The Invention of Nature

8

Politics and Nature

Thomas Jefferson and Humboldt

IT WAS AS if the sea were about to swallow them. Huge waves rolled on to the deck and down the stairway into the belly of the ship. Humboldt’s forty trunks were in constant danger of flooding. They had sailed straight into a hurricane and for six long days the winds would not stop, pounding the vessel with such force that they could not sleep or even think. The cook lost his pots and pans when the water came gushing in, and was swimming rather than standing in his galley. No food could be cooked and sharks circled the boat. The captain’s cabin, at the ship’s stern, was flooded so high that they had to swim through it, and even the most seasoned sailors were tossed across the deck like ninepins. Fearing for their lives, the sailors insisted on more brandy rations, intending, they said, to drown drunk. Each wave that rolled towards them seemed like a huge rock face. Humboldt thought that he had never been closer to death.

It was May 1804, and Humboldt, Bonpland, Montúfar and their servant, José, were sailing from Cuba towards the East Coast of the United States. It would be ironic to die now, Humboldt thought, having survived five years of perilous travels in Latin America. After their departure from Guayaquil in February 1803, they had spent a year in Mexico where Humboldt had stayed mainly in Mexico City, the administrative capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain – the vast colony that included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, as well as Florida. He had scoured the extensive colonial archives and libraries, interrupting his research only for a few expeditions to mines, hot springs and yet more volcanoes.

It was time to return to Europe. Five years of travelling through extremes of climates and the wilderness had damaged his delicate instruments, many of which no longer worked properly. With so little contact with the scientific community back home, Humboldt also worried that he might have missed out on important scientific advances. He felt so isolated from the rest of the world, he wrote to a friend, as if he were living on the moon. In March 1804 they had sailed from Mexico to Cuba for a brief stopover in order to pick up the collections that they had stored in Havana three years earlier.

Humboldt returned from Mexico with detailed observations from nature but also with notes from archives and monuments such as this Mexican calendar which for him was proof of the sophistication of ancient civilizations (Illustration Credit 8.1)

As so often, Humboldt had then made some last-minute changes and decided to postpone his voyage home by a few more weeks. He wanted to sail via North America in order to meet Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. For five long years, Humboldt had seen nature at its best – lush, magnificent and awe-inspiring – and now he wanted to see civilization in all its glory, a society built as a republic and on the principles of liberty.

From a young age Humboldt had been surrounded by Enlightenment thinkers who had planted the seeds of his life-long belief in liberty, equality, tolerance and the importance of education. But it had been the French Revolution in 1789, just before his twentieth birthday, that had determined his political views. Unlike the Prussians who were still ruled by an absolute monarch, the French had declared all men equal. Since then Humboldt had always carried the ‘ideas of 1789 in his heart’. He had visited Paris, in 1790, where he had seen the preparations for the celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution. So enthused had Humboldt been that summer that he had helped to cart sand for the building of a ‘temple of liberty’ in Paris. Now, fourteen years later, he wanted to meet the people who had forged a republic in America and ‘who understood the precious gift of liberty’.

After a week at sea, the hurricane abated and the winds eventually calmed. Then, at the end of May 1804, four weeks after their departure from Havana, Humboldt and his small team disembarked in Philadelphia, with its 75,000 inhabitants the largest city in the United States. On the eve of his arrival, Humboldt wrote a long letter to Jefferson, expressing his desire to meet in Washington, DC, the nation’s new capital. ‘Your writings, your actions, and the liberalism of your ideas,’ Humboldt wrote, ‘have inspired me from my earliest youth.’ He brought a wealth of information from Latin America, Humboldt informed Jefferson, where he had collected plants, made astronomical observations, found hieroglyphs of ancient civilizations deep in the rainforest and had amassed important data from the colonial archives of Mexico City.

Humboldt also wrote to James Madison, the Secretary of State and Jefferson’s closest political ally, declaring that ‘having witnessed the great spectacle of the majestic Andes and the grandeur of the physical world I intended to enjoy the spectacle of a free people.’ Politics and nature belonged together – an idea that Humboldt would be discussing with the Americans.

At sixty-one, Jefferson was still standing ‘straight as a gun barrel’ – a tall thin and almost gangly man with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and an ‘iron constitution’. He was the President of the young nation, but also the owner of Monticello, a large plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, a little more than one hundred miles south-west of Washington. Although his wife had died more than two decades earlier, Jefferson had a tightly knit family life and greatly enjoyed the company of his seven grandchildren. Friends commented how they often climbed on to his lap as he talked. At the time Humboldt arrived in the United States, Jefferson was still grieving for his younger daughter, Maria, who had died just a few weeks previously, in April 1804, after giving birth to a baby girl. His other daughter, Martha, often spent long periods at the White House and later moved permanently to Monticello with her children.

