Fighting the Hessian Fly
American and British Responses to Insect Invasion, 1776-1789
Philip J. Pauly
The origin of the name was quite specific. In 1788, George Morgan—colonel in the
Revolution, member of the American Philosophical Society, and gentleman-farmer
in New Jersey—explained to British consul-general John Temple: “The name of
Hessian Fly was given to this insect by myself & a Friend early after its first appearance on Long Island, as expressive of our Sentiments of the two Animals—We
agreed to use some Industry in spreading the name to add, if possible, to the detestation in which the human Insect was generally held by our yeomanry & to hand it
down with all possible Infamy to the next Generation as a useful National Prejudice—It is now become the most opprobrious Term our Language affords & the
greatest affront our Chimney Sweepers & even our Slaves can give or receive, is to
call or be called Hessian.”1
The background of the insect itself was much less clear. The Hessian fly (in
modern classifications a gall midge, Mayetiola destructor) suddenly became visible in the late 1770s on farms around New York City, where it destroyed entire
fields of wheat in the course of a few days. Scientifically literate individuals in both
North America and Europe were soon debating both its geographic origin and its
recent and potential migrations. If it was an Old World insect, where had it been
living, apparently unnoticed? Why had it crossed the ocean at that moment, more
than a century after Europeans first planted wheat on the Atlantic seaboard? Had it,
in fact, had been brought by the German-speaking troops sent across the Atlantic by
the British government to put down the American rebellion? If, on the other hand,
it was indigenous to America, how had it learned to feed on wheat; and, more
importantly, could it reach, or be kept from reaching, the fields of England?
Study of the early history of the Hessian fly is important from four perspectives.
First, it illuminates the dynamics of the science and policy of biological invasion
in the era when tools for investigating, discussing, and interdicting insects were first
taking shape. Recent work has highlighted how important and how intricate horticultural introductions were in the eighteenth century, but much less is known
486 Environmental History
about issues involving novel pests during this period. The early discussions of the
Hessian fly display struggles over insect identities and life histories, interactions
between knowledge and interest, and pathways for structuring prudent policy.2
The second area of significance comes from the fly’s status as a participant in the
Atlantic world during the Age of Revolution. Elizabeth Fenn describes how that
familiar biological agent, smallpox, was able to affect events on a continental scale
in the 1770s because of new human travel patterns. The Hessian fly—previously
unknown—began its movements during the same period, and within a decade
linked such transatlantic odd couples as Flatbush farmers and the destroyers of the
Bastille.3
Looking beyond the eighteenth century, I suggest that the Hessian fly provides a
useful starting point for examining how nationalism—involving issues of both
political sovereignty and, more diffusely, xenophobia—has influenced the science
and policy of biological invasions. As the first new environmental problem confronted by citizens of an independent United States, the insect shaped American
naturalists’ terminology, imagery, and expectations. It is easier, from a distance of
two centuries, to see the implications buzzing around the Hessian fly, than to deal
with the contemporary connotations of, for example, Africanized killer bees or
Asian tiger mosquitos.4
Finally, studying the scientific and diplomatic responses to Hessian flies indicates how historiographic emphasis on nationalism can be consistent with reliance
on naturalism. These men of the Enlightenment saw themselves as naturalists in
both the disciplinary and philosophical senses of the word. Yet for them the natural
economy was a political one, in which science and diplomacy functioned as forces.
Even if their understanding of nature and culture was incomplete, their comfort
with this complexity should be taken seriously.
The entry of the Hessian fly into transatlantic history occurred in three phases.
The first was centered in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut between the late
1770s and early 1788. Various farmers and scientific gentlemen gradually recognized
the existence of a phenomenologically new and problematic insect. Prominent
Americans, including Morgan, Noah Webster, Jeremiah Wadsworth, Samuel
Mitchill, Matthew Carey, and George Washington, discussed it in correspondence,
learned organizations, and national publications. Overcoming the Hessian fly was
one aspect of the struggle in the 1780s to constitute the United States as a nation.
A second, more intense, phase opened in London in May 1788. George III and the
Privy Council, advised by botanical explorer and Royal Society president Joseph
Banks, banned American wheat in order to keep the new insect from England.
Their action was based on sketchy information, but was grounded on fears of agricultural disaster that were large in scope, plausible in theory, and appealing to
predominant economic and political interests. Banks’s repeatedly revised rationales for agricultural quarantine expressed both English leaders’ understanding of
the interrelations between the natural and political economies and their views on
risk and on burdens of proof in environmental policy.
Finally, from August 1788 to the summer of 1790, events occurred on a stage that
encompassed the United States, Canada, England, France, the Netherlands, and
Fighting the Hessian Fly 487
numerous German states. English leaders were able to establish as reasonable a
policy grounded explicitly on lack of certainty because they mobilized a combined scientific-diplomatic network far more effective than anything possessed by
such friends of America as Thomas Paine. In late 1789, however, a more compelling
environmental crisis induced the Privy Council suddenly to reverse its carefully
justified prohibition. The indefinite risks posed by an insect were less compelling
than the immediate prospect of riot and revolution.
It is surprising that this story of environmental disaster and diplomacy, involving
many of the most influential individuals in North America and Europe in the late
eighteenth century, has not been detailed before.5 I emphasize narrative in order to
provide a new path through a canonical period in American and, to some extent,
British, history. Linking migrations, science, and diplomacy highlights the Hessian
fly’s substantial participation in the Age of Revolution. In addition, I hope to
advance a temperate and empirical approach in an area that is dominated by the
crisis terminology of aliens, invaders, and killers.6
Prospect and Retrospect
George Morgan anticipated life as a rural republican gentleman. Part of a prosperous Philadelphia family, he worked before the revolution as a mercantile agent for
British forces on the far western frontier, while at the same time participating in the
newly-established American Philosophical Society. He then served the cause of
independence as supply officer for the American army in western Pennsylvania and
as an emissary to the Ohio Indian tribes. Morgan, like others in the revolutionary
elite, anticipated that his prosperity ultimately would be secured through claims to
western lands. But his immediate interest, as the war wound down, was to exchange
his sword for a plowshare—to cultivate domestic happiness, agricultural improvement, and republican virtue. In 1779 he purchased a 300-acre farm on the outskirts
of Princeton, New Jersey. With a panoramic view of the Navesink Highlands and
toward the distant Atlantic Ocean, he gave his estate the descriptive, if not very
imaginative, name, “Prospect.”7
Morgan’s property had been heavily damaged by imperial forces in the first
months of the war. In the autumn of 1776, before George Washington and his army
memorably crossed the icy Delaware River and pushed the invaders back to New
York, the occupying Hessians—unable to purchase supplies from sullen natives—
had appropriated food and liquor and burned all the available wood. Morgan put
his yeoman neighbors and his slaves to work rebuilding Prospect’s fences, planting
trees to replace those cut down, and creating new plots for gardens. On those foundations Morgan initiated improvements. Following the guidance of English agricultural reformers, notably Arthur Young, he built a farmyard designed scientifically
to facilitate manure recovery. He planted the fertilized fields that stretched southeast from his house toward the Stony Brook (now Lake Carnegie) with wheat.8
Morgan’s activities combined economic calculation, patriotic display, and leadership aspirations. Wheat, which could be easily exported directly from New Jersey
488 Environmental History
to the West Indies, Newfoundland, or Europe, would provide the cash income
necessary for his continued solvency. The rebuilding and beautification of Prospect (with carefully recorded plantings of fruit trees in particular) would show that
Americans could repair “the works of death, desolation and tyranny” that the Declaration of Independence had ascribed to the “large Armies of foreign Mercenaries”
being sent to the United States in 1776. Morgan’s farmyard, as well as his design for
a humane beehive, which could be opened without destroying the “useful creatures” inside, were models for American agricultural gentility; he described them
proudly to the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, an organization he
helped to found in 1785.9
A variety of outside forces, however, repeatedly undercut Morgan’s efforts. The
revolutionary elite’s lack of leadership showed itself when the Continental Congress appeared, literally, on Morgan’s doorstep, seeking a place to meet after being
driven from Philadelphia in 1783 by unpaid troops.10 The compatibility of political
independence and mercantile prosperity was put into question as postwar British
trade restrictions prevented the export of food crops from the United States to
Canada and the Caribbean. Finally, agricultural production itself was threatened
by the gradual spread of a previously unknown insect that attacked the crop on
which Morgan and other landowners were pinning their hopes.
