The Count, the Moose, and Thomas Jefferson

That's also Noble Blood Tales. But as always, the best support for the show is just that you keep listening, unless, of course, you want to pre order my book Immortality, a Love Story, in which case that is the best support you could possibly be doing. So thank you so much for listening, and let's dive in. The year was seventeen eighty four and Thomas Jefferson had a problem. He was a Francophile. He was just about to set out for France as an ambassador from the new country of America.

But at this particular moment in time, the French were making him a little annoyed. Well, one Frenchman in particular, George Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Baifont, arguably the most famous natural historian in the world. At this time, Buffon was the author of an internationally best selling thirty six volume book called the hispan Necral, or Natural History, in which he gave meticulous evidence for the theory of quote degeneracy.

This was a popular European theory at the time, which claimed that all flora and fauna were weaker and smaller in the New World as compared to the Old World, i e. Europe. The plants and animals of America were shriveled little things compared to the plants and animals in Europe. So the theory went, the birds of America could not croak out a note compared to the marvelous European songbirds, the dogs of America could only whimper compared to the

great barking hounds of the continent. And the people well, According to this theory, the native Americans fared no better than the native fauna and flora. Jefferson ruminated on Buffon's work with increasing outrage. The chapter on quadrupeds for legged beasts was especially egregious. How could befall claim that the American land mammal was inferior, that man had never even left Europe? Jefferson envisioned his beloved home state, Virginia, which was no longer a colony, finally part of a new

independent nation. When he looked out at the grounds of his estate at Monticello, he saw rolling, fertile fields tended to buy people he enslaved, but lands that were capable of growing tobacco, wheat, and a whole host of crops. He saw the mountain on whose peak he had built his plantation. He remembered the lush, verdant Piedmont forests of his youth, the smell of autumn crisp through the trees, the hoofprints of deer just visible on the forest floor.

He recalled the spry doze and magnificent stags leaping away in the thicket. If anything, Jefferson thought the plants and animals and people were bigger in America, better in America. He had written as much painstakingly in his just published book Notes on the State of Virginia. He believed the giant mastodon was still roaming the country somewhere, the most sublime, the most colossal quadruped of all. Besides, hadn't Benjamin Franklin already shown the French that Americans were taller on his

trip to the continent. Hadn't Alexander Hamilton refuted the degeneracy concept in his Federalist papers. Hadn't Jefferson and James Madison corresponded on the matter sufficient to finally set it to rest. How dare the French not? We can't No, The degeneracy libel could not stand. Jefferson needed to do something. He picked up his quill to write John Sullivan, Governor of New Hampshire, another part of America dnse with forest and

the Great White Mountains. Jefferson needed to bring something to the continent that would change the Frenchman's mind for good. He wasn't just acting for his own sake. He was acting on behalf of the reputation of the new world, of the brand new United States of America, so young that its articles of Confederation were still being tested in practice. For the good of the Union, Thomas Jefferson, founding father, former governor of Virginia, future president, needed to ship something

enormous across the Atlantic Ocean. As the decade of the seventeen eighties neared its close. A dog wouldn't do, nor a squirrel, nor a deer. He needed to show Comte de Baifant the biggest four legged American animal that he could readily find. He dipped his quill into a pot of ink and leaned over his parchment. What he needed, he wrote to New Hampshire, was a mood. I'm Dani Schwartz and this is noble blood. Adult men comparing bodies, fighting over whose is bigger, and getting worked up over

contests of size. If the fight over the theory of degeneracy sounds a bit like an eighteenth century men's locker room to you, well it basically was. But who were the men doing the measurements in the metaphorical locker room? The comb tip of fone was born George Louis le

Cleric in seventeen o seven. He came of age in France after the death of Louis as the Age of Enlightenment was beginning to flourish after an evidently miserable childhood, before made a name for himself at the Royal Academy of Sciences by writing papers on the mathematics of probability, especially as it applied to gambling. For most of his early life, there's little evidence of any actual interest in

nature or cataloging of natural history. The closest thing to anthropology we might see was this sweet little note from his travels as a young man. Quote women are quite beautiful, and except for the old ones, I don't remember having seen any that were ugly unquote A little anthropologist in training. But all that changed when the French Navy needed a place to research would for their ships, they chose the forests around Beffon's estate, and it was then that Buffon

turned his attention to the natural world. For the next decade, he devoted himself with singular zeal, to cataloging, recording, and measuring the exact features of every species he could find. He wanted to write no less than quote the exact description and the true history of each thing end quote on the planet, and in seventeen forty nine, the first volume of his natural history was published. It was a sensation, a genuine eighteenth century best seller, one of the first

