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The First American Climate Panic (circa 1778)

By Walter Donway

September 12, 2024

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“The greatest naturalist in the Western World insisted… America’s natural environment was deleterious to all animal life.”

Americans in the decade leading up to ratification of the U.S. Constitution (1788), and decades after, gave every sign of confidence, optimism, and even exuberance. Their victory in the war with Britain, their new independence, and, especially, the new emphasis everywhere on equality—an unprecedented breadth of electoral franchise and the enumeration of their freedoms, for example—stimulated an energy that yielded an explosion of new (mostly home-based) enterprise, and a sense of liberation from the class structure, subordination, and the pervasive superior-inferior social mindset of the past.

(Many in the north, it is true, felt the psychic burden of the new “utopia” that still included a population of enslaved persons. But after ratification (and in some cases, before) one northern state after another emancipated their slaves, sometimes after the first step of ending trade in enslaved persons.[1])

Broadly, the mood was of released ambition, new entrepreneurship, and assertion that “I am as good as anyone”—not a common attitude in earlier decades. But in the decade of the 1780s and after, many Americans, and virtually all educated Americans, worried—and believed—that America might be doomed not to develop, not to prosper, and that the great experiment in republican government and democracy falters.

One curious clue to this malaise was intense interest in the American Indian. People studied Native Americans and collected information and artifacts. Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood in Empire of Liberty writes that “No president in American history was as interested in the indigenous people as Jefferson. He collected every scrap of information about them . . . in fact, he spent most of his life collecting and studying Indian vocabularies.”

But more: “Jefferson’s obsession with the Indian was shared by most of his fellow Americans. Never in history had the Indian become so central to the hopes and dreams of educated white Americans.”[2]

It all grew out of American nervousness over their New World habitat. Specifically, over climate.

“Hopes and dreams”? Resting upon the Native Americans? Perhaps “national survival” would be a better term. It all grew out of American nervousness over their New World habitat. Specifically, over climate.

Comte du Buffon insisted that beyond doubt America’s natural environment was deleterious to all animal life.

The greatest naturalist in the Western World, the French scientist George Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon—echoed by many others viewed as the leading scientific authorities of the era—insisted that beyond doubt America’s natural environment was deleterious to all animal life. All indications were that something was amiss, terribly wrong. Something inherent in nature rendered the climate of the New World pernicious to all life, including the Indians who, after all, were the only indigenous New World humans.

Buffon, director of King Louis XVI’s zoological park, today the Jardin des Plantes, and curator of the King’s nature cabinet, had been publishing a seemingly endless (36 volumes during his life, plus eight by friends posthumously) Natural History,[3] magnificently illustrated with species from around the world. In 1778, he published his critical assessment of the North American climate.

He presented a remorselessly pessimistic but “scientifically grounded” picture of the American environment. He had identified “some combination of elements and other physical causes, something that opposed the amplification of animated Nature.”

The air was more humid, the topography uneven, and the weather was more variable. Were there not extensive forests and miasmic swamps? It was an unhealthy climate in which to live, and the results were apparent and inescapable.

New World animals had not developed like those on other continents. They were smaller than in the Old World. Did America have lions? Only the scrawny puma, hardly a real lion. It did not even have a mane, and was “smaller, weaker, and more cowardly than a real lion.”

And elephants? No elephants and nothing to compare with the elephant. Buffon became a bit sarcastic: the best the New World could do was the tapir of Brazil. Ha! Like a six-month-old elephant calf.

A generalization now became possible. All American animals were “four, six, eight, and ten times… Smaller than those of the older continents.” What is more, domestic animals imported to the New World in time shrank.

No wonder Americans were panicked. Buffon concluded, broadly, that “Living nature is thus much less active there, much less varied, and we may say, less strong.”

Americans dare not view this as a mere naturalistic anomaly. Because there was worse to come. The noxious climate was responsible for what to Buffon was the obviously retarded development of the native humans, wandering savages stuck in the first stage of social development.

The Indians, Buffon explained, were like reptiles. They were cold-blooded, their “organs of generation are small and feeble.” They had no body hair, did they? No beards. And no ardor for their females. In general, then, their social bonds were weak, they had few children . . . .

The New World climate, this moist climate, in some strange way had had a devastating impact on the physical as well as the social character of the only native humans. Sadly, the outlook for humans from the Old World transplanted to this unhealthy environment was not good, not a happy prospect.