In the spring of 1786 Morgan watched his wheatfields with foreboding. The
manured plants came up green and lush, but close examination found “White
Worms which after a few days turn of a Chesnut Colour—They are deposited by a
Fly between the Leaves & the Stalk of the green Wheat & generally at the lowermost Joint, and are inevitable Death to the Stalks they attack.” These fluid-sucking
larvae stunted the growth of the plants and damaged the stalks. Wind and rain
knocked the plants over and made the sparse crop unharvestable. All that came
from the fields later in the summer was a cloud of insects. Morgan wrote in his
journal that “we call [this insect] the Hessian Fly.”11
What was new in 1786 was not discovery of the insect, but focused attention and
the resolution to act.12 As in the political realm, where the revolutionary elite
shifted in that year from vague expressions of anxiety about the future of the United
States to coherent statements regarding a “crisis” and to the organization of the
constitutional convention, Morgan and others began to articulate the pest’s importance, form networks of communication, and make the “Hessian fly” an object of
general awareness and action. In July, Morgan persuaded his neighbor Thomas
Clark, who was traveling to central Long Island, to collect information about the
fly problem from farmers en route. Two months later, a letter describing the insect’s
life history and suggesting control methods began to circulate privately.13 In January 1787 a new organization, the New York Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, discussed the (still publicly unnamed) “insect destroying the wheat,” and the
governor of New York, George Clinton, used his address opening the state legislature to highlight “the fatal ravages” that wheat had suffered “since the commencement of the late war” and to ask citizens to share remedies.14
The insect became a full participant on the national stage, and gained its distinctive name, in the American Museum, a new magazine created by Philadelphia
Fighting the Hessian Fly 489
Figure 1: No illustrations of the Hessian fly were published in the eighteenth
century. This wood engraving of developmental stages was prepared by E. L.
Trouvelot (the artist-naturalist who introduced the gypsy moth to North America)
for A. S. Packard, “Hessian Fly: Its Ravages, Habits, and Means of Preventing its
Increase,” United States Entomological Commission, Bulletin #4 (1880). It shows a,
egg; b, larva; c, pupal case or “flaxseed”; d, pupa; e, adult, natural size, laying eggs; f,
female; g, male; h, flaxseed inside damaged wheat stalk; i, parasitic wasp.
490 Environmental History
printer Matthew Carey to revive the spirit of 1776 and to strengthen communication among the national elite. The inaugural issue (February 1787), which evocatively reprinted Thomas Paine’s articulation of revolutionary consciousness,
Common Sense, warned in an editorial paragraph that “that destructive insect, the
Hessian fly,” was spreading gradually from Staten Island, “where it was discovered
about eight years ago.” It warned that unless a remedy were found, “the whole
continent will be over-run—a calamity more to be lamented than the ravages of
war.”15 Two months later the magazine published a collection of unsigned letters
discussing the animal’s life-history and suggesting a variety of remedies (heavy
fertilizing, late planting, rolling the young wheat to crush the worms, brushing
fields with elderberry bushes, and spraying with salt water).16
Then, in May and July, as delegates in Philadelphia drafted and debated the
Constitution, George Morgan published his investigations. He had sent the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture samples of the fly and its “nits,” and he
reported that the insect, “about the size of a small ant,” could be distinguished from
similar animals under magnification by its long black legs and by its “whiskers, so
small and motionless, as not to be easily perceived by the naked eye.” He connected
the facts reported by Americans to the world of learning by suggesting that the
Hessian fly could be the same as an insect that the French agricultural experimenter
Lullin de Chateauvieux had found in 1755. The Philadelphia organization, he
suggested, should write officially to the Agricultural Society of Geneva for more
information on that animal. On the more practical level, Morgan reported efforts
to control the fly by manuring, rolling, and grazing the wheat. He asserted that the
best long-term solution would be widespread use of a new “yellow-bearded” wheat
variety (taken from an enemy sloop captured in the war and planted around Flushing, Long Island) that appeared to resist attack.17 He called for action with a warning
that reversed the great event of New Jersey’s revolutionary history: the Hessian fly
had just “crossed the Delaware” into Pennsylvania, and would continue to advance
south and west.18
Carey’s American Museum continued to print letters on the Hessian fly into the
fall, ranging from a report by a relative of the wealthy Connecticut patriot Jeremiah
Wadsworth that plants grown from seeds steeped in elderberry juice resisted the fly,
to an offer from a New York merchant to sell for a premium a vaguely-described
wheat variety that he claimed would resist “that reptile,” “the Hessian bug.”19 None
of these publications claimed explicitly that the fly had been brought to the United
States by the Hessians or by other imperial forces. What motivated Morgan was the
comparison between the timing and behavior of “the human insect” and the actual
insect. Both Hessians and Hessian flies were invaders who ravaged peaceful farms in
New York and New Jersey, and left behind scenes of devastation and loss.
The coincidence in the appearance of Hessians and flies around New York City
in the late 1770s was suggestive, however, and Morgan was, as he later noted, glad to
spread prejudice about the former invaders. The idea that Hessians brought the fly
was soon common enough that an evangelical jeremiad written in upstate New
York in late 1787 reported that people had “fallen almost or quite into a frenzy” with
the belief that “the Hessians have brought over thousands of little insects, on pur-
Fighting the Hessian Fly 491
pose to destroy this country.” The pamphleteer was himself indifferent whether the
insects had been brought “by Hessians, Turks, or Jews”; he was more concerned that
Americans were trying to profit by selling supposedly resistant varieties of wheat,
either fraudulently or at extortionate prices.20
The idea that the Hessian fly came from Hesse was first broached in learned
circles specifically to be denied. In early 1788, the twenty-three year-old Samuel L.
Mitchill, just returned from medical school in Edinburgh and a European grand
tour, published an overview of the insect in Noah Webster’s American Magazine, a
New York competitor of the American Museum. Mitchill summarized basic information on the fly’s seasonality and life cycle, and presented a detailed account of
the ways the larvae damaged growing wheat plants. Other parts of the essay were
more problematical. Unable to find eggs, he suggested that the flies were similar to
aphids in producing live offspring; he also naively suggested to farmers that the
insects could be “driven off by a row of people scourging them across a lot with
flaps.” Mitchill’s adolescent cosmopolitanism was evident in both his display of
familiarity with such standard but marginally relevant scientific authorities as
Albrecht von Haller and Lazzaro Spallanzani, and in his discussion of the animal’s
name. Noting that “a report has currently prevailed that he is of Hessian origin, and
brought to this country by the soldiers from that principality,” Mitchill commented
that he had inquired among “several intelligent men, from that part of Europe” and
obtained no support for the idea. He believed that the fly had either migrated to
America from some unknown region, or that it was “long a resident of our territories,” but had just discovered wheat as a food.21
Worse Than the Plague
Americans learned about the Hessian fly gradually and directly in diverse local
settings; their efforts were directed much more toward fashioning collective awareness and action than toward uncovering the past. Europeans—more particularly,
the British—responded under quite different circumstances. A small group operating at the nexus of imperial knowledge and power discovered the insect in purely
textual form. They reacted immediately by banning wheat imports from the United
States. For men who disliked both the victorious revolutionaries and their grains,
this was an easy decision to make, but one that was hard to explain clearly. English
leaders understood that pinning down the insect’s migratory history and potential
were crucial to justifying their action. Their repeated changes in intellectual position, however, exemplify how scientific knowledge and political interests interwove in an ordinary environmental crisis at this time.