ever popular science books. It's sold out in six weeks and was translated into English and reviewed by newspapers all over the American colonies. Smart trendy readers throughout Europe and America were devouring it and its details about the theory of degeneracy in the New World, essentially, wrote Buffon, nature in America is functioning quote upon a smaller scale. Buffone was not the first European thinker to propose the idea of degeneracy in America, but he was the most respected,

the most widely read. He provided the most evidence and the clearest reason. Because the climate in America is colder and wetter, life grows weaker and diminished. His arguments extended to the people of the New World to His statements about Native American populations were especially intensely callous. He called

indigenous Americans quote a kind of weak automaton. Nature treated them rather like a stepmother than a parent, by refusing them the invigorating sentiment of love and the strong desire of multiplying their species unquote. For the record, Befall's own relationship with parental love was that he had not attended

his own father's second wedding after his mother's death. He had sued his father for his inheritance and described his feelings as that of quote the discontent of a l born son caused by a father who was heartless unquote. So if a lack of parental love renders a person in firm. Well, that doesn't speak very well of him. In all his comparison of species, Buffon never left Europe and rarely went out into nature to collect any information himself.

That was actually common practice for natural historians of the time. Instead of actually collecting data themselves, they relied on the relay testimonies of others and on cabinets of curiosities collections of natural and interesting objects. One of the collections Befone relied on was actually the King's Buffon was like the geographer, invented two centuries later in fiction by another French author

and Twine de Saint Experi in The Little Prince. In that book, the geographer character says he quote doesn't go out to scribe cities, rivers, mountains, seas, oceans and deserts. A geographer is too important to go wandering about. He never leaves his study, but he received the explorers there. He questions them, and he writes down what they remember end quote. Thomas Jefferson, for his part, had spent his

childhood in the woods of Virginia. Born in seventeen forty three, he was thirty six years Buffons Jr. Like Buffon, he studied law Unlike Buffon, he had an evident interest in nature, botany, and scientific observation from the time he was very young. Jefferson is obviously known to American history as a complicated figure.

He's the author of the Declaration of Independence, an eloquent plea for man's fundamental freedom and equality, and yet he owned a slave plantation, And as he was contemplating helping to build a new independent American nation, he was deeply affronted by Buffon's claims of American degeneracy. He wasn't the only one. Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton's basically half the guys in the musical Hamilton's We're defending America against

degeneracy theory at one time or another. Lee Allen de Gatkin, whose research I am indebted to for this episode, rightly note that these guys were bothering to think about some Frenchman's theory quote in the midst of issues such as the proposition to hold a constitutional convention, whether paper money should be adopted, and what to do about an empty treasury.

You know, just those little things. But that's to say this project of defending American bigness and heartiness had the valance of nationalism during a time when nationalism really mattered. The Republic was newly one from the British and it needed to define its national character on the world stage as one of strength. Of all of the founders, it was Jefferson who worked most passionately to refute buffonse theory.

In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, published in seventeen eighty five, Jefferson name check Buffon and his theory, and then spent page after page defending America against it. Jefferson included tables on quote a comparative view of the quadrupeds of Europe and of America, which compare by weight everything from the mammoth to the wolf, to the links, to the otter to the shrew mouse. Jefferson catalogs the number of species found only in Europe versus the number

of species found only in America. Rather hilariously, he includes a whole page in which the American side of the table is filled in and the European side is just blank. He obsesses for a while about his belief that the mammoth, which, remember Jefferson is positive, is still around somewhere. Should quote have stifled in its birth, the opinion of a writer most learned too of all others in the science of animal history unquote, that is, it should have stifled the

opinion of Bouffon. Jefferson was also passionate to the point of being over the top in his defense of Native Americans against the claim of degeneracy. At one point, he says that no orator in all of Europe, not even Cicero ever gave a speech better than a Mingo chief named Logan. But as you might expect when it comes to Jefferson and race, his views were complicated. In the same book, he makes sure to note that different races have different physical and mental abilities. It's just not in

Jefferson's opinion, because of where they were born. In the end, Jefferson wasn't satisfied with his buttle to Befall in his book. He needed something physical, something bigger than words on a page. He needed to get through to Befall. What he needed was the biggest animal that could be procured, the beast that would so impress Befall that the Frenchman would be

forced to publicly change his mind. That is why Jefferson needed a moose if you were a correspondent of the eminent Thomas Jefferson in the mid seventeen eighties, you were almost certainly someone important George Washington or John Adams. Perhaps in the seventeen eighties you might have been worried about economic disputes with neighboring states. You probably would have worn a double breasted waistcoat and skin tight riding breeches, and

a tall hat, maybe with a buckle for flair. And you might have one day received from your eminent correspondent a sixteen questioned survey on the habits and measurements of the American moose. Do they make a loud rattling sound when they run? Jefferson asked, what is their food? What is the height? Its length from ear to ear, its circumference were largest. You can almost imagine the Facebook post, Hey friends, anybody know anything about a moose? One friend did,