Jefferson hated idleness. He rose before dawn, read several books at the same time and wrote so many letters that he had bought a letter-copying machine to keep a record of his correspondence. He was a restless man who warned his daughter that ennui was ‘the most dangerous poison of life’. In the 1780s, after the War of Independence, Jefferson had lived in Paris for five years as the American Minister to France. He had used the posting to travel widely across Europe, returning home with trunks full of books, furniture and ideas. He suffered from what he called the ‘malady of Bibliomanie’, constantly buying and studying books. In Europe, he had also made time between his duties to see the finest gardens in England, as well as observing and comparing agricultural practices in Germany, Holland, Italy and France.

In 1804 Thomas Jefferson was at the pinnacle of his career. He had written the Declaration of Independence, was the President of the United States and by the end of the year he would win a landslide election, securing his second term. With Jefferson’s recent purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French, the foundation was laid for the nation’s expansion to the west.¹ For a mere US $15 million, Jefferson had doubled the nation’s size, adding more than 800,000 square miles that stretched west from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. Jefferson had also just dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first overland journey across the whole of the North American continent. This expedition brought together all the subjects that interested Jefferson: he had personally briefed the explorers to collect plants, seeds and animals; they were to report on the soils and the agricultural practices of the Native Americans; and they were to survey land and rivers.

Humboldt’s arrival could not have been better timed. The American consul in Cuba, Vincent Gray, had already written to Madison, urging him to meet Humboldt because he had useful information about Mexico, their new southern neighbour since the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory.

Once Humboldt had disembarked in Philadelphia, he and the President exchanged letters, and Jefferson invited Humboldt to Washington. He was excited, Jefferson wrote to Humboldt, because he regarded ‘this new world with more partial hope of its exhibiting an ameliorated state of the human condition’. And so, on 29 May, Humboldt, Bonpland and Montúfar boarded the mail stage in Philadelphia to make their way to Washington, DC, some 150 miles south-west.

The landscape through which they passed was one of well-tended fields with straight lines of crops and scattered farms surrounded by orchards and neat vegetable plots. This was the epitome of Jefferson’s ideas for the economic and political future of the United States: a nation of independent yeomen with small self-sufficient farms.

With the Napoleonic Wars tearing Europe apart, America’s economy was booming because as a neutral nation – at least for the moment – it was shipping much of the world’s goods. American vessels loaded with spices, cocoa, cotton, coffee and sugar zigzagged the oceans from North America to the Caribbean to Europe and to the East Indies. The export markets for their own agricultural produce were also expanding. It seemed that Jefferson was leading the country towards prosperity and happiness.

Yet America had changed in the three decades since the revolution. Old revolutionary friends had fallen out over their different visions for the republic and had turned to vicious partisan fighting. Divisions had arisen over what the various factions believed ought to be the fabric of American society. Should they be a nation of farmers, or one of merchants? There were those, like Jefferson, who envisaged the United States as an agrarian republic with an emphasis on individual liberty and the rights of the individual states, but also those who favoured trade and a strong central government.

Their differences were maybe most vividly expressed in the different designs that had been proposed for the new capital, Washington, DC – the brand-new city that had been wrested from the swampy land and wilderness on the Potomac River. The different parties believed that the capital should reflect the government and its power (or its lack of power). The first President of the United States, George Washington, a proponent of a strong federal government, had wanted a grand capital with sweeping avenues criss-crossing the city, a palatial President’s house and imposing gardens. By contrast, Jefferson and his fellow Republicans had insisted that the central government should have as little power as possible. They preferred a small capital – a rural republican town.

Washington, DC, at the time when Humboldt visited (Illustration Credit 8.2)

Although George Washington’s ideas had prevailed – and on paper the capital looked magnificent – in reality little had been achieved by the time Humboldt arrived in summer 1804. With only 4,500 inhabitants, Washington was about the same size as Jena when Humboldt had first met Goethe there – and not what foreigners associated with the capital of a huge country such as the United States. The roads were in a terrible state, and so littered with rocks and tree stumps that carriages regularly overturned. Red mud stuck to wheels and axles like glue, and anyone who walked risked sinking knee-deep into the ubiquitous puddles.

