Samuel L. Mitchill Explained

Samuel Latham Mitchill
Jr/Sr1:United States Senator
State1:New York
Term Start1:November 23, 1804
Term End1:March 4, 1809
Predecessor1:John Armstrong, Jr.
Successor1:Obadiah German
Office2:Member of the
U.S. House of Representatives
from New York
Constituency3: (1801–03)
(1803–04)
Term Start3:March 4, 1801
Term End3:November 22, 1804
Predecessor3:Edward Livingston
Successor3:George Clinton, Jr.
Term Start2:December 4, 1810
Term End2:March 3, 1813
Predecessor2:William Denning
Gurdon S. Mumford
Successor2:Jotham Post, Jr.
Egbert Benson
Birth Date:20 August 1764
Birth Place:Hempstead, Province of New York, British America
Death Place:New York City, New York, U.S.
Party:Democratic-Republican

Samuel Latham Mitchill (August 20, 1764September 7, 1831) was an American physician, naturalist, and politician who lived in Plandome, New York.[1]

Early life

Samuel Mitchill was born in Hempstead in the Province of New York, the son of Robert Mitchill and his wife, Mary Latham, both Quakers.[2]

He was sent to Scotland and graduated in 1786 from the University of Edinburgh Medical School with an M.D., his education being paid for by a wealthy uncle.[3] Returning to the United States after medical school, Mitchill also completed law school.[4] As a lawyer, he oversaw the purchase of lands in western New York from the Iroquois Indians in 1788.[2]

Career

Mitchill taught chemistry, botany, and natural history at Columbia College from 1792 to 1801 and was a founding editor of The Medical Repository, the first medical journal in the United States. In 1793, he was elected a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were James Gregory, Dugald Stewart, and John Rotherham.[5]

In addition to his Columbia lectures on botany, zoology, and mineralogy, Mitchill collected, identified, and classified many plants and animals, particularly aquatic organisms. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1797.[6] From 1807 to 1826, he taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York and then helped organize the short-lived Rutgers Medical College of New Jersey, which he served as vice president until 1830. While at Columbia, Mitchill developed a fallacious theory of disease; however, it resulted in his promotion of personal hygiene and improved sanitation.[7]

Mitchill served in the New York State Assembly in 1791 and again in 1798 and was then elected as a Democratic-Republican to the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1801 until his resignation on November 22, 1804. As a congressman, he was one of the impeachment managers who, in the impeachment trial, successfully prosecuted the articles of impeachment adopted by the House against Judge John Pickering.[8] In November 1804, Mitchill was elected a U.S. Senator from New York to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of John Armstrong, and served from November 23, 1804, to March 4, 1809. He then served again in the House of Representatives from December 4, 1810, to March 4, 1813.[9]

Mitchill was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.[10] On January 29, 1817, Mitchill convened the first meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences, originally called the Lyceum of Natural History, of which he was later elected president.[11]

Mitchill strongly endorsed the building of the Erie Canal, sponsored by his friend and political ally DeWitt Clinton; they were both members of the short-lived New-York Institution.[12] Mitchill suggested renaming the United States of America Fredonia, combining the English "freedom" with a Latinate ending. Although the suggestion was not seriously considered, some towns adopted the name, including Fredonia, New York.[13] Some freebooters established a short-lived republic under that name in Texas in the late 1820s.

Personality

Mitchill was a man of "irrepressible energies... polyglot enthusiasms... [and] distinguished eccentricities" who was not "a man afraid to speak out loud about the loves of plants and animals; indeed, he was not a man afraid to speak out loud on most any topic. In the early nineteenth century, Mitchill was New York's "most publicly universal gentleman... a man known variously as the 'living encyclopedia,' as a 'stalking library,' and (to his admired Jefferson) as the 'Congressional Dictionary.'"[14] "Once described as a 'chaos of knowledge,' Mitchill was generally more admired for his encyclopedic breadth of understanding than for much originality of thought." As a personality, he was affable but also egotistical and pedantic. Mitchill enjoyed popularizing scientific knowledge and promoting practical applications of scientific inquiry.[7]

Published works

Taxon described by him

Taxon named in his honor

The Bay Anchovy, Anchoa mitchilli Valenciennes, 1848 was named after him.[15]

External links

Notes and References

  1. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/62369#/summary Details - Plantae Plandomenses; or, A catalogue of the plants growing spontaneously in the neighbourhood of Plandome, the country residence of Samuel L. Mitchill. - Biodiversity Heritage Library
  2. Web site: Samuel Latham Mitchill – Biography.
  3. [D. Graham Burnett]
  4. Web site: Mitchill, Samuel Latham, (1764 - 1831). Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. November 29, 2015.
  5. Book: Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002. July 2006. The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 0-902-198-84-X.
  6. Web site: Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter M. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. August 7, 2014.
  7. Keir B. Sterling, "Mitchill, Samuel Latham" American National Biography Online.
  8. Web site: List of Individuals Impeached by the House of Representatives . history.house.gov . United States House of Representatives: History, Art, & Archives . 7 July 2023 . en.
  9. Web site: Mitchill, Samuel Latham . bioguide.congress.gov . Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. . 7 July 2023.
  10. http://www.americanantiquarian.org/memberlistm American Antiquarian Society Members Directory
  11. Baatz. Simon. Knowledge, Culture and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817–1970. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1990. 584. 1–256. 10.1111/nyas.1990.584.issue-1. 2200324.
  12. See Mitchill's speech at the dedication of the Erie Canal .
  13. [George R. Stewart]
  14. Burnett, 44. In 1828, Martin Harris, an associate of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, visited Mitchill to ask him to authenticate the "Reformed Egyptian" characters that Smith said were taken from golden plates to which he said he had been directed by an angel. Mitchill would have been unsympathetic to the view that Indians were related to the Jews or the Egyptians because he was one of the few scholars of his day who believed that Native Americans were descended from Asians. Mitchill left no record of Harris's visit.; ; .
  15. https://etyfish.org/search/ The Etyfish Project