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Jefferson's Shadow

Yale University Press

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.........................................................ixAuthor's Note.......................................................................xiiiIntroduction........................................................................1ONE Lost: One Large Moose...........................................................9TWO The Man Who Could Not Live Without Books........................................14THREE Schooling, Formal and Informal................................................25FOUR A Measured and Orderly World...................................................38FIVE Science and the Mastodon.......................................................51SIX The Natural History of Virginia and America.....................................62SEVEN Mountains and Shells..........................................................74EIGHT On Fossils and Extinction.....................................................86NINE Europe and the Peoples of America..............................................101TEN Natural History, Slavery, and Race..............................................118ELEVEN The Color of Their Skin......................................................134TWELVE The Paris Years..............................................................145THIRTEEN The Practical Scientist....................................................165FOURTEEN Climate and Geography......................................................179FIFTEEN Redeeming the Wilderness....................................................195SIXTEEN The Unknown West............................................................216SEVENTEEN "His Theories I Cannot Admire"............................................229EIGHTEEN Philosophers Unwelcome.....................................................239NINETEEN Transcendental Truths......................................................252Epilogue. Measuring the Shadow......................................................259Appendix: Jefferson's Letter on Climate to Jean Baptiste Le Roy.....................265Notes...............................................................................271Index...............................................................................305

Chapter One

SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE, PERHAPS in Paris, it is possible—just barely possible—that there still exists a set of moose antlers that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States. They would now be nearly 250 years old, but antlers are made of hard stuff; unless burned in a fire, they should have survived. Where are they? They spanned some four to five feet. The moose they came from had been a very large one, and that was the whole reason they were sent to Paris in the first place.

These antlers had once adorned the head of a moose living in the woods of Vermont. Jefferson, when American minister to France, went to great expense to have them imported to France. When last seen, they were part of the collections of the royal natural history museum, the Cabinet du Roi, in the Jardin des Plantes, having been sent there by Jefferson on October 1, 1787. But they are not there now. Perhaps they were lost, destroyed, or "borrowed" during the upheavals of the French Revolution. Were they ever formally added into the collections? Nobody knows.

The antlers arrived at Le Havre from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, via Southampton, England, in a large crate and were delivered to the Hôtel de Langeac, the rather grand house that Jefferson maintained on the Champs-Élysées. He kept them for only a few days. Although he had spent forty-five English pounds to obtain them, he gave them away almost immediately. Also in the crate were the bones and skin of another American moose, together with "the horns of the Caribou, the elk, the deer, the spiked horned buck, and the Roebuck of America." All were presented to the royal collections; all are now lost. In fact, the moose skin arrived with most of the fur missing and possibly was not worth keeping anyway.

Nothing about Jefferson's moose was quite what it seemed. The antlers did not belong to the same specimen as the skin and the skeleton, which had come from a gigantic moose standing seven feet high at the shoulder. Moose shed their antlers annually, and this one had been shot in the early spring, when the snows were still on the ground and moose were antler-less. So another set of antlers was put into the shipment—still big, but something of a disappointment to Jefferson.

Though sent to the royal collections, the gift was not meant for the king. It was intended for the Comte de Buon, superintendent of the royal collections and the greatest natural historian of the age. Nor was it simply a scientific gift. The whole assemblage, accompanied by a letter written in full courtly style, was a not-so-subtle scientific slap in the face, a challenge to Buon's formidable authority. To use a word with (appropriately) French associations, the gift was an act of American chauvinism. Science was being used, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, as a political weapon.

Jefferson had been trying for a year to get various American friends to find, kill, and send to him a notable specimen of a moose. Finally, his old friend General John Sullivan, a Revolutionary War hero and now president (that is, governor) of New Hampshire, took up the challenge. Sullivan arranged for a troop of soldiers to trek west into Vermont to cull the biggest moose they could find. It was slow work; a road had to be hacked through the snowy forest to get the specimen out. It was prepared according to Jefferson's precise, but inexpert, directions. As Sullivan reported, once the moose had been dressed in the field, "the remaining flesh began to be in a state of putrefaction. Every Engine was set at work to preserve the Bones and Cleanse them from the remaining flesh, and to preserve the skins with the hair on, with the hoofs on and Bones of Legs and thighs in the skin without putrefaction, and the Jobb was both Expensive and Dicult, and such as was never before attempted, in this Quarter. But it was at Last Accomplished exactly agreable to Your Directions, except that the bones of the head are not Left in the skin agreably to your Directions, as it was not possible to preserve them in that Connection, but the head of the skin being whole and well dresst it may be Drawn on at pleasure."

Jefferson was no taxidermist, and if he was a little surprised by the sorry state of the specimens when they arrived, he was even more surprised by the size of the bill. By most measures, forty-five English pounds was the equivalent in modern terms to several thousand dollars. At that time, one could buy (and we know Jefferson did) a pair of silver-mounted pistols for one pound, eighteen pence, and a microscope from Dolland's in London for five pounds, five shillings.

Matters were not improved when the shipment was badly delayed; actually, it was left behind on the dock at Portsmouth in March. This contributed to the decay of the specimens, but when the crate arrived at his house, Jefferson eagerly opened it and laid out the contents, showing them o to every visitor, many of whom may have been surprised to see that such a long-anticipated shipment contained a bunch of odoriferous bones. Then, on the cool, rainy last day of September 1787, everything...