Jefferson’s Moose: The Incredibly True Story | France VS The United States

We talk about the time founder Thomas Jefferson shipped a dead moose to France to prove Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon and his Theory of American Degeneracy wrong - yes, that really happened.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Even though they had just won a war against the most powerful country on the planet, in the 1780’s, to the rest of the world, America was a young country and sort of a joke.

Why had America only produced one great man, Benjamin Franklin?

Franklin was HUGE in Europe.

The most popular theory about America came from a french nobleman named Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon. Buffon had never been to America, but based on the word of some less-than impressed French friends, claimed that the continent had just risen from the sea. It was covered in swamps and too humid and soft, compared to the dry hard land of Europe.

Buffon had never been to America.

This made life in America just a degenerate copy of Europe’s. If you brought animals or plants from Europe to America, their offspring would be smaller and inferior as well. This even applied to humans. So, you better not have any babies in America.

Have I mentioned that Buffon had never been to America?

But, this theory became really popular and started to appear in textbooks and even poetry.

This wasn't good news for a fresh country, that needed people to move there and for Europe to buy its goods.

Enter, the American ambassador to France, a young Thomas Jefferson.

This was personal.

TJ writes all his founder friends for help in proving this dangerous Frenchman wrong. James Madison sent Jefferson the detailed measurements of a Virginian weasel, even down to the distance between the anus and the Vulva.

Jefferson writes his first and only book, which included a massive table of animal measurements compared to Europe's. Such as the 12 pound US otter compared to The 9 pound European otter.

He even sends Buffon an American cougar pelt and Mastodon fossils.

None of this is good enough for Buffon and over an awkward dinner with him, Jefferson has an idea. He starts a flurry of letters to his fellow founders, with a task "more precious than they could imagine."

He needed a moose. And fast.

Good News Mr. Jefferson, John Sullivan, the governor of New Hampshire, bagged a seven foot tall moose!
Wonderful. The bad news?
It's 20 miles from the nearest road.

It would take 20 men, two full weeks to drag the dead Moose through the snow to the Governor.

By the time it arrives in his office, the moose was starting to decay, had lost most of its fur, and somehow, it's antlers were missing.

Not wanting to disappoint the writer of the Declaration of Independence, the governor packs up the mangled moose with a bunch of deer antlers as replacements and ships it off to Paris.

When it finally arrives in Paris, one year later, Thomas Jefferson had no choice but to take the largest pair of deer antlers, nail them on to the stuffed moose, and send it on to Buffon with a note to... well, use his imagination for what it used to look like.

So did this not so mighty moose change Buffons mind?

No one knows, he would die a few days after it arrived.

Let's just pretend he died of shock over how wrong he was.

The theory of American degeneracy wouldn't go away for another 70 years, well beyond the death of Thomas Jefferson, who would continue to fight it into his presidency. At his funeral, his friend giving his eulogy would call this fight, Jefferson's Personal second Revolutionary War.