Sea of Glory

domesticity. Five years later, in 1859, Mary gave birth to a daughter; Wilkes was sixty-one.
    After more than a decade at the Patent Office Building, the collection of the Ex. Ex. found a new and permanent home. Congress had finally established the Smithsonian Institution in 1846 with the understanding that it would take over stewardship of the Expedition’s collection. But the Institution’s first secretary, the scientist Joseph Henry, saw the Smithsonian as a research organization, and one of his first moves was to refuse the Expedition’s collection. Like Charles Pickering, Henry was for original research, not the maintenance and display of a momentous pile of artifacts that would require a large, expensive building and sizeable staff. Henry was part of a young group of scientists who were replacing the amateur collectors of the previous era, and he wanted to reserve as much as possible of the Institution’s resources for the practice of new science—for laboratories and the publication of results, not specimen cases.
    But there were some influential congressmen who were determined that the Smithsonian Institution would become America’s national museum. In spite of Henry’s protestations, bids went out to architects for a palatial new building. The winner turned out to be Wilkes’s nephew James Renwick, Jr., whose ornate Norman design is still known today as the “Castle on the Mall.” By 1850, it was clear that Henry needed an assistant, and although Titian Peale was a leading candidate for the job, Henry hired the much younger Spencer Baird from Dickinson College. Baird’s personal natural history collection was big enough to fill two boxcars, and he looked with enthusiasm to the possibility of expanding the Smithsonian’s holdings, particularly since the many expeditions into the American West were sending back a steady stream of specimens and artifacts to Washington.
    Reluctantly, Henry realized that he had no choice but to surrender to the inevitable. In 1858, when the Smithsonian finally acquired the objects of the Exploring Expedition, the Institution’s collection had already grown to the extent that the Ex. Ex. objects accounted for just one-fifth of the Institution’s total natural history holdings. But no one could deny that the addition of the Expedition’s collection added immeasurably to the Smithsonian’s importance and prestige. The larger space of the Smithsonian’s hall allowed Baird to expand and refresh the original Ex. Ex. exhibit, and much as Wilkes had done at the Patent Office fifteen years before, the words NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE UNITED STATES were placed above the entrance to the hall. In the words of William Stanton, whose book about the Expedition stands as the definitive account of how science in America was forever changed by the Ex. Ex., “[the] Great National Expedition had created a great national museum.”
    There were other national institutions whose genesis can be traced to the Exploring Expedition. By this point, Brackenridge’s plants in the greenhouse behind the Patent Office had been moved to a new structure located at the foot of Capitol Hill that is now the home of the U.S. Botanic Garden, while the more than four million specimens currently in the National Herbarium began with the dried plants brought back by the Ex. Ex. Soon after Wilkes’s return to the United States, the Depot of Charts and Instruments and its small observatory were moved from his home on Capitol Hill to a new location in Washington that became the predecessor of the Naval Observatory and the U.S. Hydrographic Office.
    Suddenly it was possible for a scientist to earn a living in the United States—something that had been almost unimaginable when the Expedition had first sailed. This may have been the Expedition’s—and its leader’s—greatest contribution. “Without Wilkes’s incredible energy and Byzantine mind,” Stanton writes, “the Expedition’s achievements might have been no more lasting than the wake of its ships upon the waters of the world. . . . By putting science into government and government into science he had made it possible for the American scientist to live by his profession—like other respectable people.”
    But the Expedition’s scientific impact was not wholly institutional. It had an indirect, but nonetheless crucial role in introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution to the United States. About the same time that Commodore Matthew Perry was