The Marquis of Carmarthan, Britain’s foreign minister, learned about the Hessian fly in late May 1788 through a confidential report from Phineas Bond, his
consul in Philadelphia. Son and nephew of prominent Philadelphia physicians,
Bond was a loyalist who had escaped to England after facing a Pennsylvania treason
indictment in 1777. He was able to return nine years later only because he had
acquired diplomatic status.22 A semi-secret agent, Mr. Bond protected imperial
492 Environmental History
interests by preventing importation of English cotton spinning machinery, and by
warning customs officers about American efforts to smuggle tea into Ireland. When
he learned in April 1788 that Philadelphia merchants were planning to ship large
amounts of wheat to England, he immediately notified London about the new and
ruinous insect “called the Hessian Fly.” Emphasizing Connecticut patrician Jeremiah
Wadsworth’s report in the American Museum that the insects could be controlled
by soaking wheat grains in elderberry juice, Bond argued that “it is but reasonable to
conclude that this process destroys the Egg in the Grain,” and hence that grain
contained Hessian fly eggs. He warned that importation of American grain infested
with the fly could destroy English wheat culture.23
The Privy Council Committee for Trade, Bond’s chief audience, was receptive
to his message. Lords Carmarthen, Sheffield, and Hawkesbury, and their scientific
adviser, Joseph Banks, were all hardliners toward the new United States. They
believed that the Americans should get the independence they had demanded, and
more: Britain should eliminate all special ties with the former rebels and should
reconfigure imperial trade to exclude them.24 In addition, they argued that higher
agricultural tariffs and thus higher wheat prices would stimulate home production,
thereby improving the agricultural economy, increasing the security of the food
supply, and, incidentally, enriching rural gentry like themselves.25 Parliamentary
enactment of a higher tariff, which would directly increase the price of bread for
urban workers, was not politically feasible in the late 1780s; but administrators
could prohibit imports of pestiferous grain.
Banks provided both the scientific basis and the leadership for the government’s
action against the new American insect.26 Since Bond had supplied little more than
a name and a warning, Banks was (in his own words) “utterly ignorant what insect it
was that the Americans meant by the Hessian Fly.” The subject, however, “appeared
to him so pregnant with danger to his country” that he sought to do whatever he
could.27 With only a few days to respond, he turned to the available technical
literature. Finding a paper on a wheat insect in the American Philosophical Society’s
Transactions, Banks reported that the Hessian fly, “more generally called The Flying Wevil,” had been known in Virginia for at least fifty years. The larval stage of
this “minute moth” penetrated and fed on wheat grains. It differed, Banks explained,
from the “Wevil of Europe,” by having wings and by attacking the grain in both the
warehouse and in the field; as a consequence it could easily be transported in grain
and was “an Evil of a most dreadful Nature.”28 On June 25 the Privy Council and
George III received Banks’s recommendations and prohibited entry of American
wheat until further notice.29
The problem with Banks’s argument was that his identification of the Hessian fly
with the Virginia “flying wevil” was simply incorrect. He soon recognized his error
and tried to rectify the situation, but had great difficulty developing a consistent
position. Banks realized that the Hessian fly was a novel insect on July 2, when he
read Samuel Mitchill’s American Magazine essay. Rather than retract his call to
action, however, he advised the Privy Council three days later that while the Hessian fly, which “confin[ed] its Ravages to the Blade of the Corn,” would not be a
problem, the flying wevil was a real danger. On July 8, however, he shifted position
Fighting the Hessian Fly 493
again: He argued that there was “great reason” to believe that the Hessian fly laid its
eggs on the grain, and not the straw; warning that both the flying wevil and the
Hessian fly were causing “alarming ravages” in America, he asserted that each independently would justify prohibition of imports “capable of bringing . . . the Seeds
of so dreadful a Calamity.”30
The council accepted Banks’s statements without question. Issues arose, however, when the Customs Office began to set up procedures to inspect American
grain already in English warehouses.31 Local officials in Liverpool informed London that all the insects in American grain shipments were the same kind of “wevil”
and were all dead; they therefore posed no problem.32 Banks dismissed such sweeping claims from provincials who “cannot be presumed to possess so much knowledge of insects as those who have dedicated a large portion of their time to the study
of natural history,” but then was shocked to receive, not bureaucratic acquiesence,
but a scientific challenge.33 James Currie, a young physician who had wandered the
Atlantic as an adolescent during the revolution, critiqued both Banks’s natural
history and the council’s policy. He argued that the flying wevil was not a problem
since it had lived so long in Virginia without entering England; he emphasized that
the Hessian fly fed on stalks, and that a propensity for the same insect also to enter
the grain was “not consonant with the course of nature.” Noting that “Government”
had initially confused two different insects, and, after being warned against one,
was taking action against the other, Currie regretted that evidence seemed to be
“biased by interest.” He emphasized that “the judgment of men of science unconnected with commerce,” such as Banks and himself, needed to prevail, and boldly
offered his services as a partner and consultant.34
Banks’s response to this challenge took two forms. He directed that Currie be
excluded from further service as an inspector; more significantly, he prepared a
sweeping biopolitical justification for the Privy Council’s course of action. 35 This
careful report emphasized that, although a bug’s life was generally quite predictable, under unusual environmental circumstances it could be greatly extended in
length—“a Circumstance as curious perhaps as any that has been observed in the
History of animated Nature.” The claims that neither the wevil nor the fly could
cross the Atlantic were plausible, Banks admitted; yet they “do not on the whole
amount to that Degree of Certainty, which in Matters of such material Importance
ought to be required.” The wevil had gradually moved north in America over the
last thirty years, and hence was now more likely to survive in England. Banks was
persuaded by the argument “from general Analogy” that the Hessian fly laid its eggs
on the leaves and not the grain, but he countered that eggs could mix with grain
during threshing and might be transported across the Atlantic in that form.36
From Banks’s perspective, however, plausible scenarios about the activities of
insects mattered less than the broader landscape of interactions between the natural
and human economies. He explained dispassionately that the introduction of a
new wheat insect into England would be “a Calamity of much more extensive and
fatal Consequences than the Admission of the Plague.” Plague resulted only in “the
extinction of a certain proportion of the human Species, which may be, and generally is replaced in the next Generation.” Insects, by contrast, could permanently
494 Environmental History
affect food supply, and thereby result in a “real Diminution of Population,” and
hence the power of the state. Banks calculated that every English wheat farmer
supplied eleven people—himself, “six manufacturers, and four of the affluent, their
unproductive dependants, or the army.” A one-sixth drop in domestic production
would mean—since the affluent and the army would not cut consumption—that
one in six workers must either “cease to eat, and consequently to labour,” or would
need to buy imported food. In the latter case, the benefit of that labor would go to
foreigners, because, from Banks’s physiocratic perspective, “food, and food only is
the creator, and . . . the whole of the honest gain it produces, must ultimately center
in the Country that produces the food.”37
Banks, the creator of a global botanic empire, imagined England in its agricultural character as a biogeographically isolated island. The familiar image of plague
encapsulated the alternative between the potential for disaster resulting from the
entry of American wheat and the indefinite continuation of the environmental
present at a small but continuing cost. Framed this way, the political choice was
easy. Implementation would be guided by naturalists, the new guardians of agricultural national security.
The Subsistence of the People
Joseph Banks was committed to rationality and fact. He outlined his reasons for the
quarantine, he explained, so that “if by better Information than we have at present,
they appear hereafter to be erroneous, it may be retracted.” On the other hand, he set
an extraordinary standard for acknowledging error: In a matter with such consequences, “a positive proof that no danger whatever exists should be exacted.”38 As
the news about the Hessian fly circulated around Europe and, with a two-month
time lag, traveled back to the United States, efforts were made to provide that
proof. The different positions advanced, and the character of the eventually persuasive argument, enable a retrospective critique of this kind of practical reason in the
late 1700s.