John Sullivan, Governor of New Hampshire. The two men continued to correspond on and off about the possibility of procuring a moose, a correspondence that continued when Jefferson shipped off to Paris as Ambassador to France. In Paris, Jefferson left a dinner with Baffon, with the distinct impression that showing Befall a giant moose would change the Frenchman's mind about

American degeneracy once and for all. He wrote more urgently to Sullivan in New Hampshire, saying that the quote skin, skeletons, and horse unquote of moose would be quote more precious than you can imagine unquote. In fact, by this time, Buffon had already issued a fifth supplement of his natural History that was a gentle walking back. While American degeneracy had originally extended to the entire American continent, the fifth edition subtly dropped the references to North America. It's not

clear whether Jefferson saw or registered this change. If he did, he surely didn't think it was enough. In the meantime, back in New Hampshire, John Sullivan decided to deliver. In mid March, very much still winter in New England, he dispatched a twenty man team to kill a seven foot tall moose Vermont as a favor to Thomas Jefferson. It's at this point in the story that it might be time to introduce the third player in our metaphorical locker room an unwitting player to be sure the moose himself.

The word moose comes from the Algonquin language. The Algonquin root word refers to stripping off, probably of bark, the way a moose's antlers might. Elizabeth Bishop's famous poem The Moose describes an animal quote that stands there looms rather towering high as a church. Unquote. The adult male moose averages six ft tall each year in the testosterone surge before breeding season. It's antlers grow in a coat of

velvet and then harden before shedding. And yes, to continue our prevailing anatomical metaphor, one wild life biologist for National Geographic says, quote, the guy who has the biggest set of antlers and can show them off to potential girl friends will be the fortunate individual who does the breeding. Unquote. Those antlers alone can weigh sixty pounds, and the moose

can weigh fourteen hundred pounds. That's the sheer size of the thing that Sullivan's men spent the next two weeks hauling twenty miles through the snow back to New Hampshire. Sullivan stepped outside nose reddening in the cold, to find not the noble creature that Thomas Jefferson had asked for,

but a putrefying carcass in very rough shape. Nevertheless, he was committed to his task, so the men, wanting arrest and a warm hearth at this point, instead set to the hard work separating flesh from bone, preserving as much of the moose as they could against further degradation, and attempting to keep the hoofs and antlers attached. The smell of dead moose filled their nostrils as they worked, but

as they continued, they reached an uneasy conclusion. This moose and its antlers would not be making it together across the Atlantic. Jefferson's moose could only come in pieces. The magnificent specimen that Jefferson requested was not to be Like a kid. Desperate not to fail the assignment, Sullivan also decided to send along a few other antlers he had lying around. This was New Hampshire, after all, and he instructed Jefferson that he could attach them to the carcass

at will. By this time, fulfilling Jefferson's obsessive requests for a moose had become more trouble than Sullivan had signed up for this was a guy who had once charged at Hessian's soldiers during the Revolutionary War with a pistol in each hand, and now he was stuck borrowing forty five pounds sterling from his brother to deal with Thomas

Jefferson's moose carcass. He must have been very happy to put the moose and the assorted antlers on a ship that sets sail from Portsmouth, New Hampshire in early May, but the poor moose got left behind on that ship for reasons unknown, possibly that chip's captain got a whiff of the giant, smelly moose skin and decided he could

do a transatlantic voyage without it. For five months, the carcass sat until finally it caught her ride and arrived in Half the Grace France in the final days of September. We can only imagine Jefferson's ecstasy at the arrival of the ship, and then his disappointment at the sorry state of its cargo. Nonetheless, he immediately wrote Buffon on October one seven. He told the Frenchman that he had the bones and skin of a moose. He did make some apologies.

He had envisioned that the skin would come stuffed and sewn back together like a giant bild the bear. He'd imagined something immediately impressive. Instead, Jefferson acknowledged this moose had been sent quote with the hair on, but a great deal of it has come off, and the rest is ready to drop off unquote, more than anything. Jefferson implored

Buffon's understanding when it came to matters of size. The antlers that finally made it across the Atlantic with the moose skin and bones were those assorted antlers of other species that the governor had included, and Jefferson tried his best to justify them, insisting, quote, the horns of the elk are remarkably small. I have certainly seen of them which would have weighed five or six times as much.

