Thomas Jefferson - Revolutionary: A Radical's Struggle to Remake America by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Author:Kevin R. C. Gutzman [Gutzman, Kevin R. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, History, United States, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781250010810
Google: SxCxDAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01IN9FC5W
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2017-01-29T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Assimilation

All of Jefferson’s writings concerning Native American Indians must be put into a specific context.1 Jefferson did not simply study Indians for study’s sake. Rather, he was a participant in the transatlantic Republic of Letters.2 His chief interlocutors in this field were the day’s leading biologist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the comte de Buffon, and his circle. To great acclaim, Buffon long argued that the Western Hemisphere was the site of degeneration of animals generally, including humans. Calling Buffon “the best informed naturalist who has ever written,” Jefferson set himself the patriotic task of refuting Buffon’s argument.

Good student of Aristotle that he was, Buffon first described what men had in common, then turned to classifications and distinctions. In light of the “fact” that animal life in general degenerated in the Western Hemisphere, he said, Europe’s quadrupeds were of greater size and variety than their puny American cousins. Apparently under the prodding of correspondence and samples from Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Buffon eventually abandoned the notion that his general theory applied to European-descended people in America.3 Perhaps Buffon had heard of the Abbé Raynal’s experience at a dinner also attended by Franklin. The French disciple of Buffon asserted that men degenerated in the Western Hemisphere, and so Franklin demanded that first his American, then his French guests stand up. As Jefferson told it, the half-dozen Americans possessed the “finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself, was a mere shrimp.” 4

Indians, however, Buffon continued to insist were notably inferior to European humans. As Jefferson has Buffon tell it, animals “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and an unprolific land,” and “all the animals that have transported from Europe to America … have become smaller … and those which were not transported [and] which are common to both Continents … are also considerably less than those of Europe.”5 While eventually deciding that Europeans did not degenerate in America, and indeed all might improve, Buffon clung to his insistence that Indians were backward.6

Various American men of letters responded to Buffon’s argument.7 Ben Franklin, characteristically, mocked the Frenchman’s assertions on numerous occasions. John Adams repeatedly confuted the “shameless falsehoods” of Buffon and his circle. Thomas Jefferson, however, went further than any other: he made answering Buffon a major project, one on which he worked for many years.

* * *

Jefferson offered his most extensive counterstroke in his sole book, Notes on the State of Virginia. Besides discussing Indians in Query XI, which answered a question his correspondent François Barbé-Marbois had not asked—“A description of the Indians established in that state?”—Jefferson in Query VI, “Productions Mineral, Vegetable and Animal,” included copious information about Virginia’s animals, including people.8 Jefferson began by describing Buffon’s general position:

The opinion advanced by the Count de Buffon, is 1. That the animals common both to the old and new world, are smaller in the latter. 2. That those peculiar to the new, are on a smaller scale. 3. That those which have been domesticated in both, have degenerated in America: and 4.

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