Banks, first of all, sought to determine whether there really was a “Hessian” fly. If
the insect did not live in Germany, the insult that imperial troops had brought a
pest across the Atlantic would dissipate; in addition, the fly’s absence from central
Europe would strengthen the argument that it was in fact American, and thus a new
and alien menace to English agriculture. In August 1788 the Foreign Office sent
queries to its emissaries throughout central Europe. With one exception, ambassadors reported back that their contacts did not believe that any local insect had the
characteristics of the Hessian fly.39 Assertions that an unknown pest was absent were
problematical, however. A few respondents sought to anchor their claims in citations to the new naturalists’ bible, the collected works of Linnaeus, with one suggesting that the Hessian fly was the Scandinavian Musca secalis. The exceptional
respondant—an anonymous consultant in the Austrian Netherlands—emphasized
the deeper difficulty. If the English really wanted to know whether the insect
existed in the Low Countries, he argued, they would need to supply “either an exact
Fighting the Hessian Fly 495
diagram of the different stages of the insect, or the insect itself in its different stages.”
A merely verbal description was too vague to provide any basis for serious study. 40
French agricultural naturalists, whose perspective was both continental and philosophic, treated the British inquiry with careful condescension. A committee of the
Royal Academy of Agriculture, then the world center for practical entomology,
sought to avoid nomenclatural bias by discussing Banks’s insects only as #1 (the
flying wevil) and #2 (the Hessian fly). They suggested that #1 was a European species
investigated in Angoumois in 1755; although it periodically caused problems, it was
not a major agricultural threat.41 Insect #2, they believed, had been found by Linnaeus
in Scandinavia, and named Phaliena graminis; animals like it existed in France,
but had not been studied in depth because they had never caused enough damage
to “attract the attention of the Government.”42 French naturalists saw Europe teeming with poorly known insects. Humans could fight these animals when they became rampant, but could not stop them from crossing the borders. To the French,
the British dream of isolating their island from the rest of the world was feverishly
unrealistic.
Americans of a variety of sorts responded vigorously as soon as they learned, two
months after the fact, that the British government was condemning their wheat.43
The lead was taken by John Temple, a Massachusetts native married to the daughter
of Governor James Bowdoin, who served, in New York, as British consul-general.
This well-known “friend of America” interpreted the letter that arrived in late
August (with a copy of Banks’s first report) as a search for reassurance that American
wheat was in fact safe. His energetic inquiries on behalf of the Foreign Office put
him within a week in direct contact with George Morgan.44 Morgan marked up
Temple’s copy of Banks’s report, prepared an expansive and blunt cover letter, and
provided a copy of his recent exchange with George Washington regarding ways to
fight the fly. Morgan’s commentary included his claim that he had christened the
“Hessian fly,” his belief that the insect had somehow arrived in straw “at an early
period of the late war,” and his discovery that it had first infested fields “in the
neighbourhood of Sir William Howe’s debarkation [on Staten Island], and at Flat
Bush.”45 He dismissed Banks’s June 4 report completely, asserting that anyone who
would “confound the Virginia Wheat Fly with the Hessian Fly, which are as different as a Toad from a Snake,” was completely misinformed. He provided an elementary account of American wheat insects, explaining that the Virginia wheat fly
(Banks’s flying wevil) was a “minute moth” that fed on grain, but was long established and easily controlled; the flying-ant-like Hessian fly, by contrast, “had no
connection immediately with the grain,” and thus would not survive in transatlantic shipments.
Morgan pressed the reconciliatory message that the English had nothing to fear
from American wheat. However, the former frontier revolutionary could not resist
reminding royal officials that “were a single straw containing this insect in the egg,
or aurelia, to be carried and safely deposited in the centre of Norfolk in England, it
would multiply in a few years so as to destroy all the wheat and barley crops of the
whole kingdom.” Americans’ distress could be, at least in the imagination, a source
of power. 46
496 Environmental History
Phineas Bond, like anyone on the scene in America, understood immediately
that Banks had erred in conflating the flying wevil and the Hessian fly. He sought to
reinforce his original warning about the latter, however, by carefully cultivating
uncertainties. Bond wrote the foreign secretary that Americans’ claims that the
animals fed and propagated only in straw were undercut by their lack of good
microscopes and other “suitable instruments” for discovery. If, however, the eggs
were laid in the straw, and, as Americans asserted “with great earnestness,” the fly
“was brought hitherto in the straw beds and baggage of the German troops employed in the late war,” then American shippers could easily carry it to Britain.
“Plain, intelligent, artless” farmers had informed Bond that Hessian flies could be
found in stored wheat. This unselfconscious testimony was more trustworthy than
the claims of leaders like Morgan, who were biased in favor of “the interests of the
country.” Bond concluded that “the works of nature are so minute, and its modes so
inscrutable, as to baffle every endeavour hitherto made to form a satisfactory conclusion.” Not having “any conclusive fact” from which the non-transportability of
the fly followed, “the wisdom of guarding against so grievous a calamity by all due
caution, must be evident.” 47
In February 1789 Joseph Banks reviewed the hundreds of pages of memoranda he
had received. Believing that he now knew “as much on the subject as the Americans
themselves,” he considered the full range of arguments advanced and decided that
Phineas Bond’s analysis of dangers and uncertainties (and his own initial recommendation for action) had been basically right. Contrary to American expectations, Banks reported to the Privy Council, there was no indication that the Hessian
fly ever lived in Hesse or anywhere else in Europe, nor that it had been carried
across the Atlantic during the war. In the face of Americans’ “bold” assertions that
the fly would not come to England in their grain, he declared that “with nearly if
not exactly the same materials before me, as these gentlemen have made use of, I
have not been able to draw a similar conclusion, nor indeed any certain conclusion
whatever.” He backed Bond’s argument that until British officials could be sure that
the Hessian fly could never be transported across the Atlantic, American grain
shipments should be banned. Americans, he suggested, needed to investigate both
the identity and the mode of propagation of the insect further, and he helpfully
supplied a bibliography. In the meantime, Americans needed to control themselves: Paraphrasing Morgan’s comment about the placement of eggs in Norfolk, he
warned that “there cannot exist so atrocious a villain, as to commit such an act
intentionally.”48
In late March the Privy Council (operating in the absence of George III, who was
in the midst of his first attack of porphyric insanity), accepted Banks’s report. Prime
Minister William Pitt forwarded it to Parliament, and that body ordered that the
most significant documents be printed in full as testimony to the world regarding
the reasoning behind the import ban. Proceedings of His Majesty’s Most Honourable
Privy Council, and Information Received, Respecting an Insect, Supposed to Infest
the Wheat of the Territories of the United States of America, a large-format pamphlet, appeared in late April; it gained wider circulation when Arthur Young reprinted it in the Annals of Agriculture.49
Fighting the Hessian Fly 497
This document generated considerable controversy around London. Thomas
Paine, skeptical as always about British leaders’ motives, told Banks to his face that
the import prohibition “was only a political manoeuvre of the Ministry to please
the landed interest, as a balance for prohibiting the exportation of Wool to please
the manufacturing interest.” Jefferson, in Paris, complained indirectly to Banks that
the report was a “libel on our wheat.” Banks ignored Paine, and brushed off Jefferson’s
“warm expressions” as unreasonable. Still concerned about Morgan’s agroterrorist
threat, he warned Jefferson that “obloquy” would fall on all Americans if “any one
of them should wilfully bring over the Fly” in retaliation for British action. On the
other hand, he accepted with equanimity the declaration of the Duke of Grafton,
a former prime minister, that the Hessian fly was a miraculous creation—a “scourge
of Heaven . . . upon such ungratefull colonies and rebellious people.”50
American newspapers, surprisingly, were almost completely silent when the
Privy Council’s Proceedings arrived in the summer of 1789.51 To understand why,
we need to look beyond the circulation of documents toward the circulation of
weather currents. During the year that Banks was building his case for the continued
prohibition of American wheat, storms and cold in both Europe and northern
North America were producing the worst grain shortages in decades. The price of
bread in Paris began to rise in August 1788, and Louis XVI’s government, anxious
that social instability not exacerbate the country’s ongoing financial and constitutional crises, opened ports to unlimited importation of American wheat. In November the French began to offer a bounty to encourage shipments, and by the
summer of 1789 Philadelphia and New York wheat prices were reaching the high
end of their postwar range. (The doubling of the price of bread in Paris, meanwhile,
had helped ignite the French Revolution.)52 Within that context, the British quarantine was irrelevant.
