Jefferson

by Albert Jay Nock

  Mr. Jefferson got one more glimpse of this strange being who, as he wrote dryly to Charles Thomson, had “too much imagination.” Ledyard somehow found his way from Poland to London, where he “engaged under the auspices of a private society formed there for pushing discoveries into Africa.” On his way to embark at Marseilles, he stopped at Paris, where he promised Mr. Jefferson that if he returned from his explorations of the Nile and the Niger, he would go to Kentucky and penetrate to the western side of the continent. But he never returned. There is possibly just the faintest suggestion of emotion discernible in Mr. Jefferson’s few words to Carmichael in 1789, “My last accounts of Ledyard were from Grand Cairo. He was just then plunging into the unknown regions of Africa, probably never to emerge again.”

  II

  But the true business of life in Europe, as in America, lay outside the routine of politics and diplomacy. One of the first matters that came under Mr. Jefferson’s notice in Paris was the theory of Buffon that hot countries produce large animals and moist countries small ones; and the variant of the same theory, fathered by the Abbé Raynal, that the transplanting of Europeans to America tends to degeneration of physique. He collided sharply with Buffon on both these assumptions, denying that the atmosphere of America was more humid than that of Europe, and maintaining that neither heat nor humidity had anything to do with determining the size of animals. He got data on the minor point from Franklin, proving that there was more moisture in the air of Paris and London than in the air of Philadelphia. This did not amount to much, to be sure, but it was all that could be shown on the basis of observation and experiment until more facts were collected. “In the meantime,” he says, “doubt is wisdom.”

  Even admitting the “superior humidity of America,” however, he contended that Buffon’s theory still ran aground on the mammoth, for instance; and, among living animals, on the cat tribe, on birds, on certain types of deer, and on the elk and moose—on nearly everything, in fact. Buffon had his doubts; he was polite about them, but imperturbable. A mammoth was probably the same thing as an elephant. As for the others, one must see them in order to make up one’s mind. The moose seemed interesting, as Mr. Jefferson described it, but it was no doubt the same thing as a reindeer. Mr. Jefferson was an American, and these well-meaning children of the forest were imperfectly informed and likely to exaggerate. There must be some mistake about it; the moose could hardly be a distinct species. As for the elk, Buffon would like to see its horns; “this would decide whether it be an elk or a deer.”

  Buffon was the greatest of men in his line, and worth converting; not for the sake of a mere theory, still less of deciding the petty personal question of who was right and who was wrong, but for the sake of attracting the eye of science everywhere to the unsuspected resources of the new country. “He did not know our panther. I gave him the stripped skin of one I bought in Philadelphia, and it presents him a new species. . . . I have convinced him that our deer is not a chevreuil.” This was something, but the whole matter might as well be settled first as last. Mr. Jefferson accordingly asked John Sullivan, President of New Hampshire, to send over the horns, bones and skin of a moose, particularly, and those of such other animals on the list as could be conveniently got hold of. In his eagerness, he forgot to suggest a limit of expense in the matter, and the bill of sixty guineas was a heavy blow. The mystified Sullivan had taken him at his word and made a good workmanlike job of it. “He had made the acquisition the object of a regular campaign, and that too of a winter one. The troops he employed sallied forth, as he writes me, in the month of March—much snow—a herd attacked—one killed—in the wilderness—a road to be cut twenty miles—to be drawn by hand from the frontiers to his house—bones to be cleaned, etc., etc., etc.” Mr. Jefferson paid the costs of this expedition without flinching, when he found out how they had been incurred, and shortly had the satisfaction of presenting Buffon with “the bones and skin of a moose, the horns of another individual of the same species, the horns of the caribou, the elk, the deer, the spiked-horned buck, and the roebuck of America.” Buffon was graceful, as became a man of science, and wound up the controversy by saying, “I should have consulted you before publishing my natural history, and then I should have been sure of the facts.”

