Joel Roberts Poinsett is and was everywhere if we look for him. The Smithsonian, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, the American Philosophical Society, the oldest stone bridge in the South. The War and State Departments, US Congress, the South Carolina General Assembly, Europe, Russia, South America, Mexico, the Caribbean. Andrew Jackson confided in him about military matters, and Emperor Alexander of Russia discussed US claims to the Pacific Northwest with him. He fought in Chile’s War for Independence and orchestrated the United States’ longest and costliest war against Native Americans in history. Today Poinsett’s primary visible traces are on the tags of the world’s most economically important potted plant: the Christmas flower called the “Poinsettia,” which he took from the Mexican state of Guerrero in 1828 on a business trip during his controversial tenure as America’s first minister plenipotentiary to the country. The story of how the United States appropriated the Aztec plant the Cuitlaxochitl, named it after Poinsett, and commercialized it speaks to the process by which American foreign relations and political economy developed in the nineteenth century, as well as to the role that Poinsett played in this development. 

He worked as a secret agent in South America, ambassador to Mexico, South Carolina state legislator, US congressman, and secretary of war. His three-decade career included military planning for Chilean independence leaders, asserting US commercial interests in Mexico, and advocating the use of federal force against tariff opponents in his home state. All of these activities reflected an emerging form of political economy rooted in opportunism, chauvinism, and international competition. Poinsett personified a type of patriotism that emerged in the decades following the American Revolution, in which statesmen claimed to act in the service of the new American republic by securing economic prosperity and military security. 

In many ways, we could call Poinsett a nationalist for his commitment to whiteness, Anglo-American culture, and militarism, but this word is steeped in twentieth-century meaning, and it was not a word that Poinsett or his correspondents used; instead, they used patriotism and patriot often. Early in his career, he used these words most frequently to refer to revolutionaries in South America, equating their independence movements with that of the “patriots” of the American Revolution. Patriotism was a value judgment used to compare individuals’ actions to those of the “patriot Washington”4 and to praise the “military spirit” that marked the “patriotism of the soldiers.” It could also be used to refer to any activity that advanced commercial or national interests, such as when South Carolina botanist Stephen Elliott referred to Amos Eaton’s work on geological surveys as a “patriotic pursuit.” Poinsett’s own friends and allies referred to his patriotism. Fellow Mason, South Carolina slave owner, and unionist Chapman Levy, for example, wrote to Poinsett in reference to his actions during the nullification crisis: “These feelings of high respect and kindness and regard for you, which sunk deep into my bosom in those trying times which evinced your exalted patriotism and devotion to our country, as well as your firmness and talents in its support, has remained unchanged.” And Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Hartley Crawford wrote to Poinsett at the end of Poinsett’s term as secretary of war, “Your administration of the department was in the true spirit of patriotism.” When South Carolinians began seriously debating secession, Poinsett wrote that at least the “fanatics of the north” had “patriotism” and an “attachment to the union.”9 Finally, nine years before South Carolina’s threats became reality, Poinsett’s tombstone proclaimed his life and death as those of “a pure patriot, an honest man, and a good Christian.” 

Poinsett matters, but not because he was “a pure patriot, an honest man,” or “a good Christian.”10 He was never fully any of those things. He matters because he embodied the contradictions and inconsistencies at the heart of the American experiment. He was born in South Carolina while it fought for independence from Great Britain, and he died as it debated secession from the Union on the eve of the Civil War. He was a southerner who lived much of his life elsewhere—in Europe, Mexico, South America, and Washington, DC. In his time, he was the subject of newspaper articles, presidential correspondence, diplomatic memos, and congressional proceedings. A eulogist credited him with “sav[ing] the country” from disunion over a tax crisis; members of the Mexican public lambasted his self-interested interference in local politics.