AFA Autumn 2021

Autumn 82 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com A WARM RECEPTION IN CHARLESTON In the fall of 1831, Audubon was visiting Charleston, South Carolina, on his second return to the United States since launching his landmark publication The Birds of America in Great Britain in 1827. He had spent the better part of the previous thirty years preparing for and producing the greatest bird book the world had ever seen. He had two important reasons for making this trip. The first was to gather source material with which to create additional plates for his “double elephant folio,” and text for its accompanying narrative, which he was publishing in a series of volumes under the title Ornithological Biography . The second reason for visiting the U.S. was to secure more American subscribers for The Birds of America , for which he was always in need of funds. He found Charleston a particularly fertile area for both activities. On November 6, 1831, the forty-six-year-old naturalist wrote to his friend Dr. Richard Harlan in Philadelphia to tell him what a delightfully warm reception he had received in Charleston. “I have [been] struck by the generous hospitality of the Charlestonians,” he wrote, “and I am this day more amazed than ever. Everybody seems anxious to promote my wishes and comfort.” He was particularly happy to report that a Dr. Samuel Wilson, one of Harlan’s “old companions at college,”  1 had just presented him with “a most excellent New Found Land Dog and a handsome silver snuff box.” To emphasize the warmth of the city’s residents and explain the usefulness of the second gift, he added that “the ladies of Charleston…contributed to our pleasure by giving us [an] abundance of good snuff.”  2 The collective “we” refers to his traveling companion, the Swiss landscape painter George Lehman (ca. 1803–1870), who Audubon had hired to assist him with some of the backgrounds for his work. Samuel Wilson, the generous donor of these two gifts, was a doctor in Charleston who is frequently mentioned in Audubon’s Ornithological Biography as a source of many of his bird specimens and of first-hand information about the birds of the Charleston area. The gifts were doubly noted by the grateful naturalist, for on the following day he gave a similar account of them to his wife, who was then living in Louisville, Kentucky. In a letter to Lucy, dated November 7, 1831, Audubon wrote: “Docr Saml Wilson, a friend of Docr Harlan, gave me an excellent & beautiful Newfound Land dog for which…I would not take 100 dollars, and a few days afterward he…presented me with a handsome Silver Snuff Box.”  3 Whether unconcerned by, or oblivious to, the unsettling impression his references to the attention of Charleston’s ladies might give his wife, Audubon boasted that: “The Ladies have brought me ½ a dozen bottles of snuff.” There is no record of Lucy’s reaction to Audubon’s news, nor that of his friend and Charleston host, the Lutheran minister John Bachman (Fig. 3). We know that Reverend Bachman frowned on his friend’s fondness for tobacco, alcohol, and unattached women. He tried repeatedly to get Audubon to give up these vices. He succeeded, if only brief ly, just a few months after Audubon announced his windfall of tobacco-oriented gifts from Charleston. 4 “Thou wilt be surprised to read that I have abandoned Snuff for ever!” Audubon wrote his wife in January 1832. 5 His resolution was short lived, for in June of the following year he was once again using it regularly. Joseph Coolidge, the son of the man in charge of the revenue cutter on which Audubon traveled along the coast of Maine, wrote of the naturalist making a dramatic demonstration of his effort to abandon both snuff and alcohol. “Audubon was what you may term a free drinker, and, furthermore, he was a great snuff taker,” he recalled in 1896. 6 “What liquors there were the old man [Audubon] collected, and as we were passing the Eastport Lighthouse he took a last drink and said to us, ‘Boys, no more drink for me.’ With that he threw the liquors into the waves. Then he fished out his snuffbox [probably a commercial tin or paper box], and after taking a pinch, exclaimed, ‘No more snuff,’ and flung the box and its contents after the liquors into the tide.”  7 Later in the trip, Audubon expressed his regret about having abandoned these vices. “I do not know what I would not give for a glass of good brandy,” he told Coolidge a few days after his flamboyant, vice-dumping gesture. Happily, for him, his young traveling companion was able to find a bottle of brandy that had been kept for medicinal purposes. Audubon was elated. “Now, how would you like a pinch of snuff?” followed-up Coolidge. “As mortals seldom obtain all they wish,” replied Audubon, “they should study to be contented with what they can get.” “But I can find you some snuff,” said Coolidge, who had brought a package on board as a gift for Audubon but had not given it after seeing the naturalist throw his own package overboard. “If you can [find it] you will be quite an angel,” replied Audubon. “When I brought the snuff to him,” recalled Coolidge, “he was as happy as a child on Christmas morning with a wealth of gifts in his lap.”  8 Audubon was not unique in his addiction to snuff, a ground and fermented form of tobacco that could also be scented. Columbus’ crew observed the inhaled product being used in the Caribbean in the fifteenth century and by the sixteenth century it had become a luxury trade commodity in Europe and China. Coveted for its “medicinal” qualities, it had taken hold in England by the next century and its influence continued to expand worldwide, including the Americas, where it had originated. (Figs. 4, 5). Snuff would be important to Audubon through most of his life. In a letter of 1838, he described himself as a “Hypocondriacal of 53 Years of Age” who was “thank God yet able to put his fore finger and thumb up to his nose holding withal a pinch of the ‘American Gentleman’—(Snuff! Snuff!).”  9 When Audubon launched his second ambitious book project, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America , with Bachman as co-author, in 1839, Bachman optimistically predicted that the