The English also faced a food crisis, but not so quickly as the French. The thin
harvest of 1788, combined with the ban on American imports and the shortage on
the continent, produced exactly the result that landowners such as Banks had hoped
for: The London price of wheat rose and stayed above forty-four shillings per quarter for the first time in four years. Matters became worrisome, however, when the
1789 crop failed across much of the island. London wheat prices spiked in midsummer to sixty-nine shillings, and then fluctuated for the rest of the year around fiftyfive, well above the previous decades’ average of forty. Privy Council leaders shared
Banks’s biosocial interpretation of the relations among food, prices, and population. But, while the naturalist could write philosophically that under certain circumstances one in six laborers might “cease to eat,” politicians emphasized the
potential for “popular commotions” in times of shortage and the government’s
responsibility for “the subsistence of the People.”53 During 1789 they worried increasingly about the island’s wheat supply. They were equally concerned about the
potential for infection from France, not by the Hessian fly, but by the revolution.
The effects that French ideas and models of mass behavior might have on a population stressed by food shortages were unknown, but English gentry could readily
imagine the possibilities.
498 Environmental History
British policy changed abruptly in November, just as the Privy Council was
approving emergency food shipments to the Channel Islands to forestall starvation
and mutiny. Foreign Secretary Carmarthen (now the Duke of Leeds) sent Temple
and Bond a leading inquiry: first, whether “the Evil arising from the Wevil or
Hessian Fly [had] wholly ceased,” and then, whether Americans had a wheat surplus, what were current prices, whether other countries had cornered the market,
and whether English merchants had placed orders.54 Three days later the Privy
Council jumped ahead of this correspondence by interviewing merchants with
American connections. Hearing that “the Hessian Fly had not at all appeared, . . .
that the crops have been very abundant, and that the price of wheat at New York by
the last accounts was 4 shillings per bushel,” the council recommended an immediate end to the quarantine and ordered the navy to dispatch a ship to New York
immediately with the news.55 When HMS Echo arrived with the new order in
February 1790, together with rumors that more than 140 vessels were on their way to
buy wheat, the New York Daily Gazette sneered, “what avail will this be to England? None; for in the first place, the Americans have no wheat to spare; and if they
had, all the French ports are ready to swallow it up at ten shillings a quarter above
the price of the British market.”56 As the Hudson thawed and prices continued to
rise, however, stored grain was released and shipped in large quantities to England.
Temple and Bond each understood the new situation, parrotting back their assurances that “the evil [is] thought to have wholly ceased.”57
A good English harvest in 1790 caused prices and imports to drop, and in the
following year Parliament amended the Corn Laws to encourage domestic production. But the issue of the Hessian fly did not reemerge. When Bond warned his
superiors in July that the pest was reappearing in American fields, he received no
response. Diplomatic historian Charles Ritcheson concluded that in 1789 British
leaders decided that the United States would likely function in the future as their
island’s reserve food source. Having watched the ancien regime collapse in France,
they were willing to accept the hazards posed by an insect.58
Conceptualizing Invasion
The efforts of American and European men of knowledge and power to establish
reasonable courses of action regarding the Hessian fly, within settings that contained incorrigible uncertainties, can be understood at three different degrees of
interpretive resolution: economy, policy, and science. The coarsest interpretation
is that grounded in the principles advanced by Joseph Banks. He understood the
British people as animals seeking to maximize food and comfort within a humannatural economy. We can extend this perspective to include British leaders also.
Banks, Carmarthen, and Pitt were organisms under stress, pressured not only by the
Hessian fly, but also by the madness of King George and by the French Revolution.
Between the spring of 1788 and the autumn of 1789, they repeatedly adjusted their
assessments of the imagined risks and benefits facing the populations about which
they cared most. Their final position— that the immediate need for food for British
Fighting the Hessian Fly 499
people was greater than the danger posed by the Hessian fly—made sense at the
time. Viewed in retrospect, it was reasonable, humane, and, in its implications for
both wheat culture and national culture, it was benign. Louis XVI, for whom the
Hessian fly was one among many headaches, was not so lucky.
A higher level of analysis focuses on human actors as rational and political
animals, and more particularly on the means by which policies grounded in uncertainty became credible. The British dominated this situation because they possessed recognized naturalists, a fully functioning diplomatic network, and a
comprehensive perspective on the interrelations among food plants, insects, travel,
human populations, and mass behavior. The former colonials, by contrast, were
uninformed, unconnected, and empiric. Banks in particular was able to articulate
how the new American insects posed risks for the natural and political economies
of Britain, and was confident in demanding what was logically impossible: The
Americans should prove that Hessian flies could not cross the Atlantic to England.
Reinforcing his position with international testimony, Banks raised standards of
certainty over time and articulated the reasonableness of positions that were
grounded explicitly on continuing lack of knowledge.
The most intricate questions, then and later, revolved around science. One motivation behind this article has been to convey the seriousness and difficulty of
knowing about insects in the eighteenth century. Entomology was not merely an
effete hobby or a subfield of natural theology, but rather a highly consequential
body of technical knowledge. Banks developed procedures for detecting insects in
the large quantitities of plant seeds then being shipped into Britain. Individuals in
geographically dispersed settings struggled to communicate intelligibly about animals with imprecise identities. Naturalists in the 1780s were recognizing increasingly that Linnean names were valuable, because potentially universal, reference
points. But—as the different suggested binomials indicate—they were unable to
get this method to work.
Over the next century entomologists intermittently looked back at the events of
the 1770s in order to understand the habits and vulnerabilities of the fly and to
address the nationalistically-colored issues of nativity and responsibility. They
mustered the resources of a growing international communications network
grounded in technical literature, illustrated reference works, and museum reference collections, but they struggled against loss of memory and the ability of the
insect to cover its migratory tracks. In the early 1790s Thomas Jefferson led an
American Philosophical Society committee that asked the American public, among
other things, whether the Hessian fly had existed in North America prior to the
revolution. (The committee produced no report).59 Samuel Mitchill, impressed
that French and Italian memoirs sent to him by Banks contained no description of
the species, declared that “Hessian fly” was a misnomer, and that the animal should
properly be called “the American wheat-insect.”60
The discovery of the fly in Minorca, Russia, and Austria in the 1830s and 1840s
reopened questions regarding its homeland and the circumstances of its appearance in America. Disagreement between entomologists with, not surprisingly, German and American allegiances gradually built to a climax.61 In the 1880s Germanic
500 Environmental History
Harvard professor Hermann Hagen and midwestern federal scientist Charles V.
Riley rediscovered the documents Banks had published, disputed the details of
German military discipline during the revolution, and struggled with inaccuracies
in the transcriptions of the American Philosophical Society’s early minutes. Riley
prevailed with arguments that were both broadly ecological and grounded in study
of primary sources. He declared that the Hessian fly had evolved in western Asia
along with its host species, that it had spread to southern Europe by the 1700s, that
its ability to survive as a puparium for more than a year in cool dry circumstances
(discovered in the mid-nineteenth century) meant that it could conceivably have
traveled across the Atlantic, and that it had arrived in New York during the early
years of the revolution. This view continues to be the scientific consensus.62
Drawing on modern histories of British logistics during the revolution, I suggest
a more paradoxically pointed reformulation of Riley’s scenario. The Hessian fly
could have arrived in New York in 1776 along with imperial expeditionary forces;
these troops came, not only from England and Germany, but also from Minorca
and Gibraltar. The insect’s more probable migration pathway, however, was in the
large shipments of forage that began arriving in New York harbor from many parts of
Europe in 1777. This variation on sending coals to Newcastle was necessary, David
Syrett has explained, because British plans to feed their horses on the vast amounts
of grass and straw that could be requisitioned from loyal natives of New Jersey were
stymied by Washington’s victories at the Battles of Trenton and Princeton the
previous winter. The arrival of the Hessian fly was thus an ecological “revenge
effect” resulting specifically from Americans’ violent assertion, in New Jersey, of
political independence.63
This claim does not, however, entail the conclusion that the Hessian fly was a
biological invader. Such a perspective would be as partial as the view that the
American Revolution was a fight between natives and aliens. First, the concept of
invasion is problematic. Mayetiola was rejoining a Eurasian host that had left it
behind fewer than three hundred years earlier. It settled in fields that were familiar
because they had been cultivated by generations of European and African Americans. The Hessian fly depressed wheat growth locally along the seaboard in the
1790s, but it soon became a paradigmatic manageable naturalized pest. Populations fluctuated with the extent of monoculture, choice of cultivars, and extent of
parasites. Farmers in the nineteenth century increasingly followed entomologists’
advice and outsmarted the insect by delaying fall planting until the summer adults
ceased egg deposition. Waiting for the “fly-free date” became part of the natural
rhythm of American agriculture.64
The deeper and more difficult issue concerns the extent to which the Hessian fly
invasion was biological. In the 1770s the species was unknown to the learned, and
perhaps to all humans. It travelled—to New York in North America, rather than to
Norfolk in England—only because of a number of singular circumstances. On the
one hand, political identities were diverging to the point that British military agent
George Morgan, for example, could recreate himself as a model American farmer,
while his Philadelphia neighbor Phineas Bond became an English gentleman who
left his country in 1786 to live in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, armies were
Fighting the Hessian Fly 501
converging in circumstances that led to the peculiarly uneconomic transport of
large quantities of wheatstraw from places such as Minorca and Poland to Staten
Island. While the Hessian fly finally arrived in England in the 1880s, either from the
Continent or from North America, the species never established itself in, for example, South America or Australia. Its migrations were influenced much more
profoundly by events generally seen as parts of political history than by any aspect
of its natural history.
