Thomas Jefferson, Scientist?
Thomas Jefferson, Scientist?
Ethan Caldwell Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
How much do we TJ students really know about the scientist Thomas Jefferson? Sixty years ago, President Kennedy invited all of the Nobel Prize winners from North and South America to dinner at the White House, where he told them, “this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Kennedy said that Jefferson “could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet” [7]. If there had been such a thing as a Nobel Prize for broadest scientific interests, Jefferson might have won it.
But scientific enthusiasm and real, hard science aren’t the same thing. Good scientists are expected to follow certain rules: they don’t fudge data, they relentlessly follow the evidence no matter where it leads, and they certainly don’t disguise their own beliefs as facts. If we look more closely at Thomas Jefferson, to what extent was he really a good scientist?
In May of 1784, Jefferson was preparing to board a ship to Europe to become America’s new ambassador to France. He saw science as part of his job. A famous French biologist named Buffon had insulted America — and Jefferson himself — with a new theory that the moist climate of the New World was so unhealthy that American species were smaller and weaker than their Old World counterparts. Jefferson needed, for himself and for his country, to defend America. Understandably, he wanted Buffon to explain why he thought America was more humid, and why moisture was supposedly unhealthy. So Jefferson included those questions in a book he was writing, called Notes on the State of Virginia, and he sent a copy to Buffon. Buffon sent a polite response, but he was never convinced by Jefferson’s arguments [1]. Those arguments give us a better picture of Thomas Jefferson as a scientist.
To prove Buffon wrong, Jefferson started by providing a detailed table with weights of animals from both America and Europe. He clearly had an agenda and chose his “facts” to fit it. But some of Jefferson’s statistics are so extreme that Buffon must have laughed. Jefferson claimed that the American beaver weighed twice as much as the European one [5]. (Actually, the average American beaver weighs less.) Jefferson said the European bear, at 154 pounds, weighed one-third as much as the American bear [5]. (In fact, a typical Eurasian bear weighs 550 pounds.) Was Jefferson using extreme data points to exaggerate his argument?
Other examples of Jefferson’s “science” shed light on that; his argument didn’t end with the table. Just before he left America in May, Jefferson bought a panther skin to send to Buffon [8]. Why? He described the skin as “uncommonly large,” so he was either trying to impress Buffon with the size of a single specimen, or lead Buffon to believe that this was in fact how big most specimens got. But Jefferson still needed more, so he asked his American friends to shoot as big a moose as they could find and ship it to Paris (which they did) to impress Buffon [4]. It’s pretty clear that Jefferson was trying to use the panther, the moose, and the table of animal weights to convince Buffon that extreme outliers were actually representative.
Still, Jefferson went further. He had a moose-sized problem gnawing at him: how to compete with the elephant, the biggest land animal of all — found in the Old World? He got his chance when Americans discovered the fossils of an enormous elephant-like creature, the mastodon. Jefferson estimated the mastodon to be “five or six times the cubic volume of the elephant,” which would allow America to claim “the largest of all terrestrial beings” [5]. There was just one problem: no one had ever found a living specimen. (Because it was extinct.) But he couldn’t let this opportunity go to waste, so he turned to the very thing he had criticized Buffon for: relying on unconfirmed oral reports as scientific evidence; he made an exception for data that didn’t even meet his own standards. According to the “testimony of the Indians,” Jefferson wrote, “this animal still exists” [5]. He was so convinced that he placed the mastodon at the top of his table of animals.
But Jefferson stretched more than data: sometimes he stretched his conclusions to try to fit perfectly good data. When an unusually large claw was discovered in America, Jefferson argued that it came from a giant American lion that would dwarf any European equivalent. It didn’t. The French naturalist Cuvier discovered that the claw was from an extinct giant sloth, which he jokingly named Megalonyx jeffersonii. A modern biologist called this Jefferson’s “most embarrassing error” [2].
These stories show that in some important ways Jefferson didn’t just fail to be a scientist by modern standards, but even by the standards of his own time. Other scientists back then made similar mistakes — some of Buffon’s theories weren’t testable, and not all of his data was solid — but at least scientists like Buffon tried to form theories based on evidence. Thomas Jefferson did not. As a trained lawyer, Jefferson approached science as an argument that he could win by choosing the “right” facts and using them to support his preconceived conclusions. That may not bother us today when we read about a giant moose or the claw of a huge sloth, but Jefferson applied the same approach to living human beings — and that’s when its danger becomes clearly visible.
In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson called Native Americans “merciless Indian savages,” but when he sent Buffon a copy of Notes on the State of Virginia he wrote, “I believe the Indian to be in body & mind equal to the white man” [3]. Why such a dramatic shift? Because Indians were New-World, so Jefferson needed to defend them. As usual, his book tried to make his data about Native Americans sound scientific, even though it was really just fitting facts to an argument. A more disturbing version of the same process happened when Jefferson wrote about African-Americans.
Jefferson didn’t feel obligated to defend African-Americans, since enslaved Africans had come to America from the Old World. This meant that Jefferson’s “science” about African-Americans could be influenced by his other opinions: Jefferson was especially afraid that America was heading toward a race war. He wrote that it “will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race” [6]. These are the fears we would expect of a man who owned slaves and lived in a slave state, at a time when slave uprisings were becoming more common. Jefferson served as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, where he was in precisely that position. He believed in ending slavery, but his fear was so powerful that he believed all African-Americans would need to be deported from America. He knew this was going to sound crazy to outsiders, since he wrote, “It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state?” [6] Jefferson needed a strong-sounding argument, so, just as he did with Buffon, he disguised his prejudice in “science”.
Jefferson wrote that there are “physical and moral” differences between the races. Blacks “secrete less by the kidneys ... which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.” Their intelligence is “much inferior” and “in imagination they are dull.” Jefferson claimed that Europeans were more beautiful than Africans and that African men themselves agreed with this, since (Jefferson claimed) African men preferred European women the same way that male orangutans preferred African women. Nature had made the races separate, Jefferson wrote, and so they should be kept separate, with no “staining the blood” though “mixture” [6].
These statements are all just Jefferson’s prejudices disguised in scientific-sounding language. Because science has a way of masking personal prejudices as objective realities. Science makes irrational fears sound reasonable. Jefferson’s “science” made lies sound like truth.
Was Jefferson really a scientist? No matter whether he was arguing about extinct mastodons or living people, he knew his answers before he started. He made his evidence fit his argument. And he used scientific language to pass off his prejudices as facts. That’s not science — not now, not ever.
References
[1] Comte de Buffon, G.-L. L. (1785, December 31). Au Jardin du Roi [Letter to Thomas Jefferson]. Founders Online.
[2] Gould, S. J. (2011). Inventing Natural History in Style: Buffon's Style and Substance. In The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (p. 80). The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
[3] Jefferson, T. (1785, June 7). [Letter to Chastellux]. Founders Online.
[4] Jefferson, T. (1784, January 12). [Letter to William Whipple]. Founders Online.
[5] Jefferson, T. (1995). Query VI: Productions Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal. In W. Peden (Ed.), Notes on the State of Virginia. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1785)
[6] Jefferson, T. (1995). Query XIV: Laws. In W. Peden (Ed.), Notes on the State of Virginia. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia by the University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1785)
[7] Kennedy, J. F. (1962, April 29). Remarks at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-dinner-honoring-nobel-prize-winners-the-western-hemisphere
[8] Webster, D. (2005). The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster (F. Webster, Ed.). University of Michigan Library. (Original work published 1857)