When Jefferson moved into the White House, after his inauguration in March 1801, it had been a building site. Three years later, when Humboldt visited, nothing much had changed. There were workmen’s sheds and dirt in what should have been a presidential garden. The grounds were divided from the neighbouring fields only by a rotting fence on which Jefferson’s washerwoman dried the presidential laundry in full view. Inside the White House the situation wasn’t much better, as many rooms were only half furnished. Jefferson inhabited, as one visitor remarked, only one corner of the mansion with the rest still in a ‘state of uncleanly desolation’.

Jefferson did not mind. From his first day in office, he had begun to demystify the role of President by ridding the fledgling administration of strict social protocols and ceremonial pomp, casting himself as a simple farmer. Instead of formal levees, he invited guests to small intimate dinner parties which were held at a round table to avoid any issues of hierarchy or precedence. Jefferson deliberately dressed down, and many commented on his dishevelled appearance. His slippers were so worn that his toes poked out, his coat was ‘thread bare’ and the linen ‘much soiled’. He looked like ‘a large-boned farmer’, one British diplomat noted, exactly the image that Jefferson wanted to convey.

Jefferson regarded himself foremost as a farmer and gardener, and not as a politician. ‘No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,’ he said. In Washington, Jefferson would ride out every day into the surrounding countryside to escape the tedium of governmental correspondence and meetings. More than anything, he longed to return to Monticello. At the end of his second term, he would claim that ‘never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power.’ The President of the United States preferred to wade through swamps and climb rocks, and to pick up a leaf or a seed rather than attend Cabinet meetings. No plant, a friend said – ‘from the lowliest weed to the loftiest tree’ – escaped his scrutiny. Jefferson’s love for botany and gardening was so well known that American diplomats sent seeds to the White House from all over the world.

Jefferson was interested in all sciences – including horticulture, mathematics, meteorology and geography. He was fascinated by fossil bones, and in particular in the mastodon, a giant extinct relative of elephants that had roamed America’s interior only 10,000 years earlier. His library numbered thousands of books and he had written his own, Notes on the State of Virginia, a detailed description about economy and society, about natural resources and plants, but also a celebration of the Virginian landscape.

Like Humboldt, Jefferson moved across the sciences with ease. He was obsessed with measurements, compiling a huge number of lists that ranged from the hundreds of species of plants he was growing in Monticello to daily temperatures tables. He counted the steps on stairs, ran an ‘account’ of the letters he received from his granddaughters and he always carried a ruler in his pocket. His mind seemed never to rest. With such a polymath as President, Jefferson’s White House had become a scientific nexus where botany, geography and exploration were the favourite dinner topics. He was also the president of the American Philosophical Society, co-founded by Benjamin Franklin before the revolution, and by then the most important scientific forum in the United States. Jefferson was, one contemporary said, ‘the enlightened philosopher – the distinguished naturalist – the first statesman on earth, the friend, the ornament of science … the father of our Country, the faithful guardian of our liberties’. He couldn’t wait to meet Humboldt.

The journey from Philadelphia took three and a half days, and Humboldt and his travel companions finally reached Washington on the evening of 1 June. The next morning Humboldt met Jefferson at the White House. The President welcomed the thirty-four-year-old scientist in his private study. Here Jefferson kept a set of carpenter’s tools because he had a knack for mechanics and enjoyed making things – from inventing a revolving bookstand to improving locks, clocks and scientific instruments. On the windowsills stood flowerpots planted with roses and geraniums, which Jefferson delighted in tending. Maps and charts decorated the walls, and the shelves were filled with books. The two men liked each other immediately.

Over the next few days, they met several times. One early evening, just as dusk settled over the capital and the first candles were lit, Humboldt entered the drawing room at the White House to find the President surrounded by half a dozen of his grandchildren, laughing and chasing each other around. It took a moment before Jefferson noticed Humboldt, who was quietly watching the boisterous family scene. Jefferson smiled. ‘You have found me playing the fool,’ he said, ‘but I am sure to you I need make no apology.’ Humboldt was delighted to find his hero ‘living with the simplicity of a philosopher’.

