was just before the end of the war that the governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, along with the other governors of the new states, received a questionnaire from the French ambassador asking for a summary of natural resources and political institutions in America. Only Jefferson found time to respond, although it took him five years to do so. His response came in the form of a slim book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which had developed into a more elaborate reply than the ambassador probably expected. The book marked a transition in the approach to natural science in the New World and would eventually precipitate a revolution in American thought about the land it was overspreading.
In his book—it was the only one he wrote—Jefferson provided a detailed guide to Virginia’s flora and fauna, including tables giving the sizes and weights of animals; to its geographical boundaries and internal topography; to its rivers, including their length, breadth, and navigability; to its mineral deposits, including discussions of mining operations and valuable ores and gemstones; to its population, military capabilities, laws, cities and towns, forms of government, and religion; to its agriculture and manufacturing; to its currency; to its buildings and roads. In his discussion of the people of Virginia—whites, slaves, and aboriginals—Jefferson vigorously defended American Indians against Buffon’s scathing assessment. But in the same breath, he advanced a contradictory and confusing racial theory that seemed to argue for and against slavery all at once. Jefferson, who was serving as ambassador to France when the book first appeared in Paris in 1785, held off publication in the United States for two more years, anticipating that it would outrage people on both sides of the slavery issue.
Jefferson had reasons to make such a thorough inventory of Virginia. Emerging from revolution, America found itself mired in debt and an object of skepticism in Europe. The new republic appeared to be not only impoverished and materially pathetic, but also politically unstable. Europeans continued to wonder if there was anything of value in the wilderness of the New World beyond the narrow beachhead claimed by the former colonies. Jefferson saw it in reverse. America, he believed, was a land of unimagined natural wealth and diversity—a country that would someday exert itself as an economic force. As one of the architects of American independence, Jefferson felt obliged to correct the American image abroad—and to provide assurance to allies and creditors that the young nation’s current straits were only temporary. The French, who sided with the Americans in the Revolution and whose trade policies were seen as more friendly than England’s, were exactly the people Jefferson wanted to impress.
Jefferson was also instinctively drawn to the challenge of merging science and statesmanship—disciplines he did not regard as so separate and distinct as we do now. Like other adherents to the principles of the Enlightenment, Jefferson believed that all knowledge and all forms of social organization could be derived from the study of natural history. Jefferson saw a chance to show the rest of the world what America was made of, and, by extension, what America stood for. Here, too, was an opportunity to answer Buffon. When Jefferson turned his attention to the size and vigor of American animals in his Notes, he began with the big quadruped that was by then being called the mammoth.
Jefferson did not think the large skeletons found in America were the remains of elephants. Nor would he entertain any thought that they belonged to an animal that no longer existed. Jefferson did not believe in extinction. “Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” Instead, he declared that mammoths were one of God’s proofs against Buffon’s theory of degeneration in the New World. Mammoth remains hinted at an animal with “six times the cubic volume of the elephant,” Jefferson wrote. The teeth of the mammoth and the elephant were different, and Jefferson noted that elephant remains had never been discovered in North America. Jefferson considered—and rejected—alternative theories in which elephants and mammoths could be one and the same. Could elephants be more adaptable to cold climates than was believed? No. Could an “internal fire” deep in the earth once have warmed the higher latitudes to a range comfortable for elephants? There was no evidence of such. Was it possible that the angle of the earth’s axis relative to the sun had changed, and that northern regions were formerly warmer for that reason? Maybe. But Jefferson concluded that, given the maximum shift anyone could conceive, these northern elephants would have had to have lived some 250,000 years ago! Here Jefferson declined to invoke biblical time lines, noting instead that many mammoth bones had been discovered lying in the open air and could not possibly have remained intact for so long given such exposure.
Jefferson thought there was only one reasonable explanation. Nature, he said, had drawn a “belt of separation between these two tremendous animals,” and in so doing, “assigned to the elephant the regions South of these confines, and those North to the mammoth, founding the constitution of the one in her extreme of heat, and that of the other in the extreme of cold.” Given the efforts of the Creator to thus distinguish these two animals by disposition and by geography, was it not then “perverse” of man to believe they were the same beast?
But Jefferson was less interested in the precise identity of the mammoth than he was in what the beast suggested about the faunal environment of the New World. Jefferson was well versed in Indian legends concerning the mammoth, which the Indians sometimes called the “big buffalo,” and had heard reports that Indian tribes in the north and west of the continent claimed the animal still existed in remote areas. Jefferson’s presumption was that remnant populations of the mammoth represented greatly reduced numbers as the animals retreated ahead of the settlers advancing into North America. It was much the same thing as was happening to the Indians. Some years later, when Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the American West, he would instruct the party to be on the lookout for mammoths. But even without a live mammoth to point to, or certainty of what the animal was, its existence refuted the concept of degeneration.
But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence in the conception and nourishment of animal life on a large scale: to have stifled in its birth the opinion of a writer, the most learned too of all others in the science of animal history, that in the new world . . . nature is less active, less energetic on one side of the globe than she is on the other. As if both sides were not warmed by the same genial sun . . .
Jefferson backed up his velvety demolition of Buffon’s theory with hard numbers. In table after table, Jefferson showed that animals common to both North America and Europe—from elk to flying squirrels—were in many cases bigger in the New World, and that there were so many species unique to America that no one could doubt the natural vitality of the continent.
During his time in Paris, Jefferson met with Buffon on several occasions and tried to talk him out of his ideas about degeneration. He found Buffon polite but indifferent until Buffon was presented with an ambitious argument. Jefferson prevailed on the governor of New Hampshire to send a moose to him in France. The governor dispatched a troop of soldiers who shot a sizable bull. The animal was dressed and skinned, and after the skeleton had been cleaned and dried, its hide was stitched together such that it could be draped over the bones in a semblance of its original shape. After some delay, the “moose” arrived in Paris and Jefferson showed it off to Buffon. Amazed at the animal’s size—it was as big as a large draft horse—the aged naturalist agreed that he would have to amend his theory. Buffon had always maintained that an “error corrected” equals a truth told. But he died almost immediately after viewing Jefferson’s “moose.”
Jefferson had been less good-humored in responding to Buffon’s claims that American Indians were impotent and cowardly. He denounced Buffon’s characterization of the Indians as an “afflicting picture indeed which, for the honor of human nature, I am glad to believe has no original.” Unlike Buffon, Jefferson had firsthand knowledge of Indians, whom he described at length as being brave and intelligent
