In september 1753 the American botanist John Bartram set out with his young son Billy from their farm on the banks of the Schuylkill for the Catskill Mountains for the purpose of gathering seeds and plant samples. The journey ended at the Hudson Valley home of Cadwallader Colden, surveyor-general of New York and himself a botanist of note, where the Bartrams made the acquaintance of yet another botanist, Alexander Garden of Charleston, South Carolina. The elder Bartram encouraged Garden to open correspondence with Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist to whom Bartram had been writing for years, correspondence that gives particular point to this triangular meeting on the banks of the Hudson. For the Bartrams' journey and their visit with the other two botanists may be said to epitomize the scientific Enlightenment in colonial America, an intellectual voluntarism that had as its political counterpart a formal gathering of regional representatives in nearby Albany the year following. That convention, necessitated by the hostilities soon to erupt as the French and Indian War, produced a prototype of the Constitution, and the impromptu congress that met at “Coldenhamia” in 1753, though animated by pacific purposes, was likewise a manifestation of federated and protonational design.