to say he admired the “elegant” drawing he’d received. He also asked Wilson for assistance in identifying a bird he had spent twenty years wondering about. This bird, Jefferson wrote, was found everywhere in America but was difficult to observe. It was almost always perched on the highest branches of the tallest trees in the forest. Despite having chased them—on occasion through “miles” of woods—Jefferson had never gotten a good look at one. He’d also offered to reward anyone who could shoot him a specimen, but none of the young woodsmen he knew had managed it. The elusive bird appeared to be about the same size as a mockingbird and was generally brownish, with a lighter coloring on its breast. What was most notable, however, was its song, which Jefferson described as a glorious serenade, not unlike the nightingale’s.
In retrospect, this exchange is an amusing demonstration of the primitive state of American natural science at the time. The jay Wilson “discovered” was in fact a Canadian jay and not a new species at all—as he was later pained to learn. As for the bird that so beguiled Jefferson, Wilson could only conclude that it was the ordinary wood thrush, a common bird also known as a “wood robin” that was not mysterious to anyone who spent time in the forest. Jefferson was, however, rightly smitten with the song of the wood thrush, which was so lovely that it taxed Wilson’s descriptive powers a couple of years later when he completed an essay on the bird and its habits for American Ornithology:
With the dawn of the succeeding morning, mounting to the top of some tall tree that rises from a low thick shaded part of the woods, he pipes his few, but clear musical notes, in a kind of ecstasy; the prelude, or symphony to which, strongly resembles the double-tonguing of a German flute, and sometimes the tinkling of a small bell; the whole song consists of five or six parts, the last note of each of which is in such a tone as to leave the conclusion evidently suspended; the finale is finely managed, and with such charming effect as to soothe and tranquilize the mind, and to seem sweeter and mellower at each successive repetition.
This lyrical, overwrought style, characteristic of the times and also of Wilson’s poetic sensibility, contrasted with his drawing of the wood thrush—a frozen profile in which Wilson showed the bird’s beak open, as if it were caught singing. Like all of his images, this one bore the caption “Drawn from Nature.” But it was nature flattened, as though the bird had been pressed onto the paper like a flower preserved between the pages of a book. Nature was less vivid in Wilson’s drawings than it was in his prose, and in this Wilson was a reflection of the moment in which he lived. America was then the epicenter of several worlds in collision—a country of revolution and radicalism premised on the triumph of reason, a civil nation thinly established on the shore of an immense land where the raw power of nature flooded the senses. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia had in effect been a second declaration of American independence, this time from the tyranny of European science. In answering Jefferson’s call to arms, Wilson was awed by what he saw in nature and by the responsibility of rendering it properly. But he wasn’t ready, or talented enough, to throw away tradition. This limitation added a sorrowful tinge to the graceful but immovable images in American Ornithology, which was so much like its creator—ambitious yet bound by convention. Wilson allowed his writing to soar, but not his birds.
Wilson’s interest in ornithology arrived late in his short life, after years of struggle and restlessness. In the summer of 1803 he wrote to a friend back in Scotland that he was determined to “make a collection of all our finest birds.” He was just shy of his thirty-seventh birthday. He would be dead in ten years.
In the summer of 1794, Philadelphia, which had so impressed Wilson and his nephew when they first saw it sprawled on the opposite shore of the Delaware River, was in reality a devastated city just coming back to life. Still the provisional seat of government—Philadelphia was the federal capital under the Articles of Confederation—the city had been decimated by yellow fever the previous summer and fall. The fever was a terrifying, frequently fatal disease that produced rashes, lethargy, breathing difficulties, black vomit, and a ghastly yellowing of the skin. It turned up initially along the riverfront but spread quickly, sending panicked citizens fleeing to the countryside. Many who left did so on the advice of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the city’s most prominent physician. Rush, who was also a political leader and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was among the handful of doctors who first realized an epidemic was under way. He believed that the fever was caused by airborne poisons given off by putrefying garbage—especially the spoiled cargoes that were sometimes dumped on the wharves along the Delaware and left to rot. Rush thought that a great load of ruined coffee, lying out under the August sun and fouling the air over the city immediately before the outbreak of fever, was particularly suspect.
As the city emptied, those who stayed behind saw the hellish effects of the fever. City officials commandeered deserted homes and stables to house the sick. In reeking hospitals the dying and the dead were confined together and then abandoned by their physicians, left to be tended only by ill-trained nurses, some of whom stole their patients’ food and took no notice of the filth accumulating around them. The sky itself turned black, as buckets of tar were burned in the streets in hopes of sanitizing the air.
Rush no doubt saved many lives with his advice to get out of town—mainly because people who left were more likely to escape his own widely practiced treatment for the fever. Rush adhered to an old-fashioned, two-stage remedy that began with a massive dose of purgatives, which doubtless exhausted and dehydrated an already desperately ill patient. This was followed with a heavy bleeding of the victim. Rush, who greatly overestimated the amount of blood in a typical human body, advised the removal of several quarts from fever sufferers. In both phases of the treatment, Rush emphasized that it was important not to err on the side of caution, but to take the most aggressive measures possible. This approach, which by itself could be enough to kill a healthy person, contributed to the deaths of many fever patients.
Yellow fever was actually transmitted by mosquitoes. It probably arrived in Philadelphia with infected refugees who’d fled the recent uprising in Saint-Domingue—and who also seemed somewhat resistant to the disease. All of this was the subject of keen speculation, but nobody at the time really understood how the fever spread or what to do about it. A few doctors who were more familiar with tropical diseases prescribed fluids and cool baths, and their fortunate patients survived at higher rates. But the disease ran rampant. Racing through the city in a matter of months, it left five thousand dead—about one out of every ten Philadelphians. The following spring the city still appeared deserted. Weeds grew in the streets. Many businesses were boarded up; some had been looted or burned out.
But by midsummer, as Wilson and his nephew hiked along the Delaware toward the city, things were returning to normal and a general cleanup had restored a sense of well-being. Wilson, shocked as he was at the prices of almost everything and by the number of Caribbean refugees wandering the streets, still perceived the wealth and opportunity pulsing in the city. When he couldn’t find work as a weaver right away, he accepted a position at an engraving shop—where he got a taste of the printmaking business in which he would one day make a name. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Wilson felt happy. In letter after letter home, he wrote about the wonder of America, and how grand a city Philadelphia was.
Philadelphia was then America’s most successful seaport, prospering on a brisk export trade in agricultural produce—principally flour—and on the import of manufactured goods. Built on an orderly grid of tree-lined avenues fronted by sturdy, somewhat unimaginative brick buildings, the city was dominated by a burgeoning class of merchants and seamen. Market Street, which ran east–west from the Delaware waterfront, bisected the downtown area. It was twice as wide as the other streets, and the roofed stalls of meat and produce sellers occupied the center of the boulevard. Newcomers gaped at the abundance on display in the marketplace and at its tidiness. The butchers, especially, were immaculate. They dressed in sparkling white smocks and sawed the bones as they cut meat—an appetizing improvement over the European practice of breaking the bones. Every inn and hotel in the city served feastlike meals daily, though the rough table manners of the Americans offered a challenge to anyone too dainty to grab a portion.
By day the streets were clean and quiet, and it was generally agreed that no city in the world was better lit at night. Philadelphia looked rich, and it was—a city triumphant in the