The Invention of Nature

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.