Emphasizing the highly charged revolutionary events during which the Hessian
fly appeared in North America clarifies both the name and the broader intellectual
framework used to characterize it. The language of invasion was at the center of
awareness among Americans like George Morgan. As he looked out from Prospect
in the 1780s he saw fields where his compatriots had, a few years earlier, heroically
pushed back forces from foreign lands. It is hard to imagine that, when he saw
insects pushing across the New Jersey landscape from the direction of New Brunswick,
where the imperial soldiers had massed, he could think of them in any way other
than as invaders. Such a perspective, this essay has argued, was in fact an accurate
reading of the situation, both in relation to the movements of forces in the war, and
more specifically, to the Battle of Princeton. Such a perfect overlay of the natural
on the political was an exceptional event, however. As I write this, a few months
after September 11, 2001, Americans are anxious about human invaders from the
Fertile Crescent, and also, admittedly to a lesser extent, about invertebrate “alien
invaders” from the Old World.65 I doubt, however, that exploring parallels between
these two groups can be as constructive now, either intellectually or politically, as
in the 1780s.
Philip J. Pauly commutes from his home in Brooklyn, New York, to the New
Brunswick campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he is a
professor of history. Author, most recently, of Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton University Press,
2001), he currently is working on a history of American desires for ecological independence.
Notes
This essay is adapted from a presentation to the annual meeting of the History of
Science Society, Vancouver, B.C., 4 November 2000. Paul Clemens (Rutgers), Robert Cox (American Philosophical Society), James Hatchett (USDA), Sarah Jansen
(Harvard), Roger Ratcliffe (USDA), Susan Schrepfer (Rutgers), and Peter Silver
(Princeton) generously provided guidance and suggestions.
1. George Morgan to Sir John Temple, 26 August 1788, copy in Thomas Jefferson Papers,
Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (http://memory.loc.gov/
ammem/mtjhtml/mtjhome.html). A second copy, in the Records of the Philadelphia
Society for Promoting Agriculture, Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania
502 Environmental History
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Library (hereafter PSPA) has a slightly different wording—most notably, omitting the
explanatory “as a useful national prejudice.”
Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999): Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and
the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000);
E. C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden : French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782 (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2001). An additional issue, the influence of the Hessian fly on the
American agricultural economy, is examined in Brooke Hunter, “Rage for Grain:
Flour Milling in the Mid-Atlantic, 1750-1815” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 2001),
ch. 4. I learned of this work after submitting my essay for publication. I have benefited
from it in revisions.
This argument is developed in Philip J. Pauly, “The Beauty and Menace of the Japanese Cherry Trees: Conflicting Visions of American Ecological Independence,” Isis 87
(1996):51-73; see also Uta Eser, Der Naturschutz und das Fremde: Ökologische und
normative Grundlagen der Umweltethik (Frankfurt/Main: Campus-Verlag, 1999); Sarah Jansen, Schädlinge: Geschichte eines wissenschaftlichen und politischen
Konstrukts, 1840-1920 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus-Verlag, 2000); Edmund Russell, War
and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Banu Subramaniam, “The
Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions,” Meridians 2
(2001):26-40.
The extent of the Hessian fly disputes became evident to me through study of the
manuscripts cited in note 26, below. I have found no references to these materials in
prior literature. On the history of the insect see Asa Fitch, The Hessian Fly, its History,
Character, Transformations, and Habits (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1846), 4-18; Brook Hindle,
The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1956), 364-365; Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution:
British Policy Toward the United States 1783-1795 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969), 199-202; Editors’ Comments, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed.
Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-), 20:445-449; John
Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the
Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 114-115; Kim Todd, Tinkering with Eden (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 39-46.
E.g., Chris Bright, Life Out of Bounds: Bioinvasion in a Borderless World (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998); Robert S. Devine, Alien Invasion: America’s Battle with NonNative Animals and Plants (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1998);
Alexandre Meinesz, Killer Algae: The True Tale of a Biological Invasion (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999); for a more balanced perspective see Mark L. Winston, Nature Wars: People vs. Pests (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Max Savelle, George Morgan, Colony Builder (New York: Columbia University Press,
1932), 76-110, 183-199; Gregory Schaaf, Wampum Belts and Peace Trees: George Morgan, Native Americans, and Revolutionary Diplomacy (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Press,
1990). The site is now occupied by the Princeton University Faculty Club.
Varnum Lansing Collins, “‘Prospect Near Princeton,’” Princeton University Bulletin 15
(1904):164-182; Collins, ed., A Brief Narrative of the Ravages of the British and Hessians
at Princeton in 1776-77 (Princeton: University Library, 1906); also a note, 1786, in
George Morgan, “Journal 1780-1804, ‘Prospect,’” AM 12800, Special Collections,
Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.
Fighting the Hessian Fly 503
9. Morgan, “Journal”; United States, In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the
Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled (Philadelphia, 1776); Morgan, “An Essay, Exhibiting a Plan for a Farm-Yard, and Method of
Conducting the Same,” Columbian Magazine, 1 (1786): 77-80; Morgan, “Management
of Bees,” 10 March 1786, PSPA; Simon Baatz, “Venerate the Plough”: A History of the
Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, 1785-1985 (Philadelphia : The Society,
1985), 7-11.
10. Savelle, Morgan, 196.
11. Morgan, “Journal.”
12. Morgan’s 1786 journal entries imply a history of observation and discussion stretching
back at least two or three years. A short letter in the Pennsylvania Mercury, 1 April 1785,
discussed ways to counter unnamed insects damaging wheat on Long Island.
13. “Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman, dated New-York, September 1, 1786,” printed in
“On the Hessian Fly,” American Museum 1 (April 1787): 325-326.
14. George Clinton, [Address to Legislature], 13 January 1787, in New York Packet, 16
January 1787; Samuel Bard, in New York Journal, 18 January 1787.
15. “On the Hessian Fly,” American Museum 1 (February 1787): 133-135. The main text,
which this editorial note introduced, was Christopher Gullet, “On the Means of Preserving Growing Plants from Insects and Flies,” Annals of Agriculture 7 (1786):48-64,
with author given but source unacknowledged.
16. “On the Hessian Fly,” American Museum 1 (April 1787): 324-326. See also “Agricola” in
New York Journal, 19 April 1787.
17. George Morgan, “On the Hessian Fly,” American Museum 1 (June 1787): 529-531,
dated 20 May 1787; Morgan, “Letter Relative to the Hessian Fly,” American Museum 2
(September 1787): 298-300, dated 25 July 1787; see also Morgan, “Journal.” He drew
Chateauvieux’s report from [Henri Louis] Duhamel du Monceau, Practical Treatise of
Husbandry, ed. John Mills, 2nd ed., 1762, p. 86. His 1786 notebook entry was in fact a
paraphrase of this text.