  An unauthorized French edition of Mr. Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, the book which gave rise to this little brush with Buffon, was just now putting its author in something of a quandary. The volume had been originally compiled off-hand for the information of the French representative in the United States. In two respects it remains a literary curiosity of the first magnitude; in the range of observation, information and memory that it exhibits, and in the extraordinary interest that it carries for the general reader, without showing any mark whatever of literary effort. It is a book of statistics, without pretence of being anything else, and it is probably the most interesting statistical work ever produced—interesting, that is, to a reader who has no antecedent interest in the statistics it presents. Mr. Jefferson did not publish the book in America, chiefly from diffidence; besides, it contained observations on slavery and on the State Constitution, that he feared might “produce an irritation” which would stand in the way of reform. When he went to France, he had a few copies privately printed for the benefit of acquaintances whom he could trust; and one of these copies getting into the hands of a French publisher, it was surreptitiously translated and put on the press. Mr. Jefferson was quite as willing to have the book appear in Europe as he was unwilling to have it appear in America; it was not bad advertising for the United States. But the translation was a botch. Mr. Jefferson succeeded in delaying publication while he struggled with some of its worst errors, when the Abbé Morellet came forward, to his great relief, with an offer to retranslate the work de novo. By way of providing a frontispiece to the book, Mr. Jefferson mustered his talents as a surveyor and mathematician, and produced a map, on the scale of one inch to twenty miles, which he caused to be engraved in London. “It comprehends from Albemarle Sound to Lake Erie, and from Philadelphia to the mouth of the Great Kanawha, containing Virginia and Pennsylvania, a great part of Maryland, and a part of North Carolina.” He enlisted Dr. Bancroft, in London, to arrange for the engraving and printing; and he added a postscript stipulating that his name should not appear on the map, partly out of regard to the original authors whom he had consulted in its compilation, but chiefly and characteristically, “because I do not wish to place myself at the bar of the public.”

  His letters in the early summer of 1785 describe at great length the ill-fated experiment in aerial navigation made by Pilâtre de Roziére, who lost his life in attempting to cross the English Channel in a balloon; and also a curious anticipation of the screw-propeller, which worked in the air instead of in the water. “I went to see it. . . . The screw, I think, would be more effectual if placed below the surface of the water.” He sends the president of Yale College the star-catalogues of de la Caille and Flamsteed, and discusses briefly the identity of the planet Jupiter with the 964th star of Mayer. He comments on Pigott’s discovery of periodical variations of light in the star Algol. “What are we to conclude from this? That there are suns which have their orbits of revolution too? But this would suppose a wonderful harmony in their planets, and present a new scene, where the attracting powers should be without and not within the orbit. The motion of our sun would be a miniature of this.” He notes the superior availability of “the metal called platina; to be found only in South America,” for the specula of telescopes, since “it is insusceptible of rust, as gold and silver are, none of the acids affecting it excepting the aqua regia.” Noticing that the royal cabinet of natural history was without specimens of the American grouse and pheasant, he asks Hopkinson to stuff and send over a pair of each, and to send also two or three hundred pecannuts, of which he always thought uncommonly well, for some reason or other, and believed that the French would take great interest in cultivating—a belief which turned out to be illusory. In
behalf of literature, he would be all for the expulsion of the Turks from Greece, “if they meant to leave the country in possession of the Greek inhabitants. We might then expect once more to see the language of Homer and Demosthenes a living language. . . . But this is not intended. They only propose to put the Greeks under other masters; to substitute one set of barbarians for another.”

