Collection

Humphry and Moses Marshall papers, 1721-1863
Total components 220
Items available online Online 216
Last indexed 2025-02-09