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Chapter 9: Better Tools for a New and Better World: Jefferson Perfects the Plow
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200 In the spring of 1788 an elegant carriage bounced along the post roads of eastern France. The American minister to the court of Louis XVI, returning from a tour up the Rhine River, gazed from its window at a group of peasants working in a field.Traveling always stimulated Thomas Jefferson to engage in comparisons, and this sight of oxen, plows, and working women provoked a remarkable confluence of philosophical and mathematical reflections —on society and contrasting states of civilization, on soil preparation and Newtonian geometry. He entered his musings on the role of women into his travel journal, directly following his ideas for the best form for a critical part of a plow. Jogging through Germany, Jefferson had confided to this journal: “The women do everything here. They dig the earth, plough, saw, cut, and split wood.” And a week later, in the heart of the Lorraine, he encountered another scene that confounded his understanding of women’s place in civilized society:“The women here,as in Germany do all sorts of work. . . .How valuable is that state of society which allots to them internal emploiments only, and external to the men. They are formed by nature for attentions and not for hard labour.” He later expanded this section of his journal to include the customs of Native Americans, among whom the men were wholly absorbed by war and hunting:“The civil part of the nation is reduced to women only. But this is a barbarous perversion of the natural destination of the two sexes.” Thus, by extension, he lumped Europeans with American Indians in their uncivilized behavior and conveniently forgot the enslaved women hoeing and plowing back home at Monticello.Throughout his journey Jefferson had been measuring the effects of a greater or lesser degree of European despotism on the landscape, and here was a poverty that not only barbarously perverted the natural order on a human scale but also retarded the Better Tools for a New and Better World Jefferson Perfects the Plow lucia stanton s Better Tools for a New and Better World 201 development of agricultural implements. The teams of oxen were pulling plows that struck Jefferson as crude and unwieldy (“barbarously heavy,” as he later wrote). He focused particularly on “the awkward figure of their mould board,” which “leads one to consider what should be it’s form.” (The main purpose of a moldboard is to raise the furrow slice and invert it.) That night in his inn at Nancy,as he pondered the consoling geometry that connected everything in his Newtonian universe, mathematics must have crowded even women out of his mind. He soon had an elegant solution to the problem posed by European awkwardness (Fig. 1). This was only two months after he had written, in a playful letter to Angelica Church,that Europe had been the Creator’s maiden effort,“a crude production,” while his own nation had been “made on an improved plan.” By turning his attention to “the most useful of the instruments known to man,” he could give these words a tangible effect. He would be improving a crude European object and linking the European world of Newtonian philosophy with a new world dedicated to the pursuit of happiness through the “first & most precious of all the arts,” agriculture. A new civilization,its emblem a perfected plow—at this time the accepted symbol of civilization’s very beginnings—was rising across the Atlantic Ocean. Fig. 1. Jefferson’s first known sketch, in a 1788 travel journal, of his concept for a moldboard of least resistance. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society) The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted [3.229.122.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:45 GMT) Lucia Stanton 202 In the famous debate between the Head and the Heart in Jefferson’s letter of October 1786 to Maria Cosway, the Heart set out the parameters of the Head’s dominion: “When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance, is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours.” Jefferson had been investigating the wedge, also known as the inclined plane or solid of least resistance, at least since his college days, when he studied calculus in a popularization of the precepts in Newton’s Principia...