18. Morgan, “Letter Relative to the Hessian Fly,” including letter from Clark to Morgan, 20
July 1787. The following summer Morgan called on Washington for aid again, asking if
he and other Virginians could supply the resistant wheat: Morgan to George Washington, 31 July 1788, and Washington to Morgan, 25 August 1788, George Washington
Papers (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html).
19. “Letter Relative to the Hessian Fly From Mr. Decius Wadsworth, to Col. Jeremiah
Wadsworth, dated Farmington, July 4, 1787,” American Museum 2 (August 1787): 175176; “Copy of Letter from Mr. Decius Wadsworth to Col. Jeremiah Wadsworth, containing a Further Account of Mr. James Cowles’ Wheat, Farmington, August 13, 1787,”
American Museum 2 (November 1787): 458-459; Peter Burtis, “Letter Relative to the
Hessian Fly,” American Museum 2 (November 1787): 459.
20. The Prophet Nathan, or Plain Friend; Containing Some Observations Respecting the
Late Insects Commonly called the Hessian Fly, Considering Them as a Judgement
Upon the Land . . . (Hudson [N.Y.]: Ashbel Stoddard, 1788 [preface dated 20 September
1787]), esp. pp. 10 (quotation), 14-18.
21. Samuel L. Mitchill, “An Account of the Insect; Which for Some Years Has Been Very
Destructive to Wheat in Several of the United States,” American Magazine 1 (February
and March 1788): 173-176, 201-204.
22. Joanne Neel, Phineas Bond: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1786-1812 (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 1968). The senior Bonds were rivals of Morgan’s
504 Environmental History
prominent brother, John, in organizing the University of Pennsylvania Medical School
prior to the war.
23. Phineas Bond to Lord Carmarthen, 22 April 1788, “Letters of Phineas Bond, British
Consul at Philadelphia, to the Foreign Office of Great Britain, 1787, 1788, 1789,” ed. J.
Franklin Jameson, American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1896, 565; “Letter
. . . From Mr. Decius Wadsworth . . . .”
24. Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, 65-86, succinctly sketches the makeup
and outlook of this group. See also Drayton, Nature’s Government, 96-106; Ritcheson,
Aftermath of Revolution, 21-24, 189-195. Their immediate project was to have Canada
replace the United States as grainery for Britain’s other New World colonies. In early
1788 Parliament banned sale of American grain to Newfoundland and the West Indies:
“A Bill for Regulating the Trade Between the Subjects of His Majesty’s Colonies . . . and
the Countries Belonging to the United States of America,” House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, v. 61, George III, #4019, 13 February 1788.
Banks’s longer-term solution was breadfruit: he had sent HMS Bounty to Tahiti in late
1787 to transport specimens to the West Indies.
25. The Corn Law placed a high tariff on grain when the price was below forty-eight
shillings per quarter, but allowed essentially untaxed imports above that price. (A quarter
equalled eight bushels.) Its aim was to protect British farmers while also preventing
famine and riots when crops failed. In May 1788, Parliament strengthened regulations
to prevent importers from manipulating prices to claim exemption from the tariff.
Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, 77-83; “A Bill to Explain and Amend an
Act for . . . Regulating the Importation and Exportation of Corn and Grain . . .” Sessional
Papers 61:4069, 22 May 1788. Wheat prices are found in William Beveridge, et al.,
Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth Century to the Nineteenth Century, 2
vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1939) 1: 568; Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States 1700-1861: Statistical Supplement (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1938).
26. From May 1788 to August 1790 Banks worked closely with the Foreign Office and the
Customs Office, soliciting, collecting, and analyzing communications. His authorship
of reports was not advertised until April 1789, when the Privy Council published the
naturalist’s selection of the more important memoranda. See Proceedings of His Majesty’s
Most Honourable Privy Council, and Information Received, Respecting an Insect,
Supposed to Infest the Wheat of the Territories of the United States of America (21 April
1789); reprinted in Annals of Agriculture 11 (1789): 406-613 (citations from the original;
hereafter PCP). In addition, Banks gathered a larger body of correspondence and notes
in a portfolio that he retained. These materials are in the collection of Joseph Banks
Papers held at the Sutro Branch, California State Library, San Francisco, Calif.; a
microfilm is on deposit at the American Philosophical Society, cataloged as History of
Science 3.1, reel 19 (hereafter cited as Banks-APS).
27. “Preface,” [April 1789], 2 pp., Banks-APS.
28. Banks to Carmarthen, 4 June 1788, PCP, 3-4; Landon Carter, “Observations Concerning the Fly-Weevil, That Destroys the Wheat. . .” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1 (1771): 274-294. I use Banks’s spelling “wevil” thoughout, to emphasize
the distinction between this moth larva and the modern usage, which restricts “weevil”
to certain families of beetles.
29. Carmarthen to Banks, 26 June 1788, Banks-APS, 13; Order in Council, 25 June 1788,
PCP, 5; New York Independent Journal, 23 August 1788. Further details can be found in
Fighting the Hessian Fly 505
memoranda in the Privy Council Register, PC 2/133, pp. 175, 191, 199, Public Record
Office, Kew, United Kingdom (hereafter PRO).
30. Banks’s abstract of Mitchill’s essay, 2 July 1788, Banks-APS, 173-176; “American Wheat.
Minute of what was stated by Sir Joseph Banks,” 5 July 1788, PCP, 7-8; “Further Account
of the Hessian Fly, by Sir Joseph Banks, Baronet; and, a Statement of the printed
Accounts published in America, 8th July 1788,” PCP, 9-11.
31. “Report of Sir Joseph Banks, Baronet, proposing the Mode of making Experiment on
the American Wheat, 6th July 1788,” PCP, 8-9. Banks directed local officials to take
samples of grain cargoes, place them in water, and look for floating insect parts.
32. A. Onslow and E. Rigby to [Stephen Cottrell], 16 July 1788, Banks-APS, 303-305. Other
provincial bureaucrats—mostly notably Adam Smith, customs officer in Glasgow—
understood that perfect paperwork would satisfy London. Adam Smith, James Edgar,
David Reid to Stephen Cottrell, 21 August 1788, Banks-APS, 299. (Smith included both
a lengthy “digression” attacking restraints on the grain trade, and a critique of physiocrats
(see below), in The Wealth of Nations, 5th edition, (1789; reprint Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), 2:28-52, 195-209.)
33. Banks to [Cottrell], 20 July 1788, Banks-APS, 306.
34. James Currie to Banks, 22 July 1788, and 23 July 1788, Banks-APS, 379-389. Currie later
became a major figure in medicine and literature: see William Wallace Currie, ed.,
Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of James Currie, M.D., F.R.S., of
Liverpool, 2 vols. (London, 1831), esp. 1: 10-15, 76, 152 for Currie’s transatlantic career.
35. Banks to Currie, 26 July 1788, Banks-APS 386; Banks note, n.d., Banks-APS, 306 (top).
Currie recognized that he had been read and snubbed: see Currie to Dr. Percival, 2
June 1791, in Currie, Memoir, 2: 61-67.
36. “General Report of Sir Joseph Banks, respecting the Hessian Fly, and Flying-Wevil,
24th July 1788,” PCP, 18. Banks never mentioned Currie’s intervention.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 18-19.
39. Joseph Ewart to Lord Carmarthen, 9 August 1788, PCP, 26; Robert Murray Keith to
Carmarthen, 8 October 1788, PCP, 32; Mr. Walpole to Carmarthen, 23 October 1788,
PCP, 33; Alexander Gibson to Carmarthen 29 October 1788, PCP, 35; Mr. Heathcote to
Carmarthen, 16 February 1789, PCP, 57; Mr. Mathias to Carmarthen, 19 September
1788, PCP, 34.
40.Mr. Heathcote to Carmarthen, 16 February 1789; Lord Torrington to Carmarthen, 28
July 1788, PCP, 53-55.
