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ecause America’s eighteenth and early nineteenth century settlement patterns reflect a westward orientation away from the coastal cities toward the less heavily populated interior, contemporary (twentieth century) Americans sometimes forget America’s southern frontier during the colonial period.
After the French and Indian War (1754–1763), wealthy English speculators were encouraged, with financial incentives from the English government, to establish colonies in the newly acquired Floridas. These speculators, in turn, had reason to stimulate a southern migration in America to augment their personally sponsored emigration of colonists from Europe.
As will be shown later in this report, John Bartram’s trip to the Floridas in 1765 was both the result of and cause for such stimulation. To a botanist such as John, the Southeast offered unlimited possibilities for discovery. Not only were a great profusion of plant species known to grow in the semitropical climate of Florida, but the land had the further intrigue of being almost entirely unexplored.
William Bartram’s exposure to such new territory appealed to his broad range of interests and greatly stimulated his desire to experience more. The young naturalist’s selection of the Southeast for his “great adventure” of 1773–1777 is not surprising in view of the region’s many fascinations for him. The variety of the terrain, the abundance of wildlife, and the relatively undisturbed nature of the Indian population made the Southeast ideally suited to the kind of exploration Bartram wished to undertake. In order to fully understand the nature of William’s eighteenth century trip, we must first examine the physiographic and cultural composition of the Southeast as it was in Bartram’s time and as it exists today.(1)
1. For this information the Bartram Trail Conference is indebted to Mr. Horace P. Morgan for his Bartram Trail Conference Technical Study: “Description of the Southeast Region,” 1978.
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