Thomas Jefferson's Theory of the Super Lion, and a Different Sort of Environmental Racism

Most people would likely be surprised to hear that 18^th century European Americans did not think of Africans, African Americans, or Native Americans as innately inferior.  The concept of innate inferiority was actually a later development, beginning around the time of Jefferson’s presidency in 1800, and brought on partly by the need to justify slavery in a post-Revolutionary age obsessed with independence and equality.    

Prior to this, the imagined inferiority of people of color was considered an environmental problem: because all people had sprung from the same source – i.e., Genesis – people were innately equal.  However, according to Enlightenment thinking and to popular culture, as people spread across the globe, they were deeply and often negatively affected by their environments.  An average European American prior to the Revolution would have considered everything from perceived savagery to dark skin to be a deleterious effect of a harmful, non-European environment. 

Many Europeans worried that Americans would gradually succumb to the environmental pressures that caused Native American savagery; they took the wildness and violence of Western settlement as evidence of this.  Jefferson, always ready to argue for the superiority of everything American, argued that while the African environment certainly had led to inferiority amongst Africans, that Native Americans were not inferior at all.  To claim Native American inferiority would have meant admitting  the inferiority of the American environment.  In his own words, the Native American was “in body and mind the equal of the white man.”  However, rather than leading him to value the existing cultures of the indigenous peoples, this belief led Jefferson and his followers to more fervently engage in the colonial project of proving that Native Americans could be converted to European American ways.  Towards this end, Jefferson studied Native Americans passionately: he spent thirty years studying indigenous languages, although after his presidency, his work on Native American languages was stolen as his library was shipped back to Monticello. 

The inferiority of the American climate was also the subject of much European scientific literature.  The great French naturalist of the Western world, Buffon, influentially wrote that the life forms of the New World were underdeveloped, pointing out that the New World had no lions or elephants because the weak American environment could not support such rigorous life forms.  He apparently didn’t see the irony that these animals lived in Africa but not Europe.

The only book that Jefferson ever wrote, Notes on the State of Virginia, took Buffon to task.  In charts that are often edited out of current editions, Jefferson weighed American animals against European ones, finding that while the average European bear weighed 153.7 pounds, the American weighed 400; that the American cow weighed 2,500 pounds to the European 763.  Jefferson sent Buffon enormous moose antlers and numerous specimens, forcing Buffon to revise his work.  

Jefferson wasn’t done with Buffon though.  The following quote is straight from the book Empire of Liberty, the second volume of the Oxford History of the United States: “In the mid-1790s on the basis of some fossil remains, probably belonging to a prehistoric sloth, he [Jefferson] concocted the existence of a huge super-lion, three times bigger than the African lion, and presented his imagined beast to the scientific world as the Megalonyx, ‘The Great Claw.’”  It gets even better: when Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition to chart the West, he did so expecting that Megalonyx’s and Mammoths were still walking the Western earth, and hoped that specimens of these super creatures would demolish the Old World notions of New World inferiority once and for all.  

Jefferson's Megalonyx presentation to the American Philosophical Society initiated vertebrate paleontology in the United States.  The great prehistoric sloth remains known as the Megalonyx Jeffersonii.