For the next week Humboldt and Bonpland were passed from meeting to dinner and to yet more meetings. Everybody was excited to meet the intrepid explorers and hear their tales. Humboldt was the ‘object of universal attention’, one American said – so much so that Charles Willson Peale, a painter from Philadelphia and the organizer of the trip to DC, handed out a great number of silhouettes that he had made of Humboldt (and Bonpland), including one for Jefferson. Humboldt was introduced to the Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, who thought listening to his tales was an ‘exquisite intellectual treat’. The next day Humboldt travelled to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, some fifteen miles south of the capital. Though Washington had died four and a half years previously, Mount Vernon was now a popular tourist destination and Humboldt wanted to see the home of the revolutionary hero. The Secretary of State, James Madison, hosted a party in Humboldt’s honour, and his wife, Dolley, professed herself charmed and said that ‘all the ladies say they are in love with him’.

During their days together Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin bombarded Humboldt with questions about Mexico. None of the three American politicians had been to the Spanish-controlled territory but now, surrounded by maps, statistics and notebooks, Humboldt briefed them on the peoples of Latin America, their crops and the climate. Humboldt had worked intensely to improve existing maps by calculating again and again his exact geographical positions. The results were the best maps that could be had at the time – some locations, he boasted to his new friends, had been wrongly placed in the old maps by up to 2 degrees in latitude – around 140 miles. In fact, Humboldt had more information on Mexico than was available on some European countries, Gallatin told his wife, hardly able to contain his excitement. Even better, Humboldt allowed them to transcribe his notes and to copy the maps. His knowledge was ‘astonishing’, the Americans agreed, and in return Gallatin provided Humboldt with all the information he wanted about the United States.

For months Jefferson had tried to procure any scrap of information he could get about their new Louisiana Territory and about Mexico, and suddenly he held so much more in his hands than he could ever have hoped for. With the Spanish watching closely over their territories, and rarely granting a foreigner permission even to travel to their colonies, Jefferson had not been able to find out much until Humboldt’s visit. The Spanish colonial archives in Mexico and Havana had remained firmly closed to the Americans and the Spanish Minister in Washington had refused to furnish Jefferson with any data – but now Humboldt delivered plenty.

Humboldt talked and talked, Gallatin noted, ‘twice as fast as anybody I know’. Humboldt spoke English with a German accent but also German, French and Spanish, ‘mixing them together in rapid Speech’. He was a ‘fountain of knowledge which flows in copious streams’. They learned more from him in two hours than they would from reading books for two years. Humboldt was a ‘very extraordinary man’, Gallatin told his wife. Jefferson agreed – Humboldt was ‘the most scientific man of his age’.

The most pressing question for Jefferson was the disputed border between Mexico and the United States. The Spanish claimed it was marked by the Sabine River, which runs along today’s eastern border of Texas, while the Americans insisted it was the Rio Grande, which forms part of today’s western border of Texas. The ownership of a huge swathe of land was at issue, because in between those two rivers lies the whole of modern Texas. When Jefferson asked about the native population, soils and mines in the area ‘between those lines’, Humboldt had no qualms about passing on the observations he had made under the protection and exclusive permission of the Spanish crown. Humboldt believed in scientific generosity and in the free exchange of information. The sciences were above national interests, Humboldt insisted, as he handed over vital economic information. They were part of a republic of letters, Jefferson said, paraphrasing Joseph Banks’s words that the sciences were always at peace even if ‘their nations may be at war’; the sentiment no doubt suited the President perfectly in this instance.

If the Spanish would hand over the territory that Jefferson claimed for the United States, Humboldt told him, it would be the size of two-thirds of France. It wasn’t the richest spot on earth, Humboldt said, because there were only a few scattered small farms, a lot of savanna, and no known port along the coast. There were some mines and a few indigenous people. This was the kind of intelligence that Jefferson needed. The next day the President wrote to a friend that he had just received ‘treasures of information’.

Humboldt gave Jefferson nineteen tightly filled pages of extracts from his notes, sorted under headings such as ‘table of statistics’, ‘population’, ‘agriculture, manufacturers, commerce’, ‘military’ and so on. He also added two pages that focused on the border region with Mexico and in particular on the disputed area that so interested Jefferson, between the Sabine River and the Rio Grande. This was the most exciting and fruitful visit Jefferson had received in years. Less than a month later, he held a Cabinet meeting about US strategy towards Spain in which they discussed how the data they had received from Humboldt might influence their negotiations.

Humboldt was happy to assist because he admired the United States. The country was moving towards a ‘perfection’ of society, Humboldt said, while Europe was still gripped by monarchy and despotism. He didn’t even mind the unbearable humidity of the Washington summer, because the ‘best air of all is breathed in liberty’. He loved this ‘beautiful land’, he said repeatedly, and promised to return in order to explore.

