Samuel L. Mitchill: Difference between revisions

Mitchill served in the [[New York State Assembly]] in 1791 and again in 1798 and was then elected as a [[Democratic-Republican Party|Democratic-Republican]] to the [[United States House of Representatives]], serving from 1801 until his resignation on November 22, 1804. In [[United States Senate special election in New York, November 1804|November 1804]], Mitchill was elected a [[U.S. Senator from New York]] to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of [[John Armstrong, Jr.|John Armstrong]], and served from November 23, 1804, to March 4, 1809. He then served again in the [[United States House of Representatives|House of Representatives]] from December 4, 1810, to March 4, 1813. Mitchill was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.<ref>[http://www.americanantiquarian.org/memberlistm American Antiquarian Society Members Directory]</ref> 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.<ref name="BaatzHistory">{{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|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.1990.584.issue-1/issuetoc|doi=10.1111/nyas.1990.584.issue-1}}</ref>

 

 

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 [[Thomas Jefferson|Jefferson]]) as the 'Congressional Dictionary.'"<ref>Burnett, 44. In 1828, [[Martin Harris (Latter Day Saints)|Martin Harris]], an associate of [[Joseph Smith]], the founder of the [[Latter Day Saint movement]], visited Mitchill asking that he 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]] |title=[[Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling]] |publisher=New York: Alfred A. Knopf |year=2005 |page=64}}; {{citation|author=[[Fawn Brodie]] |title=[[No Man Knows My History]] |publisher=New York: Alfred A. Knopf |year=1971 |page=51}}.</ref> "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.<ref name="American National Biography Online"/>

* {{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]].

 

{{s-start}}