Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (67 page)

It is difficult to appreciate the extent of European ignorance about the Western Hemisphere, even as late as the eighteenth century. Since Alexander von Humboldt had not yet made his journeys and published his findings, even educated Europeans had strange ideas about the New World. Of course, at the beginning Europeans had expected the climate of America to be similar to that of the Old World. Indeed, “climate” was described, as, for example, in Jedidiah Morse’s
American Geography
(1796), as a belt of the earth’s surface between two given parallels of latitude. People assumed that places that were the same distance from the
poles or the equator would have the same climate and were surprised to find the contrary. The latitude of London was north of Newfoundland; that of Rome was nearly the same as New York City. Yet the climates of these places on the same latitude were very different. It was out of this sense of difference between the Old and New Worlds and the hearsay it generated that Buffon fabricated his scientific conclusions.
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The great naturalist’s theories about the New World were taken up by others, including Corneille de Pauw, the Abbé Raynal, and the Scottish historian William Robertson, and through such writers they entered the popular thinking about America in the late eighteenth century.
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Naturally those Americans who became aware of Buffon’s findings were alarmed. If Buffon’s scientific claims were true, then the chances for the success of the new American republican experiment were not good, and the predictions of pessimistic Europeans about the future of the New World would be proved correct. For many eighteenth-century Englishmen and Europeans the term “American” often had conjured up images ofunrefined if not barbarous persons, degenerate and racially debased mongrels living amidst African slaves and Indian savages thousands of miles from civilization. Hessian soldiers arriving in New York in 1776 had been surprised to find that there were actually many white people in the New World.
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Now the best scientific theories of the day seemed to reinforce these popular European images of the degeneracy of the New World.

Of course, most Americans in the generation following the Revolution did not let these English and European charges seriously dampen their optimism and enthusiasm for the future. Instead, they reacted with indignant dismissal, exaggerated boasting, or extensive scientific comparison. Perhaps it was true, conceded Jefferson, that America had twice as much rain as Europe, but in America, he said, it fell “in half the time.”
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Yet some Americans seemed to have an underlying anxiety that the European critics might be right after all. There did seem to be something peculiar about America’s climate. The same regions with temperatures well below zero in winter could swelter in heat close to one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer; also, swings of forty degrees Fahrenheit in twenty-four hours were not uncommon. No place in Europe had these sorts of radical variations in temperature. The American climate did seem to have more moisture. Humidity was often high, and heavy rainfall alternated with an unusual number of sunny cloudless days. Some speculated that these peculiarities were due to the existence of so much uncultivated land with so many dense forests in America. Europe’s climate had once been like America’s, it was thought, but once most of its trees had been cut down, its climate had changed.

The devastating epidemics of yellow fever that erupted in American cities during this period, beginning with the catastrophe in Philadelphia in 1793 (which killed 10 percent of the population), were not duplicated elsewhere in the Western world. This led some Americans, including Jefferson, to conclude that the disease was indeed “peculiar to our country.” Because the sun rarely shone in the middle and northern parts of Europe, the Europeans could “safely build cities in solid blocks without generating disease.” But America’s unusual atmosphere—the cloudless skies and the intense heat and humidity—fermented the garbage and filth in America’s cities, creating putrefaction that released effluvia and morbific fluids that bred disease; thus in America, said Jefferson, “men cannot be piled on one another with impunity.” He hoped that some good might come out of these epidemics of yellow fever: Americans might be inhibited from building the sorts of huge sprawling cities that existed in Europe.
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Although America’s cities were scarcely crowded or dirty by European standards, many Americans decided that their unusual climate required their cities to be designed differently from those in the Old World. Urban renewal in the early Republic was born out of these concerns. Jefferson was especially worried about New Orleans, which promised to become “the greatest city the world had ever seen. There is no spot on the globe,” he said, “to which the produce of so great an extent of fertile country must necessarily come.” But unfortunately at the same time “there is no spot where yellow fever is so much to be apprehended.” He decided that New Orleans and other American cities had “to take the chequer board” for a
plan, with “the white squares open and unbuilt for ever, and planted with trees.”
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Not just Jefferson but many other leading intellectuals of the day, such as Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, Samuel L. Mitchill, and Benjamin Latrobe, also concocted plans for cleaning and renovating America’s cities. But Dr. Charles Caldwell, a Philadelphia physician, was the one who drew up the most elaborate plans for urban renewal to deal with the effluvia that presumably caused yellow fever. Caldwell thought all of America’s cities, which were simply “vast factories of this febrile poison,” would have to be rebuilt in accord with the country’s unusual climate—requiring lofty buildings, lots of squares, and many trees, especially Lombardy poplars, which were the best kind of tree for soaking up the miasma and emitting vital air.

Caldwell seems to have conceded that the Europeans were correct in their judgment about America’s climate. Instead of denying the Europeans’ charges, he turned them around by claiming that America’s climate was simply more stupendous than any other. “Nature,” he said in an oration in 1802, “was more gigantic in her operations” in America. “Compared to our own, how humble are the mountains, rivers, lakes, and cataracts of the Old World.” It stood to reason, he said, that America had bigger and more powerful diseases than other places. “Our diseases are not only more frequent but aspire to the same scale of greatness with our other phenomena.”
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Americans’ preoccupation with the climate that was causing these diseases grew out of their Enlightenment assumption that people were the products of experience and external circumstances. Since, as most people believed, humans had all sprung from the same origin, as recorded in Genesis, only the effects of the environment through time could account for the obvious differences among them. Even skin color was explained in environmental terms. Many believed that the Negro’s blackness came from the intense African sun—that somehow the African’s skin had
become scorched. In the peculiar climate of America, some Americans thought, the African Americans’ skin would gradually become lighter, perhaps eventually white. The South Carolina historian David Ramsay, who believed that “all mankind [was] originally the same and only diversified by accidental circumstances,” claimed that “in a few centuries the negroes will lose their black color. I think now they are less black in Jersey than Carolina.”
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All this emphasis on the power of climate had ominous implications for Americans. If the climate of the New World were powerful enough to create peculiar American diseases or to affect the color of people’s skins, then Buffon’s charges were very serious indeed. In fact, they lay behind the only book Thomas Jefferson ever wrote.