During this one week in Washington, the men talked about nature and politics – about crops and soils and the shaping of nations. Humboldt, like Jefferson, believed that only an agrarian republic brought happiness and independence. Colonialism, by contrast, brought destruction. The Spanish had arrived in South America to obtain gold and timber – ‘either by violence or exchange’, Humboldt said, and motivated only by ‘insatiable avarice’. The Spanish had annihilated ancient civilizations, native tribes and stately forests. The portrait that Humboldt brought back from Latin America was painted in the vivid colours of a brutal reality – all underpinned by hard facts, data and statistics.

When he had visited mines in Mexico, Humboldt had not only investigated their geology and productivity, but also the crippling effect that mining was having on large parts of the population. At one mine, he had been shocked to see how indigenous labourers were made to climb some 23,000 steps laden with huge boulders in one shift alone. They were used like a ‘human machine’, slaves in all but name because of a labour system – the so-called repartimiento – that made them work for little or nothing for the Spanish. Forced to buy over-priced goods from the colonial administrators, the labourers were sucked into an escalating spiral of debt and dependency. The Spanish king even enjoyed a monopoly on snow in Quito, Lima and other colonial towns, so that it could be used for the production of sorbet for the wealthy elites. It was absurd, Humboldt said, that something that ‘fell from the sky’ should belong to the Spanish crown. To his mind the politics and economics of a colonial government were based on ‘immorality’.

During his travels Humboldt had been amazed at how colonial administrators (as well as their guides, hosts and missionaries) had constantly encouraged him – the former mining inspector – to search for precious metals and stones. Many times Humboldt had explained to them how misguided this was. Why, he asked, would they need gold and gems, when they lived on land that had only to be ‘slightly raked to produce abundant harvests’? That was surely their avenue to freedom and prosperity?

All too often Humboldt had seen how the population was starving and how once fertile land had been relentlessly over-exploited and turned barren. In the valley of Aragua at Lake Valencia, for example, he had observed how the world’s lust for colourful clothing brought poverty and dependency to the local people because indigo, an easily grown plant that produced blue dye, had replaced maize and other edible crops. More than any other plant, indigo ‘impoverishes the soil’, Humboldt had noted. The land looked exhausted and in a few years, he predicted, nothing would grow there any more. The soil was being exploited ‘like a mine’.

Later, in Cuba, Humboldt had noticed how large parts of the island had been stripped of their forests for sugar plantations. Wherever he went, he had seen how cash crops had replaced ‘those vegetables which supply nourishment’. Cuba produced not much other than sugar, which meant that without imports from other colonies, Humboldt said, ‘the island would starve’. This was a recipe for dependency and injustice. Similarly, the inhabitants of the region around Cumaná cultivated so much sugar and indigo that they were forced to buy food from abroad which they could easily have grown themselves. Monoculture and cash crops did not create a happy society, Humboldt said. What was needed was subsistence farming, based on edible crops and variety such as bananas, quinoa, corn and potatoes.

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies.

He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

Jefferson had employed similar arguments. ‘I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries,’ he said, ‘as long as they are chiefly agricultural.’ He envisaged the opening of the American West as the rolling-out of a republic in which small independent farmers would become the foot-soldiers of the infant nation and the guardians of its liberty. The West, Jefferson believed, would assure the agricultural self-sufficiency of America, and thereby the future for ‘millions yet unborn’.

Jefferson himself was one of the most progressive farmers in the United States, experimenting with crop rotation, manure and new seed varieties. His library was filled with all the agricultural books he could purchase and he had even invented a new mouldboard for a plough (the wooden part that lifts and turns the sod). He was more enthusiastic about agricultural implements than about political events. When he ordered a model of a threshing machine from London, for example, he updated Madison like an excited child: ‘I expect every day to receive it’, ‘I have not yet received my threshing machine’, and it had at last ‘arrived at New York’. He tested new vegetables, crops and fruits at Monticello, using his fields and garden as an experimental laboratory. Jefferson believed that the ‘greatest service which can be rendered any country, is to add an useful plant to its culture’. From Italy he had smuggled upland rice in his coat pockets – under the threat of the death penalty – and he had tried to convince American farmers to plant sugar maple orchards in order to end the nation’s reliance on molasses from the British West Indies. In Monticello, he grew 330 varieties of 99 species of vegetables and herbs.

