Autograph Letter, signed. 4pp. including integral stampless address leaf. To Cullen, Burrough & Markoe, “Comerciantes”, Vera Cruz, Mexico.
After literally putting American Geology “on the map” in 1809, undertaking the first geological survey of the United States, then becoming benefactor and President of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia, in 1824, wealthy Scottish-born merchant William Maclure (1763-1840) joined British philanthropist Robert Owen in founding the Utopian colony of New Harmony, Indiana, where budding geologists, naturalists, botanists and engineers were brought into daily communion with social reformers. It failed as a practical exercise in communal living after Maclure had a falling out with Owen, and, for health reasons, moved in 1828 to Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. When, eight years later, the aging Maclure wrote this letter in his small, cramped, sometimes illegible, handwriting to his American financial agents at Veracruz, he had lost faith in Utopian experiments, reflecting: "... I was early in life thrown into situations that forced me to see mankind as they are, not as they ought to be as (preached?) up by moralists, seeing misery and wretchedness (crushed?) under the (fist?) of extravagance, luxury and dissipation, it being an unnatural state and entirely owing to the artifices of civilization….On retiring from commerce about 40 years ago…I adopted travelling and as an object the collection of geological specimens and the state of instruction in the perusal of which I remained in all the capitals of Europe long enough to… confirm my pronounced opinion that the inequality of property, knowledge and power was the cause of the great exaggeration of money, poverty, ignorance and crime. …” Maclure still believed in “the equalisation of knowledge” through improved education, but doubted whether “conceited”, “obstinate” schoolmasters and “ignorant” parents would ever embrace his notions of teaching the impoverished masses. In this long and rambling letter Maclure also explains why he chose to live in Santa Anna’s Mexico, “this half barbarous country”, so despised in America that year after the fall of the Alamo; and discusses his differences with leaders of the Philadelphia Academy to which he planned to leave all his fortune. As virtually of Maclure’s papers are held by the Workingmen’s Institute Library at New Harmony and the Academy at Philadelphia, his letters are rarely seen. No other Maclure letter has appeared at auction in the past 35 years.