41. Broussonet to Carmarthen, 3 September 1788, with enclosed “Extraits des Registres de
la Société d’Agriculture, du 28 Août 1788,” PCP, 23-26. The senior committee member,
Mathieu Tillet, had participated in the investigations of wheat pests in the 1750s.
42. Ibid., 24-26.
43. New York Independent Journal, 23 August 1788; Pennsylvania Mercury, 28 August
1788. The ban on grain shipments to England had no immediate effect on American
merchants because it continued rules already in place. But it provoked concern because it posed a new and higher barrier to future trade, and, more immediately, threatened the saleability of American wheat in other countries.
44.Temple to Carmarthen, 4 September 1788, PCP, 27. A few days later Morgan was
conferring with the Spanish emissary, Diego de Gardoqui, about a land grant west of
the Mississippi. This developed over the next few months into New Madrid: Savelle,
Morgan, 202-203. On Temple see Neil R. Stout, “John Temple,” American National
Biography 21:433-435.
506 Environmental History
45. Morgan to Temple, 26 August 1788, PCP, 27-29; Minute of Council, [with] Colonel
Morgan’s Remarks,” PCP, 30-31. (Morgan’s claim that he coined the name “Hessian fly”
to incite anti-imperial prejudice was excised from the copy of his letter forwarded to
England.)
46.Morgan to Temple, 26 August 1788, PCP, 27-29. Public declarations reinforced these
private communications: the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, at the
request of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, corrected the British
government’s “misinformation” and endorsed Morgan’s publications: Peter Muhlenberg
to Samuel Powell, 1 September 1788, and Powell to Muhlenberg, 3 September 1788,
printed in Pennsylvania Packet, 10 September 1788, and PCP, 45.
47.Bond to Carmarthen, 1 October 1788, with enclosures, PCP, 36-52; Carmarthen to
Temple, Bond, and G. Miller, 6 August 1788, FO 4/6, PRO; Bond to Carmarthen, 3
November 1788, with enclosures, PCP, 61-62; Bond to Carmarthen, 20 January 1789,
PCP, 63.
48.Banks, “Preface,” Banks-APS; “Report of Sir Joseph Banks, Baronet, upon the above
correspondence and information. Dated 2d March 1789,” and “Paper delivered in the
27th of April, by Sir Joseph Banks, Baronet, by Way of Appendix . . .” PCP, 59-61.
49.See note 26 above.
50. Paine to Jefferson, 10 April 1789, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 14: 567; Jefferson to
Benjamin Vaughan, 17 May 1789, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 15:133-134; Vaughan to
Banks, 5 May 1789, 21 May 1789, with Banks’s draft reply, Banks-APS; [Duke of Grafton],
“On the Hessian Fly in America,” 30 June 1789, with postscript dated 1 September 1789,
Banks-APS.
51. Nor was there any organized scientific response, in spite of the fact that Jefferson’s and
Banks’s mutual British correspondent, Benjamin Vaughan, had told his brother John,
in Philadelphia, that “the first names upon your continent” needed immediately to
investigate the problems Banks had outlined: Benjamin Vaughan to John Vaughan, 6
May 1789, Vaughan Papers, APS.
52. Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (New York:
Basic Books, 2000), 162-66; William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 151; C.-E. Labrousse, Esquisse du Mouvement
des Prix et des Revenus de France au XVIIIe Siécle, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie Dalloz,
1933), 1: 92, 104; Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 29 November 1788, printed in New York
Daily Gazette, 12 February 1789. Weather and the Hessian fly produced severe shortages
in northern New York, New England, and especially in Canada, which had been
pushed by London to export as much as possible to stymie the Americans: See Alan
Taylor, “‘The Hungry Year’: 1789 on the Northern Border of Revolutionary America,”
in Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Englightenment,
ed. Alissa Johns (New York: Routledge, 1999), 145-182; note 24 above.
53. Beveridge et al., Prices and Wages, 568; Committee report and other papers relating to
the exportation and importation of corn, 8 March 1790, PC 1/18/20, PRO.
54. William Fawkener to Duke of Leeds, 23 November 1789; Leeds to Temple, Bond, and
Miller, 24 November 1789; Leeds to Temple, Bond, and Miller, 4 December 1789, all
FO 4/7, PRO.
55. Statement of William Backhouse, and others, and minutes of deliberations, 27 November 1789, PC 2/134, pp. 320-323, PRO.
56. New York Daily Gazette, 22 February 1790; New-York Weekly Museum, 27 February
1790.
57. Temple to Leeds, 24 February 1790, also Bond to Leeds, 1 March 1790, FO 4/8, PRO.
Fighting the Hessian Fly 507
58. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 202-203; Bond to Leeds, 6 July 1790, FO 4/8, PRO.
In 1795, when two bad harvests and wartime disruption of the Atlantic trade led to wheat
prices three times above those of the mid 1780s, food riots with Jacobin overtones were
widespread: Ian Gilmour, Riots, Risings, and Revolution (London: Hutchison, 1992),
409-411).
59. Jefferson personally queried farmers in New York and New England in 1791, and a
circular requesting information (signed by Jefferson, B. S. Barton, James Hutchinson,
and Caspar Wistar) was printed nationally in newspapers, including the National Gazette, 14 June 1792. Jefferson was discouraged by lack of public interest, political distractions, and another plague—the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which
killed Hutchinson. See “Jefferson’s Notes on the Hessian Fly,” 24 May-18 June 1791,
Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 20: 456-461; editorial comments, Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
20: 445-449.
60.Samuel Mitchill, “Remarks on the wheat insect or Hessian fly,” manuscript, 4 pp., 23
June 1791, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress; Mitchill, “Oration . . .,”
Transactions of the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures
(New York) 1 (1792): 23; Mitchill, “Further Ravages of the Wheat Insect, or Tipula Tritici
of America, and of Another Species of Tipula in Europe,” Medical Repository 7 (1803):
97-98. Philadelphia naturalist Thomas Say, in making a formal identification of the
species, reinforced Mitchill’s view, and British entomologists willingly followed: Say,
“Some Account of the Insect Known by the Name of the Hessian Fly, and a Parasitic
Insect that Feeds on It,” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 1
(1817): 45-48, 63-64; “Observations on the Various Insects Affecting the Corn-Crops,”
Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 6 (1845):137. George Morgan
withdrew from public and scientific affairs when he moved to western Pennsylvania in
the mid 1790s.
61. Fitch, Hessian Fly, 4-18; Balthasar Wagner, “Observations on the New Crop Gall-Gnat”
(1860), translated in Third Report of the United States Entomological Commission,
1883, appendix 2, pp. 24-38; Packard, “Hessian Fly.”
62. Hermann A. Hagen, “The Hessian Fly Not Imported from Europe,” Canadian Entomologist 12 (1880): 197-207; Hagen, “Further Material Concerning the Hessian Fly,”
Canadian Entomologist 17 (1885): 81-93; Charles V. Riley, in Trans. London Entom.
Soc., 1887, xlvi; Riley, “The Hessian Fly an Imported Insect,” Canadian Entomologist
20 (1888):121-127. For modern views see Horace Francis Barnes, Gall Midges of Economic Importance, volume 7: Gall Midges of Cereal Crops (London: Crosby Lockwood
and Son Ltd., 1956), 107; Raymond J. Gagné, The Plant-Feeding Gall Midges of North
America (Ithaca: Comstock Publishing Association, 1989), 46. The species’ range and
spread prior to the 1770s remains an unanswered question.
63. David Syrett, Shipping and the American War, 1775-83 (London: Athlone Press, 1970),
121-139, 197; Edward E. Curtis, The Organization of the British Army in the American
Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), 115-117. See also R. Arthur Bowler,
Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775-1783 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975); on “revenge effects” see Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back:
Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Knopf, 1996).
64.Hunter, “Rage for Grain;” Fitch, Hessian Fly; A. S. Packard, “Hessian Fly: Its Ravages,
Habits, and Means of Preventing its Increase,” United States Entomological Commission, Bulletin #4 (1880).
65. E.g., “Alien Invaders Reshape the American Landscape,” The New York Times, 5
February 2002, F1.