As long as a man had his own piece of land, Jefferson believed, he was independent. He had even argued that only farmers should be elected as congressmen because he regarded them as ‘the true representatives of the great American interest’, unlike the avaricious merchants who ‘have no country’. Factory workers, merchants and stockbrokers would never feel bound to their country like farmers who worked the soil. ‘The small landholders are the most precious part of a state,’ Jefferson insisted, and had written into his draft for the Virginia constitution that every free person was to be entitled to fifty acres of land (though he had failed to get this provision passed). His political ally, James Madison, argued that the greater the proportion of husbandmen ‘the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself’. For both men agriculture was a republican endeavour and an act of nation-building. Ploughing fields, planting vegetables and devising crop rotation were occupations that brought self-sufficiency and therefore political freedom. Humboldt agreed because the small farmers whom he had met in South America had developed ‘the sentiment of liberty and independence’.

For all their agreement, there was one subject on which they differed: slavery. For Humboldt colonialism and slavery were basically one and the same, interwoven with man’s relationship to nature and the exploitation of natural resources. When the Spanish, but also the North American colonists, had introduced sugar, cotton, indigo and coffee to their territories, they had also brought slavery. In Cuba, for example, Humboldt had seen how ‘every drop of sugarcane juice cost blood and groans.’ Slavery arrived in the wake of what the Europeans ‘call their civilization’, Humboldt said, and their ‘thirst for wealth’.

Jefferson’s first childhood memory, reputedly, was of being carried on a pillow by a slave, and as an adult, his livelihood was founded on slave labour. Although he claimed to loathe slavery, he would free only a handful of the 200 slaves who toiled on his plantations in Virginia. Previously Jefferson had thought that small-scale farming might be the solution to ending slavery at Monticello. While still in Europe as the American Minister, he had met hard-working German farmers whom he believed to be ‘absolutely incorruptible by money’. He had considered settling them at Monticello ‘intermingled’ with his slaves on farms of fifty acres each. These industrious and honest Germans were for Jefferson the epitome of the virtuous farmer. The slaves would remain his property, but their children would be free and ‘good citizens’ by having been brought up in the proximity of the German farmers. The scheme was never implemented, and by the time Humboldt met him, Jefferson had abandoned all plans to free his slaves.

Slaves working on a plantation (Illustration Credit 8.3)

Humboldt, though, never grew tired of condemning what he called ‘the greatest evil’. During his visit to Washington he didn’t quite dare to criticize the President himself, but he told Jefferson’s friend and architect William Thornton that slavery was a ‘disgrace’. Of course the abolition of slavery would reduce the nation’s cotton production, he said, but public welfare could not be measured ‘according to the value of its exports’. Justice and freedom were more important than numbers and the wealth of a few.

That the British, French or Spanish could argue, as they did, over who treated their slaves with greater humanity, Humboldt said, was as absurd as discussing ‘if it was more pleasant to have one’s stomach slashed open or to be flayed’. Slavery was tyranny, and as he had travelled through Latin America Humboldt had filled his diary with descriptions of the wretched lives of slaves: one plantation owner in Caracas forced his slaves to eat their own excrement, he wrote, whereas another tortured his with needles. Wherever he had turned Humboldt had seen the scars of whips on the slaves’ backs. The indigenous Indians were not treated any better. In the missions along the Orinoco, for example, he had heard how children were abducted and sold as slaves. One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy’s testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl.

There had been a few exceptions. As he had crossed Venezuela on his way to the Orinoco, Humboldt had been impressed by his host at Lake Valencia who had encouraged the progress of agriculture and the distribution of wealth by parcelling up his estate into small farms. Instead of running a huge plantation, he had given much of his land to impoverished families – some of them freed slaves, others peasants who were too poor to own them. These families now worked as free independent farmers; they were not rich but they could live off the land. Similarly, between Honda and Bogotá, Humboldt had seen small haciendas where fathers and sons worked together without slave labour, planting sugar but also edible plants for their own consumption. ‘I love to dwell on these details,’ Humboldt said, because they proved his point.

The institution of slavery was unnatural, Humboldt said, because ‘what is against nature, is unjust, bad and without validity.’ Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race ‘inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind’, Humboldt insisted that there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climatic conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’.

Nature was Humboldt’s teacher. And the greatest lesson that nature offered was that of freedom. ‘Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

¹ In the previous year Napoleon had abandoned the idea of a French colony in North America when most of the 25,000 soldiers whom he had sent to Haiti to quash the slave rebellion there had died from malaria. Napoleon’s original plan had been to transfer his army from Haiti to New Orleans but in the wake of the disastrous campaign and with few men left, he abandoned the strategy – and sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States instead.