Gordon Wood writes: “It is difficult to appreciate the extent of European ignorance about the Western Hemisphere . . .” Climate then was seen as a belt of the Earth’s surface running between any two parallels. Europeans were surprised that this did not hold in the New World. London was north of Newfoundland; Rome was about the same latitude as New York; but how different their climates were!

Out of this sense of difference between the Old and New Worlds and the hearsay and reports of travelers, Buffon derived his hypothesis. Leading intellectuals across Europe adopted the theory of a New World unhospitable to life. Enlightenment thinkers in France, England, and Scotland advanced the ideas, which entered the thinking of the late eighteenth century, above all, among Americans—alarmed that if Buffon’s theory, the settled science on this subject—were true, then the chances for success of their bold republican experiment were not reassuring.

Americans did not let concern about their national prospects quell their new energy. But things they observed now seemed especially ominous. Temperature ranges did seem extreme, didn’t they? Winters with temperatures below zero, and sweltering summers.

And now, didn’t they understand better the devastating epidemics of yellow fever that swept American cities—the catastrophe in Philadelphia in 1783, with 10 percent of the population killed? And where else in the Western world did this happen? (The speculation launched an entire “industry” of proposals for dealing with crowded cities and their fermenting garbage, filth in the streets, putrefaction from which emanated effluvia, morbid fluids, and disease. Perhaps the American climate made big cities inadvisable; plans proliferated for remedies—the first American “urban renewal.”

Now, negative trends, unwanted developments, and, above all, catastrophes were explained by climate.

Now, negative trends, unwanted developments, and, above all, catastrophes were explained by climate. The future seemed so promising, prosperous, and inviting—a whole continent awaiting—but always there was the climate. Perhaps cities could be downsized, if not eliminated…

No one, at least on record, worried as much as Thomas Jefferson. Buffon’s volume relating to America, its climate, and its species shocked and enraged him. He joined voices urging that “men cannot be piled on one another with impunity . . .” Americans must avoid Europe’s huge sprawling cities. In particular, he dwelt on the frightening prospects of swampy New Orleans.

Jefferson published only one book, Notes on the State of Virginia, and notably a major section was devoted to refuting Buffon’s claims. Interestingly, the first edition of this book was published in French (1785) and the second in English (1787). The pages of charts with measurements of American mammals of all kinds today are usually left out of editions of the book. Weights of each were given in pounds and ounces. With few exceptions, the American animal, as compared with the European, is equal or greater in size. To deal with the “elephant in the room,” Jefferson brought in the historic American mammoth.

Its tone was often angry, raising challenges to Buffon’s credentials. Did he really have all the measurements of American animals? He had never been in America. And weren’t most of the reports on weather from French travelers in Canada? Were those making these reports real scientists? His conclusion was that European intellectuals, including even Buffon, did not know what they were talking about. One of the very first copies he had delivered directly to the great naturalist.

Jefferson took excruciating care with the charts and tables, but, today, with the climate crisis (at least that one) long forgotten, they seem to publishers irrelevant.

The controversy was broad and lasting, but accounts often climax with the story of Jefferson’s trip to Paris in the 1880s as American minister. He prepared to meet Buffon by bringing with him the largest panther skin he could obtain.

He was duly introduced to Buffon and pressed him on his knowledge (ignorance, Jefferson implied) of American animals. Jefferson’s big gun was the American moose. Why, the moose was so huge that a European reindeer horns and all could walk under its belly!

Perhaps desperate to get rid of Jefferson, who with the years had become increasingly obsessed, viewing this controversy as pivotal to American optimism, Buffon promised that if Jefferson could produce a single specimen of moose with foot-long antlers, Buffon would concede his error.

The stories of Jefferson’s efforts to obtain this moose have been elaborated in detail. If they were not, they could scarcely be believed. He wrote to American friends: Send bones, send skins, send horns—better still, send the whole stuffed animal. Governor John Sullivan of New Hampshire responded with energy, sending out hunters and, when they made a kill, ordering a 20-mile swathe cut into the woods to drag out the body.

Unfortunately, by the time the carcass reached Portsmouth, ready to ship to France, it was half rotten, hairless, and had no head bones. Sullivan sent to Paris the horns of some other animal. They are not the horns of a moose, he explained to Jefferson, but attach them to anything you want.

Jefferson found himself apologizing for the meager specimen, assuring Buffon there was an even larger set of horns. Perhaps Buffon was an example of a reasonable scientist open to evidence. He proclaimed himself convinced of his errors and said the very next volume of his work would set things straight.

But Buffon died before he was able to keep that promise.