  Whenever he heard of a new mechanical process or device, he promptly went to see it, and if it had value, he put his mind on it until he got it to work as he wished. Thus he patiently tinkered with the model of an English stationary copying-press, until he succeeded in making one that was portable; and then in great delight he sent them to one after another of his friends in America. When the Argand lamp came out, he was immediately on hand to test it and ship it over. Hearing of a mechanic who had standardized the parts of muskets, “I went to the workman. He presented me the parts of fifty locks taken to pieces and arranged in compartments. I put several together myself, taking pieces at hazard as they came to hand, and they fitted in the most perfect manner.” A few days afterwards, he went “to see a plough which was to be worked by a windlass, without horses or oxen. It was a poor affair. With a very troublesome apparatus, applicable only to a dead level, four men could do the work of two horses.” He comments on the new acid process of copperplate engraving, as an art which will be “amusing to individuals,” evidently with no great notion of its importance. He considers attentively the new steampumps of Paris, finding them nothing more in point of principle than “the fire-engine you have seen described in the books of hydraulics”; and the steam grist-mill at London, which by his calculation “makes a peck and a half of coal perform exactly as much as a horse in one day can perform.” This is much worth while, because “America has abundance of fuel.” On its first trial flight from its nest in the inventor’s brain, he caught Drost’s method of minting coins, which works “so as to strike both faces and the edge at one stroke, and makes a coin as beautiful as a medal.” Here was a real find. As yet, Drost had made only a few coins by way of sample, “to show the perfection of his manner. I am endeavouring to procure one to send to Congress as a model for their coinage.” He examined Renaudin’s metronome, and writes Hopkinson that a little Yankee ingenuity can make one plenty good enough for anybody, out of a plumb-bob and a piece of string. The colloquy with Buffon on the relative humidity of the American climate led him to inquire in London for a hygrometer made on the principles laid down by Franklin; and he presently began keeping daily hygrometric observations in addition to the thermometric and barometric records which he always kept. He complains to M. de Crèvecœur that the newspapers are “robbing us of another of our inventions to give it to the English, . . . that is, the making the circumference of a wheel of one single piece. The farmers in New Jersey were the first who practiced it, and they practiced it commonly.” He then tells how the London patentee got the idea originally from Franklin, who laboured with him for some weeks in showing him how to make his first pair of wheels. “The writer in the paper supposes the English workman got his idea from Homer. But it is more likely the Jersey farmer got his idea from thence, because ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.” Besides, he adds, the Jersey practice is precisely that stated by Homer, while the English practice is quite different:

  Homer’s words are (comparing a young hero killed by Ajax to a poplar felled by a workman) literally thus, ‘He fell on the ground like a poplar which has grown smooth in the west part of a great meadow, with its branches shooting from its summit. But the chariot-maker with the sharp axe has felled it, that he may bend a wheel for a beautiful chariot. It lies drying on the banks of the river.’ Observe the circumstances which coincide with the Jersey practice. 1. It is a tree growing in a moist place, full of juices and easily bent. 2. It is cut while green. 3. It is bent into the circumference of a wheel. 4. It is left to dry in that form. You who write French well and readily should write a line for the Journal, to reclaim the honour of our farmers.

  After vindicating the New Jersey wheelwright’s competence in classical literature, he takes note of a new departure in wagon-making, whereby the axletree turns with the wheel, “thought to be proved best by experiment, though theory has nothing to urge in its favour.” He is hospitably disposed towards a forthcoming life-preserver or “hydrostatic waistcoat,” which a person puts on either over or under his clothes in one minute, and can inflate “by blowing with the mouth, in twelve seconds.” He sends George Wythe the best editions of Polybius and Vitruvius, acknowledging “my debt to you for whatever I am myself.” He makes drawings of a cabriolet and a phaeton for the Baron de Geismer, “made with such scrupulous exactness in every part that your workman may safely rely on them.” With them also “I enclose you a pretty little popular tune which will amuse you for a day or so.” The watches one could buy in Paris were something really beyond belief. Madison ought to have one: “I can get for you here one made as perfect as human art can make it, for about twenty-four louis.” This should be a great inducement to the careful little man; but who could stand out against the insinuating intimation that “for twelve louis more you can have in the same cover, but on the back and absolutely unconnected with the movements of the watch, a pedometer, which shall render you an exact account of the distances you walk”? Mr. Jefferson was charmed with the pedometer, although from the whole pageful of intricate directions that he subsequently sends to Madison, when the Father of the Constitution finally capitulated, it must have been a frightful nuisance. Madison was not the only one who felt the tempter’s power. “Are you become a great walker?” Mr. Jefferson suddenly drops in as a guileless obiter dictum in a letter to Bannister, “You know I preach up that kind of exercise. Shall I send you a conte-pas? It will cost you a dozen louis, but be a great stimulus to walking, as it will record your steps.”

