The Invention of Nature

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.