Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  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.”76

  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.”77

  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.78

  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.”79

  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.”80

  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.81

  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.”82

  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.”83

  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.”84 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 Cl
imate 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.85

  Clergymen in such obscure places as Mason, New Hampshire, faithfully compiled meteorological and demographic records, and otherwise exclusively literary journals such as the Columbia Magazine and the North American Review published periodic weather charts sent from distant correspondents in Brunswick, Maine, and Albany, New York. Indeed, temperature-taking became everyone’s way of participating in the fact-gathering of enlightened science. Between 1763 and 1795 Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, filled six volumes with his daily temperature and weather readings. Every intellectual felt the need to present a paper to some philosophical society on the subject of America’s climate. The Transactions of the American Philosophical Society for the single year of 1799 contained no less than six articles on the topic.

  All these writings and all this temperature-taking showed that Americans were actually changing their climate. By cutting down forests and filling in swamps, they were moderating the extreme temperatures that had existed decades earlier. If Americans could change the weather, then they could change anything, or so they hoped.

  AMIDST ALL THE DISCUSSION and debate, the issue finally came back to the Indian. Had America’s climate actually retarded the development of the only people native to the New World? Jefferson’s lifelong defense of the prowess and virtue of the Indian grew out of this passionate desire to protect the American environment against European aspersions. Buffon was wrong, he wrote; the Indian “is neither more defective in ardor, nor more impotent with his female, than the white reduced to the same diet and exercise.” The difference between the native peoples of America and Europeans was “not a difference of nature, but of circum stance.” There were good reasons why Indian women bore fewer children than whites, why the Indians’ hands and wrists were small, why they had less hair on their bodies; and those reasons, said Jefferson, had nothing to do with America’s soil or climate. For Jefferson the Indian had to be “in body and mind the equal of the white man.” He could readily doubt the capacities of blacks, who after all came from Africa, but he could never admit any inferiority in the red men, who were products of the very soil and climate that would mold the people of the United States.86

  The Reverend James Madison, president of the College of William and Mary and a second cousin of the famous Founder, had much more hope for the assimilation of the Indian than of the African into white society. He told Jefferson of reports of an Indian near Albany who had gradually whitened in the past two years. But he knew of no African changing color. “It seems as if Nature had absolutely denied to him the Possibility of ever acquiring the Complexion of the White.”87 (Of course, Jefferson might have reminded the Reverend Madison of all those slave children who were becoming whiter as a consequence of what Jefferson called “the perpetual exercise of the most boisterous [meaning coarse or savage] passions” between the white planters and their African slaves.)88

  The Indian, admitted Jefferson, was at an earlier stage—the hunting and gathering stage of development; but this was not from a lack of native genius, only a lack of cultivation. Yet what if the American environment were strong enough to prevent that process of cultivation and refinement from operating? What if the environmental conditions that kept the native peoples from advancing worked to make the transplanted whites more Indian-like? Instead of progressing along through the successive stages of civilization, Americans might degenerate to a cruder and more savage state.

  Some Americans thought that such a regression was actually taking place in the frontier areas—where whites responded to brutal Indian atrocities with even more bloody atrocities of their own. Tales were told of “white savages” who bashed Indian children and cut off the limbs and severed the heads of their Indian victims. Americans had long been fearfully fascinated with stories of these “white savages,” of white men apparently abandoning civilization and adopting scalping and other violent Indian ways. In the early Republic this fascination took on a heightened importance. Was America advancing from rudeness to refinement, as the Revolutionaries had hoped, or was the move westward actually turning the civilizing process around?89

  “The manner in which the population is spreading over this continent has no parallel in history,” declared an anxious New England analyst of what was taking place in early nineteenth-century America. Usually the first settlers of any country were barbarians who gradually in time became cultivated and civilized. “The progress has been from ignorance to knowledge, from the rudeness of savage life to the refinements of polished society. But in the settlement of North America the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.” By moving to the West, cultivated Easterners were losing their politeness and refinement. “The tendency of the American character is then to degenerate, and to degenerate rapidly; and that not from any peculiar vice in the American people, but from the very nature of a spreading population. The population of the country is out-growing its institutions.”90

  Jefferson himself realized that the West was more barbaric than the East; in fact, he thought that the United States contained within itself all the stages of social development, “from the infancy of creation to the present day. . . . Let a philosophic observer,” he said,

  commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns.91

  Still, was the fact that the Indian remained in the earliest stage of social development the fault of the natural environment? Was the New World’s climate destined to turn white Americans into Indians, or at least prevent them from progressing? These sorts of nervous questions underlay the extraordinary concern that Jefferson and other educated Americans had for the fate of the Indian in the early Republic. If the Indian could not be civilized, that is, assimilated and turned into something resembling white farmers, then perhaps the natural environment of the New World was too strong and too impervious to cultural and social reform, suggesting that white men living in such a powerful natural habitat could not become fully civilized either. This unease that Buffon and his followers might be proved right after all lent a sense of urgency to the Jeffersonians’ philanthropic efforts to civilize the Indian.

  Of course, these efforts, like those of the Washington administration, gave no recognition whatsoever to the worth or integrity of the Indians’ own existing culture. In the minds of many early nineteenth-century whites, enlightened civilization was still too recent, too precarious, for them to treat it as simply an alternative culture or lifestyle. Only later, only when the Indians’ culture had been virtually destroyed, could white Americans begin to try to redeem the tragedy that had occurred.

  Jefferson, like Secretary of War Henry Knox before him, had no doubt of the superiority of white agricultural society to the “savage” state of the native peoples of America. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1801 Jefferson made clear that he would continue what he took to be the successful efforts of his predecessors to introduce among “our Indian neighbors . . . the implements and the practice of husbandry, and of the household arts.” The Indians, he said, were “becoming more and more sensible of the superiority of this dependence [on husbandry] for clothing and subsistence over the precarious resources of hunting and fishing.” Some Indians, he added, were even experiencing “an increase in population.”92
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  Jefferson, of course, never questioned that the Indians might not want to become civilized and participate in the progressive course of history. In his mind and in the minds of most enlightened Americans, his intentions were always pure. “We will never do an unjust act towards you,” he told a visiting delegation of Northwestern Indians in 1809 just before he left the presidency. “On the contrary we wish you to live in peace, to increase in numbers, to learn to labor as we do, and furnish food for your ever increasing numbers, when the game shall have left you. We wish to see you possessed of property and protecting it by regular laws. In time you will be as we are; you will become one people with us. Your blood will mix with ours; and will spread, with ours, over this great land.”93

  Jefferson’s policy toward the Indians was tragically simple: let the natural demographic growth and movement of white Americans take their course. The dynamic white settlers would surround the Indians and circumscribe their hunting grounds and thus pressure them into taking up farming, which would not require large tracts of land. Therefore the remainder of their hunting grounds could be ceded piecemeal to the United States. But even before the assimilation and incorporation of the Indians had taken place, Jefferson jumped at every opportunity to get the land that was destined to belong to American farmers. He and his successor, President James Madison, negotiated fifty-three treaties of land cession with various tribes.

  Although the Cherokees in the Southwest made extraordinary progress in developing white ways—living in houses and relying on agriculture and not game for their food—for the most part the Jeffersonian program of Indian acculturation was a disaster. Indian society and culture tended to disintegrate as they came in contact with white civilization. Commerce with the whites, especially the trade in liquor, corrupted the Indians and destroyed their independence; and diseases, especially smallpox, were devastating. In 1802 three-quarters of the tribes along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers perished from disease.