Noble Blood - The Count, the Moose, and Thomas Jefferson

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

After the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers were desperate to prove America's strength on the world stage, especially compared to Europe. To Thomas Jefferson, this meant refuting the theory of "degeneracy" put forth by French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon. And of course, there was only one way to do that: have a moose shipped across the Atlantic. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book,  'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeartRadio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Hey, this is Dana Schwartz, the host of Noble Blood. If you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com.

Noble Blood Tales. I'm also on Instagram with a Noble Blood account where I sometimes post random memes and things that I make or find. 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 17, 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 Combe de Beaufort, arguably the most famous natural historian in the world at this time. Buffon was the author of an internationally best-selling 36-volume book called the Histoire Nacral, or Natural History,

in which he gave meticulous evidence for the theory of, quote, degeneracy. This was a popular European theory. 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 Bufant's work with increasing outrage. The chapter on quadrupeds, four-legged beasts, was especially egregious. How could Bufant claim that the American land mammal was in fear? that man had never even left Europe. Jefferson envisioned his beloved home state of 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 by 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 recant?

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, dense 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 1780s neared its close. A dog wouldn't do, nor a squirrel, nor a deer. He needed to show Camp de Beaufort 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 moose. I'm Dana 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 18th 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 Comte d'Befan was born Georges-Louis Leclerc in 1707. He came of age in France after the death of Louis XIV as the age of enlightenment was beginning to flourish. After an evidently miserable childhood, Befoum 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 wood for their ships. They chose the forests around Befons' estate, and it was then that Befons 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, and quote, on the planet. And in 1749, the first volume of his natural history was published. It was a sensation, a genuine 18th century bestseller. One of the first ever popular science books,

It 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 Befant, nature in America is functioning, quote, upon a smaller scale. Bufon was not the first European third. 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, too. 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, Befant'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 well-born son caused by a father who was heartless, unquote. So if a lack of parental love renders a person infirm, well, that doesn't speak very well of him. In all his comparison of species, Befant 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 relayed testimonies of others and on cabinets of curiosities, collections of natural and interesting objects. One of the collections Bufant relied on was actually the kings. Bufant was like the geographer invented two centuries later in fiction by another French author, Antoine de Saint-Ein-Ein-Cin. in The Little Prince.

In that book, the geographer character says he, quote, doesn't go out to describe 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 1743, he was 36 years Befons Jr. Like Befant, he studied law.

Unlike Befant, 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 Bufant's claims of American degeneracy.

He wasn't the only one. Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, basically half the guys in the musical Hamilton, were 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 hardiness, had the valence of nationalism during a time when nationalism really mattered. The Republic was newly won 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 Befant's theory. In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson named 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 lynx 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 Beaufort. 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 rebuttal 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 big, biggest animal that could be procured, the beast that would so impress beffant 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-1780s, you were almost certainly someone important, George Washington or John Adams, perhaps. In the 1780s, 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 flare. And you might have, one day, received from your eminent correspondent a 16-question 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 Bufaugh, with a distinct impression that showing Bufant 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, Befant 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 20-man team to kill a seven-foot-tall moose in 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 a church, unquote. The adult male moose averages six feet tall. Each year in the testosterone surge before breeding season, its antlers grow in a coat of velvet and then harden before shedding. And yes, to continue our prevailing anatomical metaphor, one wildlife biologist for National Geographic says, quote, the guy who has the biggest set of antlers and can. can show them off to potential girlfriends will be the fortunate individual who does the breeding." Those antlers alone can weigh 60 pounds, and the moose can weigh 1,400 pounds. That's the sheer size of the thing that Sullivan's men spent the next two weeks hauling 20 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 a rest and a warm hearth at this point, instead set to the hard work of separating flesh from bone, preserving as much of the moose as they could against further degradation, and attempting to keep the hooves 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 request for a moose had become more trouble than Sullivan had signed up for. This was a guy who had once charged at Hessian soldiers during the Revolutionary War with a pistol in each hand, and now he was stuck borrowing 45-pound 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 set sail from Portsmouth, New Hampshire in early May.

But the poor moose got left behind on that ship for reasons unknown. Possibly that ship'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 a 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 Befant.

On October 1, 1787, 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 build-a-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 Befons' 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 signs the letter to Befant, 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 off in Paris in Hamilton. Of course, it was Befant, whom Jefferson was hoping to make the buffoon, at least when it came to the degeneracy theory. Jefferson, Bufant 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 Bufant to recant. When the moose carcass landed in France, Jefferson was a relatively young man of 44, but Bufant at this point was 80 years old and sick. It was his assistant who received the moose.

In Jefferson's imagination, the assistant would have been dumbstruck. Sir, the assistant would say to Bufant, you've been all wrong, all wrong, the animals in this new world are larger than the old world. Bufantan 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. Befant may 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 Befant died six months later, before publishing another word on the subject. In Jacques Rogers' 400-plus page biography of Befant, 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 14 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 Mount Ticello 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 1797, he presented to the American Philosophical Society a collection of giant bones from a new species he called the megalonics, 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 undergirds 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 other, does a value judgment need to be attached? Might Darwin himself, born a decade after the Comte de Beaufort,

argue that smallness can be adaptive, useful, good? At base, the reason why the fight over degeneracy mattered to these 18th century men was their intrinsic feeling that bigger is better. So I want to leave you and this episode with a third. thought. What if it's simply not? That's the story of Thomas Jefferson and America in a battle of size against the Comte d'Befant and Europe. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear what happened to Buffon's corpse. What's up everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell.

Woo-woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved.

And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where, you. You're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore. It's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, you know from. Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell.

Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved.

And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The funeral of the Comte de Beaufort 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 18th, 1788, 20,000 mourners watched as 14 horses carried buffons. funeral processions down the street of San Bernard 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 Bufant's death. Bufant 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, Foget de Saint-Font, 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 internment in It did not stay interred. During the French Revolution, which began just one year after Bufant's

death, a revolution that would claim the life of his son at the guillotine, Bufant'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 cerebellum was left, and that to this very day, allegedly, in the base of a statue of Befant commissioned by Louis XVI, 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 Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman.

The show is produced by Rima Il Kiali with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wode. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you're a shot, but if If you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah. It would not be.

Right. It wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human Thank you.