The horns of the deer which accompany these spoils are not of the fifth or sixth part of the weight of some that I have seen. I therefore beg of you not to consider those now sent as furnishing a specimen of their ordinary size unquote shrinkage. You can almost hear him saying he signed the letter to Buffon, your most obedient and most humble servant, and I will say it is hard reading these letters not to see how Lin Manuel Miranda made Jefferson the buffoonish frenchman oft in Paris.

In Hamilton's, of course, it was Buffon who Jefferson was hoping to make the buffoon, at least when it came to the degeneracy theory. Jefferson viewed Buffon as a true scientist, an intelligent man who had made a mistake and would surely be swayed by the evidence set before him. Jefferson sent the letter off with giddy anticipation. Thomas Jefferson had

gotten his moose, and soon he would get Baffall. To recount when the moose carcass landed in France, Jefferson was a relatively young man of forty four, but Befall, at this point was eighty years old and sick. It was his assistant who received the moose. In Jefferson's imagination, the assistant would have been dumb struck. Sir. The assistant would say to Baffall, you've been all wrong, all wrong. The animals in this new world are larger than the old world.

Baffall would gaze upon the moose bones with shock and awe. He would immediately sit up and change course, frantically, writing it would be a defining moment in his scientific career. But that's not what happened. Buffon may eight indeed have seen the moose. Maybe he really did plan, as Jefferson believed, he would to officially renounce the theory of degeneracy once and for all in his next volume of the Natural History, But Buffon died six months later before publishing another word

on the subject. In Jacques Rogers four hundred plus page biography of BeFAN, the incident with Jefferson's moose is mentioned in exactly one paragraph, where it gets half a sentence. The Natural History remained as it was, with no moose related corrections. Jefferson went on to become the third President of the United States fourteen years later. He would send Lewis and Clark to the West with a long list

of natural measurements for them to obtain. He would collect a grand cabinet of curiosities at Mounticello and have a hall hung with the head and antlers of a moose, a deer, a buffalo, and supposedly a mammoth. He never gave up on his quest to prove the massiveness of animals in the New World. In se he presented to the American Philosophical Society a collection of giant bones from a new species he called the Megalonyx, which turned out

to be the bones of the extinct giant sloth. And as to the whole debate over which animal from which quote world is bigger and therefore better, I've made allusions here to the men's locker room measuring contest character of it all. But it was a debate with real consequences, not so much the answer to the question of size,

but the framing of the question itself. The very concept that bigger is better Undergird's manifest destiny, the sense of largeness that America offered to conquerors, the possibility of more when Europe had already been claimed bigger as better undergirds the subjugation of women to men over centuries applied to Native American populations. It is dehumanization in either direction, the strong,

noble savage or the weak, degraded man. It's presented today in political wars between large and small states in the United States, between large and small states of the world. But what if, of course, bigger is not necessarily better, even if we could prove that life grew bigger in some places than others, does a value judgment need to be attached? Might Darwin himself, born a decade after the Comte de Baifant, argue that smallness can be adaptive, useful

good at base? The reason why the fight over degenerously mattered to these eighteenth century men was there intrinsic feeling that bigger is better. So I want to leave you and this episode with a thought, what if it's simply not. That's the story of Thomas Jefferson and America in a battle of size against the Comte de Bifont and Europe. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear what happened to Befon's corps. The funeral of the Comte

de Beifont was a grand affair. This was the author of the best selling natural history, The Visionary and Poetic Epics of Nature and the First Geological History of the World, a book that was read by the likes of Catherine the Great. On April eighteenth, seventeen eighty eight, twenty thousand mourners watched as fourteen horses carried Buffon's funeral processions down the street of San Menard, France, and they listened to

three dozen choir boys singing songs of mourning. They may not have known that the body they were mourning had been opened one day earlier after Buffon's death. Buffon himself had given the instructions before he died. His chest cavity was cut and his heart removed from his body, and then given to his friend, Fouget de Saint Fon, a geologist and volcanist. Buffon's skull was opened with a saw. The instinct for comparative measurement did not abandon those who

dealt with Buffon's corpse. The brain was recorded as a quote slightly larger size than that of ordinary brains unquote. So the heartless body of the naturalist was mourned with fanfare on the way to its interment in Monbar. It did not stay interred during the French Revolution, which began just one year after Buffon's death, a revolution that would claim the life of his son at the guillotine. Buffon's tomb was broken into the lead over the coffin was

stolen to make bullets, and his body was desecrated. Legend has it that only his Sarah bellum was left, and that to this very day, allegedly in the base of a statue of Buffon commissioned by Louis the sixteenth, housed in the Museum of Natural History in Paris, a little piece of the naturalist's brain remains. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from

Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Danishwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Miura Hayward, Courtney Sunder and Laurie Goodman. The show is produced by rema Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thaine and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.