  Later on, when the east wind of the Revolution was beginning to blow upon spiritual activity in France, Mr. Jefferson speaks despondently of “the crumbs of science on which we are subsisting here.” He doubts the theory of promoting vegetable growth by electricity or by light, until it is better confirmed by observation. “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.” He notes a new process of engraving on glass, and the experiments of chemists engaged in “the dispute about the conversion and reconversion of water and air.” Concerning the latter, again, he thinks it “laudable to encourage investigation, but to hold back conclusion.” Buffon frankly disparaged “the present ardour of chemical inquiry,” much to Mr. Jefferson’s surprise. “He affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on a footing with those of the kitchen. I think it, on the contrary, among the most useful of sciences, and big with future discoveries for the utility and safety of the human race.” Nevertheless he thought it “probably an age too soon to propose the establishment of a system,” and that the attempt of Lavoisier in this direction was premature. “One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms, and his string of sulphates, sulphites and sulphures may have served no other end than to have retarded the progress of the science by a jargon, from the confusion of which, time will be requisite to extricate us.” His uneasy sense of the inhibiting power of words, and of the tendency by which words come to do duty for ideas, caused him invariably to nibble with long teeth at such attempts. “Upon the whole, I think the new nomenclature will be rejected, after doing more harm than good.” Experimental chemistry, however, was producing results; a first-rate improvement in the bleaching process was already established in France, and “I believe they are beginning to try it in England.” There was news also of a most important improvement in the composition of gunpowder, the details of which were not yet made public. Something was stirring, too, in the way of manufacturing artificial pearls, enough to be worth one-third of a long letter to Francis Hopkinson, who was making some experiments of the kind himself.

  The trouble is tha
t until the whole field of chance is canvassed, one can never tell when some awkward fact will get in the way of the finest generalization, and wreck it. In fact, it is best to keep generalization down to the minimum. “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing than to believe what is wrong.” Here in Paris, for instance, is a little abbé, a humble son of the church, who has “shaken, if not destroyed, the theory of de Dominis, Descartes and Newton, for explaining the phenomenon of the rainbow.” If his observations were correct—and though they were borne out in part by Mr. Jefferson’s own observations, one must be duly cautious—“it appears to me that these facts demolish the Newtonian hypothesis, but they do not support that erected in its stead by the abbé. . . . The result is that we are wiser than we were, by having an error the less in our catalogue; but the blank occasioned by it must remain for some happier hypothesist to fill up.”

  Indeed, it seems that “a patient pursuit of facts and cautious combination and comparison of them is the drudgery to which man is subjected by his Maker, if he wishes to attain sure knowledge.” Such drudgery can hardly be overdone; it is all worth while. Sullivan’s expedition in the wintry wilds of Massachusetts and New Hampshire was worth while, and so were the sixty guineas. Here in Paris again, for instance, there comes word from America of a brilliant conjecture that the Creek Indians are descendants of the Carthaginians who had in some way become separated from the main fleet of Hanno, and drifted to a new shore. Very well; one may “see nothing impossible in his conjecture,” but the way to find out is to find out. “I am glad he means to appeal to similarity of language, which I consider as the strongest kind of proof it is possible to adduce. I have somewhere read that the language of the ancient Carthaginians is still spoken by their descendants inhabiting the mountainous interior parts of Barbary, to which they were obliged to retire by the conquering Arabs. If so, a vocabulary of their tongue can still be got, and if your friend will get one of the Creek languages, a comparison will decide. He probably may have made progress in this business; but if he wishes any inquiries to be made on this side the Atlantic, I offer him my services cheerfully.”