Samuel L. Mitchill

{{redirect|Samuel Mitchill|other people with similar names|Samuel Mitchell (disambiguation){{!}}Sam Mitchell}}

{{Infobox officeholder

|name = Samuel Latham Mitchill

|image = Samuel Latham Mitchill.jpg

|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 = {{ushr|NY|2|2nd district}} (1801–03)
{{ushr|NY|3|3rd district}} (1803–04)

|term_start3 = March 4, 1801

|term_end3 = November 22, 1804

|predecessor3 = Edward Livingston

|successor3 = George Clinton, Jr.

|constituency2 = {{ushr|NY|2|2nd district}}

|term_start2 = December 4, 1810

|term_end2 = March 3, 1813

|predecessor2 = William Denning
Gurdon S. Mumford

|successor2 = Jotham Post, Jr.
Egbert Benson

|birth_date = {{birth date|1764|8|20}}

|birth_place = Hempstead, Province of New York, British America

|death_date = {{death date and age|1831|9|7|1764|8|20}}

|death_place = New York City, New York, U.S.

|party = Democratic-Republican

}}

Samuel Latham Mitchill (August 20, 1764{{spaced ndash}}September 7, 1831) was an American physician, naturalist, and politician who lived in Plandome, New York.[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] Retrieved October 7, 2014.

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.{{Cite web | url=http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/person/samuel-latham-mitchill | title=Samuel Latham Mitchill – Biography}}

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.D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 45. Returning to the United States after medical school, Mitchill also completed law school.{{cite web|title=Mitchill, Samuel Latham, (1764 - 1831)|url=http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=m000831|publisher=Biographical Directory of the United States Congress|access-date=November 29, 2015}} As a lawyer, he oversaw the purchase of lands in western New York from the Iroquois Indians in 1788.

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.{{cite book|title=Biographical Index of Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002|date=July 2006|publisher=The Royal Society of Edinburgh|isbn=0-902-198-84-X|url=https://www.royalsoced.org.uk/cms/files/fellows/biographical_index/fells_indexp2.pdf}}

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.{{cite web|title=Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter M|url=http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterM.pdf|publisher=American Academy of Arts and Sciences|access-date=August 7, 2014}} 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.Keir B. Sterling, "Mitchill, Samuel Latham" [http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-01154.html American National Biography Online].

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.{{cite web |title=List of Individuals Impeached by the House of Representatives |url=https://history.house.gov/Institution/Impeachment/Impeachment-List/ |website=history.house.gov |publisher=United States House of Representatives: History, Art, & Archives |access-date=7 July 2023 |language=en}} 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.{{cite web |title=Mitchill, Samuel Latham |url=http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M000831 |website=bioguide.congress.gov |publisher=Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. |access-date=7 July 2023}}

Mitchill was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.[http://www.americanantiquarian.org/memberlistm American Antiquarian Society Members Directory] 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.{{cite journal|last1=Baatz|first1=Simon|title=Knowledge, Culture and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817–1970|journal=Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences|date=1990|volume=584|pages=1–256|doi=10.1111/nyas.1990.584.issue-1|pmid=2200324}}

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.See [http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/bib/colden/App16.html Mitchill's speech at the dedication of the Erie Canal] {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20000524044954/http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/bib/colden/App16.html |date=May 24, 2000 }}. 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.George R. Stewart, Names on the Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967) 173. 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.'"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.{{citation |author=Richard E. Bennett |title='Read This I Pray Thee': Martin Harris and the Three Wise Men of the East |work=Journal of Mormon History |volume=36 |date=Winter 2010 |pages=178–216}}; {{citation|author=Richard Bushman|author-link=Richard Bushman|title=Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling |publisher=New York: Alfred A. Knopf |year=2005 |page=64|title-link=Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling }}; {{citation|author=Fawn Brodie|author-link=Fawn Brodie|title=No Man Knows My History |publisher=New York: Alfred A. Knopf |year=1971 |page=51|title-link=No Man Knows My History }}. "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.

Published works

Mitchill, S. L. 1818. Description of three species of fish. Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 1, 407–412. ([https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/79416#page/479/mode/1up BHL link])

Taxon described by him

See :Category:Taxa named by Samuel L. Mitchill

Taxon named in his honor

The Bay Anchovy, Anchoa mitchilli Valenciennes, 1848 was named after him.[https://etyfish.org/search/ The Etyfish Project]

References

External links

{{Commons category-inline|Samuel Latham Mitchill}}
{{CongBio|M000831}}
[http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101179317 Francis, John W. Reminiscences of Samuel Latham Mitchell, (1859).] From the Digital Collections of the National Library of Medicine.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20131019110832/http://mcnycatablog.org/2013/01/14/samuel-latham-mitchill-papers-1801-1859-bulk-dates-1802-1813/ Finding aid for the Samuel Latham Mitchill papers at the Museum of the City of New York]
[https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mitchill Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers] at the William L. Clements Library

{{US House succession box

| state= New York

| district= 2

| before= Edward Livingston

| after= Joshua Sands

| years= 1801–1803}}

{{US House succession box

| state= New York

| district= 3

| before= Philip Van Cortlandt

| after= George Clinton, Jr.

| years= 1803–1804}}