In his
Notes on the State of Virginia
(first published in a French edition in 1785; the first American edition appeared in 1787, with two more in 1800 and five new editions in 1801), Jefferson systematically attempted to answer the famous theories of Buffon; in fact, he requested that one of the first copies of his book be delivered directly to the great naturalist. The parts of the book that today are often skipped over or eliminated entirely in modern abbreviated editions—the tables and statistics about animals that Jefferson compiled in Query VI—are precisely those parts that Jefferson considered central to his work.

Side by side in order of volume Jefferson listed the animals of the Old and New Worlds, accompanied by the weights of each in pounds and ounces. In almost every case the American animal is bigger. If the European cow weighed 763 pounds, the American cow was 2, 500 pounds. If the European bear weighed 153.7 pounds, then the American bear weighed 410 pounds. As Jefferson described the various American animals—the moose, the beaver, the weasel, the fox—and found them all equaling or bettering their European counterparts, he got carried away with excitement and even brought in the prehistoric mammoth to offset the Old World elephant. He even matched Buffon’s sarcastic reference to the tapir, “the elephant of America,” being but the size of a small cow. “To preserve our comparison, I will add that the wild boar, the elephant of Europe, is little more than half that size.”

Jefferson scarcely hid his anger at Buffon’s charges, and he raised question after question about the sources of the famous naturalist’s data. Who were those European travelers who supplied the information about America’s animals? Were they real scientists? Was natural history the object of
their travels? Did they measure or weigh the animals they speak of? Did they really know anything at all about animals? Jefferson’s conclusion was clear: Buffon and the other European intellectuals did not know what they were talking about.
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Jefferson was not someone who liked personal confrontations, but when he went to France in the 1780s as American minister he prepared himself for his first meeting with Buffon by taking with him “an uncommonly large panther skin.” He was introduced to Buffon, the curator of King Louis XVI’s cabinet of natural history, as someone who had combated several of Buffon’s theories. Jefferson did not hesitate in pressing Buffon about his ignorance of American animals. He especially stressed the great size of the American moose and told Buffon that it was so big that a European reindeer could walk under its belly. Finally, in exasperation, the eminent European naturalist promised that if Jefferson could produce a single specimen of the moose with foot-long antlers, “he would give up the question.”
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That was all Jefferson needed, and he went busily to work, writing friends in America, imploring them to send him all the skins, bones, and horns they could find, or better still, entire stuffed animals. Governor John Sullivan of New Hampshire took the most trouble of anyone, for he was commissioned to get the moose that was to demolish Buffon’s theories once and for all. Sullivan sent a virtual army into the northern wilderness of New Hampshire and even cut a twenty-mile road through the woods to drag it out. By the time the specimen arrived in Portsmouth to be readied for its transit across the Atlantic, it was half rotten and had lost all its hair and head bones. So Sullivan sent along to Paris the horns of some other animal, blithely explaining to Jefferson that “they are not the horns of this Moose but may be fixed on at pleasure.”
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Understandably, Jefferson was not entirely happy with the impression his bones and skins were making on Buffon. Although he asked his correspondents in America to send him the biggest specimens they could find, he continually apologized to Buffon for their smallness. Apparently, however, the specimens convinced Buffon of his errors, for according to Jefferson, the French naturalist promised to set these things right in his next volume; but he died before he could do so.
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Jefferson continued to be interested in the size of American animals. In 1789 he urged the president of Harvard to encourage the study of America’s natural history in order “to do justice to our country, it’s productions, and it’s genius.” In the mid-1790s on the basis of some fossil remains, probably belonging to a prehistoric sloth, he concocted the existence of a huge super-lion, three times bigger than the African lion, and presented his imagined beast to the scientific world as the Megalonyx, “the great claw.”
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The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Willson Peale’s exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of the mastodon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth in his celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized scientific exhumation in American history. Peale’s discovery electrified the country and put the word “mammoth” on everybody’s lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of “mammoth bread.” In Washington a “mammoth eater” ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes. And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a “mammoth cheese,” six feet in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds. The cheese was produced from the milk of nine hundred cows at a single milking, with no Federalist cows being allowed to participate. The president welcomed this gift from the heart of Federalism as “an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution.”
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Others besides Jefferson wrestled with the problem of America’s environment. Indeed, at times it seemed as if the entire American intellectual community was involved in examining the creatures and the soil and climate of America. The Scottish-born self-made naturalist Alexander Wilson filled his remarkable nine-volume
American Ornithology
(1808–1814) with corrections of Buffon, who, said Wilson, committed error after error “with equal eloquence and absurdity.”
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Calls went out everywhere for information about the American habitat. Was the climate really wetter
than that of Europe, and if so, could anything be done about it? Charles Brockden Brown abandoned his novel-writing career in order to devote his energies to translating the comte de Volney’s disparaging
Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis d’Amérique
(A
View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America
), even though a London translation was readily available. In his notes to his new translation Brown wanted to refute Volney’s claim that America’s climate was responsible for America’s inability to produce a decent artist or writer.
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