On September 17, Constitution Day, Patrick Spero—the incoming chief executive officer of the American Philosophical Society’s Library & Museum in Philadelphia—will release his new book, The Scientist Turned Spy: André Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Conspiracy of 1793. It explores the incredible story of an explorer, André Michaux, drawn into a plot orchestrated by the French government to exploit tensions between American settlers and Spanish authorities in the Louisiana region, with the aim of setting up an independent republic. In this episode, Spero joins Jeffrey Rosen to discuss the history of this conspiracy and explore new evidence implicating Thomas Jefferson in the plot, as well as the American Philosophical Society and Jefferson’s role in it.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Patrick Spero is the chief executive officer of the American Philosophical Society’s Library & Museum in Philadelphia. As a scholar of early American history, Dr. Spero specializes in the era of the American Revolution. His most recent book is The Scientist Turned Spy: André Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Conspiracy of 1793 (2024).
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Additional Resource:
Excerpt from Interview: Spero explains André Michaux’s involvement in Genêt’s plot and how Jefferson’s opposition to federal policies led him to support private, civil funding for scientific expeditions.
Patrick Spero: The story behind André Michaux is that he was this botanist sent over by the King of France with the idea that you can discover all these new crops in what was British North America, which had largely been sealed off to French science, and find new crops that can be used in the French agricultural system and really improve society for France. And Michaux unexpectedly gets caught into this plot with Edmond Genêt. Genêt has these secret orders to invade Spanish New Orleans, and Jefferson, and I'm sure we'll go down this, gets sucked into this plot inadvertently. And I have to try and explain how Jefferson, in some ways, passively supports the potential invasion of Spanish New Orleans. And this goes against, of course, Washington's own foreign policy. And what this gets at is, I think, the conundrum that Thomas Jefferson found himself in that first administration. When Jefferson and others created a new nation in 1776, they all believed that political parties were signs of corruption.
They were the embodiments of self-interest. The reason parties existed was to serve a specific interest, not the public good. And so the idea of parties was really an anathema to their idea of how a political body should function, especially a republic. And so here's Jefferson now in the Washington administration, where he realizes Washington's policies on the economy, which as you mentioned, was about centralizing the economy, creating a national bank. Hamilton wants to fund economic projects directly, what were called internal improvements, which today we might call infrastructure. And Jefferson just sees this as going against all the principles of the American Revolution. And so he has to try and navigate in this first administration where the idea of parties is not supposed to exist. And yet he sees that he's opposed to these policies. He's an outsider, even though he's inside the administration. And this creates an enormous amount of angst for Jefferson. But also in this incident where he is trying to raise private funds, I think he's also trying to show how he believes society should work. And so how should you fund a scientific expedition?
Well, he raised money from all these people who were in the government, but it wasn't from the government itself. And in some ways, this does embody Jefferson's idea about the role of the federal government and also the role of civil institutions like the American Philosophical Society. So if you were to think about how Jefferson saw the relationship between civil society and civic institutions and the federal government, the path he chooses to take with this expedition follows a Jeffersonian path, where through a voluntary association, not the federal government.
Excerpt from Interview: Spero highlights André Michaux’s contributions to natural history and the American Philosophical Society’s long-standing commitment to funding scientific research.
Patrick Spero: Yes, so the plot just kind of fades away, but this political culture continues in Kentucky, and we've talked a lot about that, but there are some really interesting legacies, sometimes hidden. So Michaux himself, I argue, is probably the greatest natural history explorer of his generation. When he returned to France in 1796, he covered almost all of East and North America. He travels as far north as the Hudson Bay, as far south as Florida, and all the way west to the Mississippi River. He identifies a thousand new species of plants. He ships back 50 to 60 thousand specimens to France. He also imports, for the first time, a number of plants and flowers that we see everyday in our gardens. The mimosa tree is often credited to Michaux. Michaux is really part of this international exchange of seeds, all driven by this idea that if we exchange plants and crops, we can actually improve humanity. We can eradicate the famine because we'll be able to find more productive crops that we can introduce into our own communities. So Michaux's legacy is very much around us, surrounding us, certainly hidden every day here in America.
Michaux ends up going off to Madagascar where he dies. Jefferson, of course, never gives up this dream of a transcontinental expedition. And in 1803, he realized that with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. William Clark is the younger brother of George Rogers Clark, who was actually at the center of the Kentucky conspiracy himself. He was one of those generals willing to renounce his allegiance and invade New Orleans. And then Jefferson sends Meriwether Lewis to the American Philosophical Society before he leaves to get trained by the greatest scientists in America and also to get instruments. So the society played a central role in the start up of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And then when Jefferson receives the journals afterwards, he sends them off to the American Philosophical Society. So we are the stewards of the official journals of Lewis and Clark today here at the Philosophical Society. And in many ways, the spirit that animated the society is still present at the APS today. The APS is driven by this idea that the better we understand our world, the past and the present, the better we can make our communities today and also shape our future.
And just like the society funded the Michaux expedition for eventually over a million dollars of today's dollars it raised, they never spent it 'cause Michaux obviously was redirected by the Genêt conspiracy, but still the society has funded research for almost 300 years. Today we spend over $2 million a year in small grants to young scholars conducting research across the globe. We have funded researchers in every corner of earth except for Antarctica, but we want to find somebody we can fund in Antarctica. So if you're listening to this and you are a researcher and you do research in Antarctica, check out our funds, but we continue in that same spirit almost 300 years later.
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