The Wilkes expedition was the first oceanic expedition sponsored by the U. S. government. In 1836 Congress authorized an extensive naval expedition whose goals were to circumnavigate the globe and chart the little-known waters of the South Pacific for merchants and whalers. Two years elapsed before the logistical arrangements were completed and an appropriate commander selected. to the intercession of President Martin Van Buren, the expedition leader chosen was Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, formerly head of the U. S. Navy Department of Charts and Instruments. The decision proved unpopular, given the availability of officers with more seniority. Nonetheless, Wilkes finally departed Norfolk, Virginia, on August 1838 with six small vessels and a complement of scientists.
Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes (Library of Congress)
Among them were geologist James Dwight Dana, horticulturist William Backenridge, and naturalist Titian Peale, who was also an accomplished artist.
Wilkes guided his flotilla down the coast of South America as far as Cape Horn, where the explorers established a base camp before proceeding farther south. They explored the waters of Antarctica for nearly a month without landing, then sailed up the coast of South America as far as Lima, Peru, where scientists went ashore to examine Inca ruins. The expedition next sailed west toward Australia and New Zealand, making subsequent stops in Tahiti and Samoa. The people living there did not welcome the intruders, however, and two crew members died in an attack by natives. Turning southward again in January 1840, Wilkes made his second investigation of Antarctica; the party sailed 1,600 miles along the icebound coastline before briefly glimpsing what was assumed to be a continental landmass. Again, icy conditions precluded any attempt at landing, so the expedition headed north to the Fiji Islands and Hawaii before turning east toward the North American coast.
In April 1841 the Wilkes expedition arrived in Oregon waters. Here the vessel Peacock struck a sand bar and sank while attempting to sail up the Columbia River. Undeterred, Wilkes dispatched several parties to the Snake and Sacramento Rivers, one of which ventured as far inland as Sutter’s Fort (Sacramento, California). Wilkes’s landfall at Fort Nisqually, Puget Sound, served to bolster American claims in what became the Oregon Territory. The party then sailed for home and finally dropped anchor in New York on June 10, 1842.
The Wilkes expedition sailed 80,000 miles in less than four years while gathering data on 280 islands in the Pacific and 800 miles of streams and rivers in Oregon and California. Charts created by this expedition carefully recorded long stretches of the Antarctic coast. So meticulous was Wilkes in his preparation that many of his maps were still in use as late as World War II. The expedition also recorded various ethnic and anthropological observations, especially of the Native American tribes living in the Oregon region. In addition, it returned with thousands of animal and botanical specimens, many of which formed the basis of the Smithsonian Institution collection. In sum, the Wilkes expedition played a direct role in raising national awareness of the Pacific and Northwest territories and also contributed to scientific knowledge. It further demonstrated that the young republic was fully capable of mounting sustained scientific expeditions on a scale previously enjoyed only by Great Britain. Wilkes himself, a sneering, draconian figure, was subject to a court-martial for his alleged abuse of crew members but was eventually cleared. He spent nearly two decades editing 20 volumes of scientific findings. The stretch of the Antarctic coast that his expedition covered was subsequently christened Wilkes Land in his honor.
Further reading: Barry A. Joyce, The Shaping of American Ethnology: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: The Epic South Sea Expedition of 1838-1842 (New York: Viking, 2004); Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick, eds., The Private Journal of William Reynolds, United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
—John C. Fredriksen
Willard, Emma (Hart) (1787-1870) educator, textbook writer, poet
Born in Berlin, Connecticut, the ninth child of Captain Samuel and Lydia (Hinsdale) Hart, Emma Willard spent her life teaching and advocating improvement in women’s education. From an early age, her father included her in family discussions about politics, philosophy, religion, and morality. She was encouraged to learn on her own and think independently. In addition to her father’s progressive teachings, she attended the local public school and later entered the Berlin Academy, one of the first academies established in Connecticut. In an era when girls attended school sporadically, if at all, and when educating girls was generally considered useless, or even potentially damaging, Willard’s interest in learning (and the encouragement she received from her father) made her experience exceptional. She also proved to be an exceptionally gifted teacher and was asked to run the Berlin village school when she was only 17. To improve her knowledge as a teacher, she continued her own education, attending the Misses Patten’s school in Hartford. She was then asked to run the winter school at the Berlin Academy and soon took over summer duties as well. In the spring and fall, she continued her learning at Mrs. Royse’s school in Hartford. In 1807, she went to Middlebury, Vermont, to oversee all aspects of the Female Academy. She excelled in this role, winning the trust of Middlebury’s leading citizens. In 1809, she left her position to marry John Willard, a local politician and physician. They had one child, John Hart Willard, in 1810.
John Willard supported his wife’s continued interest in learning, encouraging her to study his medical and scientific books. One of her nephews, then attending neighboring Middlebury College, showed her his course of study. She was intrigued by what was being taught to young men in college and asked her nephew if she could study along with him. She mastered his coursework and asked him to test her on it. Her excellent performance encouraged her to continue studying the material that, she was beginning to see, had been closed off from her and other young women. Always motivated to learn and urged to do so, she began to see that the educational experience of most women was quite different from that of men. While boys and young men were offered a comprehensive plan of study, women and girls were mostly given bits and pieces of intellectual matter. Female education emphasized music, French, embroidery, and other skills meant to display refinement and grace, not mental acumen. Realizing through her own experiences that women could learn about the higher or more difficult subjects just as well as men, Willard began to ponder how the disparity between men’s and women’s education might be remedied.
