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To win an argument with a Frenchman, produce a moose. This may seem like the worst attempt at an aphorism, but it is how Thomas Jefferson once defended American honor and handled an academic dispute. This article may not feature Alaska, but it focuses on a subject Alaskans know all too well: moose. And Alaskans certainly know a lot more about moose today than any European scholar did in the 18th century.
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), in English Comte Buffon, was a French naturalist and author, one of the most acclaimed scholars of his generation. Although less appreciated today, in his day he was considered a worthy peer of intellectual heavyweights such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Buffon’s masterpiece was a 36-volume “Natural History: General and Particular”, a mineral and zoological encyclopedia published between 1749 and 1788.
Written in an engaging and often poetic style, each volume was a cultural sensation, reprinted numerous times and translated into several other languages. Anyone with the slightest literary or intellectual pretensions owned a copy. The volumes of “Natural History” were among the best-selling books of the 18th century. Short chapters on specific animal species make up most of the series: larks followed by warblers, etc. But he also included some more general treatises on the natural world, notably his theory of the degeneration of animals and man on the North and South American continents.
Buffon believed that the animals and indigenous peoples of the American continents were degenerate compared to those in the rest of the world. His use of degeneration does not refer to the immoral sense of the term but to the fact that animals and humans were inferior: smaller, weaker and less prolific. The animal file constituted his main evidence. For example, he noted how big cats in the Americas were smaller and “looser” than lions. He also argued that the absence of elephants, camels, rhinos, and giraffes in the Americas meant that “living nature there is therefore much less active, much less varied, and we might even say, less strong.” Furthermore, he argued that species from elsewhere transplanted to the Americas would necessarily degenerate. The negative implications of this decision were not lost on the inhabitants of certain British colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, those which became a new independent nation during the last years of Buffon’s life.
Buffon’s self-aggrandizing theory—given its continental origins—was far from new, and far from the last of its kind. Variants have existed since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, beliefs that lands beyond the author’s own possessed inferior fauna, flora, and inhabitants. When Queen Isabella of Spain, of the Ferdinand and Isabella who sent Christopher Columbus west, heard the first reports of the novelty of her world, she remarked: “This land, where the trees are not firmly rooted, must produce men of little sincerity and unscrupulousness.” The English poet John Donne (1571/1572–1631) described the Americas as “the immature side of the earth.” And the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was at least partially influenced by Buffon in his 1837 text “Lectures on the Philosophy of History” when he wrote: “America has always shown itself physically and spiritually impotent, and it does so still today.”
When it came to the animals of the Americas, Buffon did not know or understand caribou, large bears, musk oxen, elk, and bison well. Of elk in particular, Buffon wrote disdainfully that they were “considerably smaller in America than in Europe, and that without exception.” It should be noted that the French nobleman never visited the Americas. Instead, he relied on other people’s accounts, sometimes little more than rumors. At some point, the insult to the United States became too obvious. This is how Thomas Jefferson trained.
By the early 1780s, the future president was aware of Buffon’s claims and was dismayed by the apparent critical failures, particularly regarding the quality of data collection. In “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Jefferson’s only comprehensive book, he severely criticized the theory of American degeneration. Of Buffon in particular, he wrote: “There has been more eloquence than solid reasoning to support this theory; this is one of those cases where judgment has been seduced by a brilliant pen. »
Jefferson spent most of 1784 to 1789 in France as a trade negotiator and, subsequently, as the official United States minister to France. This position offered him more direct opportunities to refute Buffon and his supporters; “Notes on the State of Virginia” was first published anonymously in 1785 in Paris. In 1786, Jefferson even dined at Buffon’s house, where the count acknowledged a minor taxonomic error but otherwise refused to modify his beliefs about American degeneration.
Jefferson had argued like a scientist up to that point, with measurements, animal skins, and fossils, but he had always been rebuffed for trivial things, or even ignored altogether. He needed a little more shock and awe to shake up European minds, a spectacular response that could not be ignored. He needed a specimen so large and grandiose that it could singularly contradict the arguments about small American wildlife. As any Alaskan would understand, he opted for a moose. However, he needed a real moose, not notes or antlers, sent to France.
Moose were a particularly fitting target, since Buffon did not believe they existed as a separate species, thinking they were better classified as reindeer. And for a Virginia resident, Jefferson was an expert on moose. He had already been researching moose for several years. Before leaving for France, he had sent out questionnaires to his colleagues (the statesman and prolific writer had many colleagues) about moose, asking them about their behavior and size. Among those interviewed was John Sullivan, a general in the American Revolution and future governor of New Hampshire.
Sullivan, who had been present at Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River among other battles, wrote to Jefferson in January 1787 with the good news. He had momentum in mind, if not in hand. In his enthusiasm, he wrote to Jefferson a little prematurely. If he had known of the difficulties ahead, he might have waited.
As of the date of this letter, the moose in question was lying dead in remote Vermont. From there, it took 14 days and the clearing of a 20-mile-long road in the middle of a particularly harsh winter before the moose arrived at Sullivan’s house. Furthermore, in his eagerness to help Jefferson, Sullivan had not taken into account his complete lack of training as a taxidermist. Once prepared, the moose still required a long sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to England, then to the French port of Le Havre, and from there to Paris.
The substantial costs of the project were more than ruinous for Sullivan. He had to borrow money from his brother for transportation. In a detailed expense report, he wrote: “I charge only the expenses I paid in cash, without anything for my own efforts which were very considerable.”
Jefferson finally received the object of his desires in late September. The moose, once a striking example of its species, was a chaotic assortment of skin and bones after months of questionable taxidermy and shipping delays. It was more kit than specimen. Sullivan had managed to preserve most of the skeleton, except for the head and antlers. As for the head, he wrote, “the skin being whole and well dressed, it can be drawn at will,” an uninspiring option. A set of replacement antlers was included and “can be attached at will.” Worse yet, as Sullivan wrote, “the moose’s hide was covered with hair, but much of it has come loose and the rest is ready to fall off.”
From this assortment of moose parts, the author of the Declaration of Independence was able to reconstruct a full, stuffed moose. On the surface, it was certainly less than it could have been. As connected as Jefferson was, it was unlikely that he would convince another person to kill, prepare, and ship a moose to France on his behalf, so he settled. A modern-day Alaskan might wonder how many diseases the moose suffered before it died, but it must have been a startling sight to Europeans of the time.
(The Mystery Meat of 1951: Did an Exclusive Club Eat a Frozen Woolly Mammoth from the Aleutian Islands?)
The moose was duly delivered to the count. In a letter to Daniel Webster, Jefferson wrote that Buffon “promised in his next volume to set the record straight.” But the Frenchman made no reply, no low insult, no formal refutation, no apology. More to the point, he died six months after the moose arrived. There is surely no causal connection between the two events, though it is amusing to imagine that the sight of an American moose sent the Frenchman into a death spiral of shame and remorse. American pride had demanded a response; perhaps this was it.
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Key sources:
Dugatkin, Lee Alan. Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: A History of Nature in Early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Gerbi, Antonello. The New World Quarrel: History of a Controversy, 1750-1900. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.
Webster, Fletcher, editor. The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster, Volume 1. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1857.