Jefferson never lost his passion for the subject, urging the president of Harvard to beef up the study of natural history. From fossil remains of what is thought to be a giant sloth, he somehow deduced existence of a giant super lion, three times bigger than the African species. But 1801 brought the ultimate satisfaction when near Newburgh, NY, Charles William Peale unearthed the skeleton of a mastodon or mammoth. In his celebrated museum, Peale set off a veritable national mammoth craze. One town managed to put together a “mammoth cheese” that they sent to Jefferson.

Gordon Wood comments: “At times, it seemed as if the entire American intellectual community was involved in examining the creatures and the soil and climate of America.”[4]

Gordon Wood comments: “At times, it seemed as if the entire American intellectual community was involved in examining the creatures and the soil and climate of America.”[4] For example, meteorology became an American craze with thousands participating, gathering facts in the best tradition of Enlightenment amateur science. Yale president Ezra Stiles filled six volumes with daily temperature and weather records. Every intellectual seemed compelled to present a paper on climate at one of the new American “philosophical” (natural science) societies.

But the issue, understandably, kept coming back to the Native Americans—the humans most affected by climate. Jefferson concluded and stated, emphatically, that on this issue, too, Buffon was wrong. As one intriguing sidelight, Americans became concerned that, given the environment, those on the frontier, most exposed to nature, might begin to degenerate toward a more and more savage state (there was anecdotal evidence!), to become “white savages.” Would the climate prevent the white man from becoming more civilized as it (purportedly) had kept the American Indian from becoming civilized?

Increasingly, in the late 18th century, Buffon’s theories of American degeneracy were challenged by U.S. politicians as well as naturalists, always with Jefferson in the van, his Notes on the State of Virginia widely read. European perceptions persisted longer, in part because they were useful to those who viewed America as a potential rival or threat. Some historians argue that the climate crisis was not fully discredited until the advent of Darwinism.[5]

In truth, the controversy had no decisive endpoint. There was no revised consensus that Buffon had been refuted or that the measurements of American species decisively disproved his climate theory. It was more that, as decades passed and predictions never panned out, and one of the prominent figures of the French Enlightenment[6]—fully as widely read in his time as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire—was overtaken by the reality of the future, the first great American climate panic simply faded away.
 

Notes

[1] Vermont in 1777, Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1783, Pennsylvania in 1780, Rhode Island in 1784, Connecticut in 1784 and 1797, New York in 1799 and 1817, New Jersey in 1804, Ohio in 1802, Indiana in 1816, and Illinois in 1818. “Race, Slavery, and Freedom – Northern ‘Unfreedom’” (U.S. National Park Service, nps.gov.)

[2] Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford History of the United States). Oxford University Press: London, 2011). Part of the Oxford History of America.

[3] Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, Buffon’s Natural History: Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals,: &c. &c. Edited by James Smith Barr.

[4] Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty.

[5] https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/ 10.1186/s12052-019-0107-0. Not that Buffon had taken no account of evolution, but he maintained that life rose spontaneously from unorganized matter in the hot oceans of the early Earth. It seemed to follow that different climates and environments mediated either the degeneration or improvement of species over time. Darwinism challenged that by proposing a different mechanism for the origin and diversity of life, that it evolved from a common ancestor through natural selection. In this context, different climates and environments acted as selective pressures that favored the adaptation or extinction of species. Darwin’s also had available more empirical evidence from fossils, biogeography, and comparative anatomy to support his claims. Some 50 to 75 years earlier, Buffon had relied more on speculation and anecdotal observations. It all made Darwinism more plausible and testable as an explanation for the diversity and distribution of life on Earth.

[6] Born in 1701 in Montbard, Burgundy, Buffon inherited a fortune from his godfather, enabling him, after attending the University of Angers, where he met the English Duke of Kingston, to travel extensively in Europe with him. He early became a member of the Royal Society of London and later the French Academy and American Philosophical Society. Through a connection (the apothecary to the King), he won from Louis XVI appointment as director of the Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin des Plantes) in Paris, where he remained the rest of his life, conducting his research. Several times, his theories (for example, on the age of the Earth) clashed with Catholic doctrine and the Sorbonne forced a retraction. A typical Enlightenment polymath, he also worked with success in probability, physics, and geology. He died in 1788 in Paris. Not long after, French revolutionaries dug up his coffin and stripped off the lead cover to make bullets

 

This essay was first published in the Online Library of Liberty, The Liberty Fund, Inc. on February 28, 2024, under the title “America’s Future Doomed by Climate (circa 1778).”

 

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