Obliged to teach once again because of her husband’s financial difficulties, Willard began to think more seriously about ways to promote women’s education. To that end, in 1814 she founded the Middlebury Female Academy, where she combined traditionally female subjects with traditionally male subjects such as mathematics and history. Barred from sitting in on classes at Middlebury to bolster her own ability to teach these subjects, she was left to teach herself and devise her own techniques for teaching these topics to her students. Her experiences in Vermont led her to think that her ideas might meet with more success in New York. In 1818, she sent an appeal to New York governor DeWitt Clinton, asking for more public funding for girls’ schools. She argued that better education for women would not undermine male and female roles, but rather it would improve the prospects of the young republic by ensuring that children raised by educated mothers would be more virtuous citizens. Her Flan for Improving Female Education (1819) received some support when she addressed groups of New York legislators, but most of her listeners still believed that educating women would interfere with their God-given duties as helpmates for men.
Willard established another female academy in Waterford, New York, hoping the legislature would provide state funds for her endeavor. When this assistance failed to appear, the academy was saved by the intervention of prosperous citizens in nearby Troy, a booming canal town with progressive and ambitious ideas about education. Willard moved her school to Troy, where it survived and began to prosper, even without state aid. Students at the Troy Female Academy learned a combination of the lighter traditional subjects and the more rigorous intellectual subjects previously reserved for men. Always looking for better ways to teach, Willard thought the existing textbooks were inadequate and off-putting to students. With typical vigor and creativity, she began writing her own texts: A System of World Geography (1824); History of the United States, or Republic of America (1828); and A System of Universal History in Perspective (1835). These were hailed as more accessible tools for educating about these subjects and were some of the best-selling textbooks of the 19th century. Always zealous in promoting her cause, Willard continued to write about education reform and publicized her
Emma Willard (Hulton/Archive)
Ideas energetically. She encouraged her students to serve their country by becoming teachers themselves, hoping to send her pupils out to the newly settled West to provide the schooling so lacking on the frontier. She traveled far herself, promoting the cause of education reform around the nation and in Europe.
In 1838, Willard retired from active teaching at the Troy Female Academy, but she continued to be a powerful figure at the school until her death. Her first husband, John Willard, died in 1825. After retirement and a brief, unhappy second marriage, she returned to her work, proposing ways to improve the common schools in Connecticut and other states. She continued to write, publishing books in her later years on subjects ranging from physiology to history to astronomy. While Willard opposed women’s suffrage as unnecessary and politically counterproductive to the cause of women’s education, she continued to advocate for women’s financial independence and the liberating effects of rigorous education. She continued on as an inspiring, charismatic presence at the Troy Female Academy until her death in 1870. The academy was renamed the Emma Willard School as a tribute to the vision of its founder, the first American woman to publicly advocate better education for women. Her school became a model for other academies, seminaries, and colleges for women in the United States and around the world.
Further reading: Stephen Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Williams, Peter, Jr. (ca. 1780-1840) activist, minister Born in New Jersey sometime around 1780, Peter Williams, Jr., moved to New York at an early age and became one of New York City’s leading African-American clergymen and activists. The son of an enslaved man (and Revolutionary War veteran) and a black indentured woman, he was educated at one of the abolitionist schools for free blacks. As an activist, Williams published some of the earliest pamphlets by an African American against racial injustice. His first such essay, entitled An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was published in 1808. While celebrating the recent congressional ban on slave imports, Williams also attacked continued racial oppression.
Throughout his life, Williams worked passionately for such issues as black EDUCATION, community uplift, and the ABOLITION MOVEMENT. He was a member of the African Society for Mutual Relief; a supporter of the first black-run newspaper, Freedom's Journal (inaugurated in New York City in 1827); and, later in his life, a founder of two educational groups, the African Dorcas Association (1828) and the Phoenix Society (1833). In addition, Williams joined the new generation of immediate abolitionists rising in American culture during the 1830s. As the editors of The Black Abolitionist Papers put it, “Williams firmly established his credentials as a leading black abolitionist by the 1830s.” From 1833 to 1836, he served on the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Board of Managers and was one of its very few black Executive Committee members.
Williams also gained fame for starting St. Phillips Episcopal Church in New York City. After a period of tutelage under a white Episcopal theologian, and after having led a group of black Episcopalians in worship, Williams organized St. Phillips 1819. The congregation expanded to more than 200 families during the next several years, making St. Phillips one of the city’s leading African-American churches. Williams became an ordained Episcopal priest in 1826. According to The Black Abolitionist Papers, Williams encountered hardship during the 1830s when “rumors that he had conducted an interracial marriage provoked a white mob to destroy his church and Rectory.” Told by a bishop in 1834 to formally resign his station in antislavery societies promulgating racial equality, Williams did so but remained at the head of his congregation. He continued to work as an abolitionist, however, attending antislavery meetings and promoting his activist views. One of Williams’s last acts in this regard came in 1836 when he received a passport for a trip to England. Although he endured discrimination during his travels, he also claimed American citizenship through the passport, thereby justifying many black abolitionists’ claims to equality.
Further reading: C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985-1992).
—Richard Newman
World History
