Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The New World climate controversy is a mostly forgotten theme of early transatlantic re-
hearing the same old jokes about freezing weather and degeneration—Buffonian climate pess-
imism stood as a serious affront to patriotic pride. There could be no touchier subject for
an American than the weather, except perhaps slavery. Opinion makers in Europe such as
Buffon had tied the concept of climate so closely with culture that to complain of the Amer-
ican weather was to insult Americans themselves and to question the very viability of their
infant republic.
Inevitably the founding fathers, especially those based for periods in Europe, found them-
selves enlisted as New World champions in the drawn-out battle over American climate. None
took up the cudgels more aggressively than Thomas Jefferson, who, among his many distinc-
tions, has been called the premier meteorologist of the early republic. In the early 1780s, Jef-
ferson found himself the American ambassador to France. His official duties were light, so he
occupied himself in reading all available literature on American geography and natural sci-
ence, while circulating his celebrated
Notes on the State of Virginia
(first published in a French
edition in 1785). A primary object of that topic—a landmark in American geography—was to
launch a full-fronted attack on Buffon's anti-American climate pessimism.
First, to demolish Buffon's argument for the physical diminution of New World animals,
Jefferson pointed to the growing archaeological record: “It is well known that on the Ohio,
and many parts of America further north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled mag-
nitude, are found in great numbers.” To lend empirical weight to Jefferson's arguments,
Notes
is studded with statistical tables comparing the size and weight of European animals with
their New World equivalents, showing how American quadrupeds—including horses, bears,
beavers, and flying squirrels—enjoyed a healthy superiority. As the coup de grâce, Jefferson
offered his prime exhibit: the recently unearthed skeleton of a mammoth “six times the cu-
of thinking, was impossible, living examples of this woolly giant would surely be found as
Americans explored farther into the vast unknown territories of the West.
But it is in response to Buffon's argument that New World climate has presided over a
degenerated
human
species that Jefferson becomes most passionate and oratorical. In a cel-
ebrated passage from
Notes on the State of Virginia
, the planter-politician rises to the defense
of the embattled American Indian, whom Buffon had called “cold” and feeble. The influence
of the icy climate, according to Buffon, extended even to the smallness of native genitals. Not
so! Jefferson proclaims. The American native is physically powerful and “brave.” His “friend-
ships are strong and faithful” and his “ardor for the female” perfectly normal. Moreover, the
climate has had no dulling effect on American intellect: the native “sensibility is keen … his
by the irony that a future president whose policy of Western expansion ensured the destruc-
tion of American Indian communities en masse should be so animated in their defense, albeit
as “noble savages.” But in championing the native American against Buffon, Jefferson was
also defending his own Anglo-Saxon settler race against Buffon's remorseless climatic logic,
which foretold “degeneration” for all migrants to the New World.
American climate optimism does not originate with Thomas Jefferson, of course. From
Drayton's tribute to her “delicious land” in his “Ode to the Virginian Voyage” (1606) to St.
John Crèvecoeur's popular
Letters from an American Farmer
(1782), Jefferson had a rich tra-
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