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chapter 1 scientific trends, continental conceptions, revolutionary implications Of the founding generation, George Washington would not rank at the top of anybody’s list for his abilities as a scientist. Benjamin Franklin’s scientific experiments assured him of an honored place in the pantheon of Enlightenment scientists, and Thomas Je√erson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) put him among those select savants. Nor did Washington think of himself as a scientist. Though an accomplished surveyor, he sometimes fretted about lagging behind many of his contemporaries in formal education.∞ Still, Washington, like so many colonists, took an interest in scientific debate, at least when it related to one of his core concerns: the nature and fate of his continent. Washington revealed his interest on a number of occasions. Just before Christmas in 1780, the general and several of his o≈cers took a break from the war to enjoy a sleigh ride from their winter headquarters to a farm in New Windsor, New York, where the Reverend Robert Annan had unearthed fossil remains. Two-pound teeth, from what we now know to be a mastodon, drew Washington’s attention. He explained to Annan that at Mount Vernon he had some similar specimens found in the Ohio River valley. In another instance, during a relatively quiet period in Washington’s life, after he chaired the Constitutional Convention and while he awaited news of the resulting document’s fate in the hands of the states, he wrote a letter in which he explained what prospective immigrants to America might profitably read: ‘‘As to the European Publications respecting the United States, they are commonly very defective.’’ Among the most misinformed, in Washington’s opinion, was the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique , des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770), which denigrated Americans and their natural environment. Better, Washington argued, to consult ‘‘Mr. Je√erson’s ‘Notes on Virginia,’ ’’ which ‘‘will give the best idea of this part of the Continent to a Foreigner.’’≤ 18 ) Continental Preconditions In examining prehistoric remains and in dismissing Raynal, Washington became a minor participant in what one historian has called the ‘‘Dispute of the New World.’’≥ For more than a century, a group of leading European thinkers had been trying to explain the Americas’ human history in light of their natural history, an e√ort that was part of a larger attempt to build a comprehensive and systemic knowledge of the world. Through the second half of the eighteenth century, European intellectuals, including not just the Abbé Raynal but also Cornelius de Pauw, William Robertson, and others influenced by the great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Bu√on, took jabs at the Americas. Based on their reading of natural history, they posited the region was either a new continent or one that had undergone a geologic catastrophe. As a result, its environment was putrid, filled with dangerous miasmas, and colder and wetter than other parts of the world. The noxiousness of the ‘‘New World’’ made its species, including humans, degenerate and e√ete. If those conclusions were true, the grandiose aspirations of the colonists and the subsequent new nation would be for naught. The nature of the continent would prevent them from ever rivaling Europe on the world stage. Like the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik in 1957, almost two centuries later, the doubts raised by Bu√on, Raynal, and others cast a worrisome shadow over Americans and their geopolitical visions . Science and national pride had become intertwined, and scientists in the late-eighteenth-century British colonies worked vigorously to disprove the aspersions cast on their continent, just as those of the twentieth century committed their energy to the space race. This ‘‘Dispute of the New World’’ may seem almost amusing today. After all, one might easily confound Bu√on by sending him on a trek across the hot, arid portions of the American West. Yet contemporaries took Bu√on’s theories seriously. Books on American degeneracy made for good reading. They sold well, and they were reprinted in a number of languages and excerpted in newspapers. Even many of Bu√on’s critics made similarly sweeping generalizations about the Americas and the other continents. Scientific trends in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led inhabitants of the British mainland colonies to comprehend their world through a continental filter. Colonists came to assume that continents—and their people—had inherent traits because...

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