Why Thomas Jefferson Shipped a Dead Moose to France

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson found himself involved in one of the strangest scientific arguments in early American history. The future president was living in Paris, representing the young United States in France, when he decided that the best way to settle an international debate was to ship a dead moose across the Atlantic Ocean.

Not a drawing of a moose. Not a written description. An actual moose.

In an attempt to defend America’s reputation, Thomas Jefferson arranged to have the animal’s skin, skeleton, and antlers of a very large Moose sent from New Hampshire to France.

One of Europe’s most respected naturalists at the time was a French scientist named  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Buffon was the author of the hugely influential Histoire naturelle, a massive study of the natural world.

Buffon argued that animals in the Americas tended to be smaller and weaker than animals in Europe. According to his theory, the climate and environment of the New World caused animals to “degenerate.” It was not exactly a flattering review of America.

Other European writers pushed the idea even further, suggesting that humans living in America might also become weaker or less capable over time. Thomas Jefferson strongly disagreed.

Jefferson was an amateur scientist and obsessive collector of information about plants, animals, geography, weather, and just about anything else that could be measured. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson directly challenged Buffon’s claims.

His basic argument was simple: American animals were not all smaller, and Jefferson had just the animal to prove it- the moose.

The American moose presented a rather large problem for Buffon’s theory because a full-grown moose is difficult to describe as small, weak, or unimpressive, and Thomas Jefferson wanted Buffon to see one for himself.

In January 1786, Jefferson wrote to contacts in America asking them to obtain specimens of North American animals. He particularly wanted a moose, including its skin, skeleton, and antlers.

Eventually, New Hampshire political leader and Revolutionary War general John Sullivan took on the assignment. Sullivan apparently took Thomas Jefferson’s request very seriously.

According to Jefferson’s later description, Sullivan essentially organized a winter campaign to get the animal. Hunters traveled through deep snow, located a herd, killed a moose in the wilderness, and then had to cut roughly 20 miles of road so the carcass could be moved out.

Once Sullivan finally had the moose packed and ready for shipment, the captain who was supposed to carry the box to Europe sailed without it.

Sullivan wrote Thomas Jefferson in May 1787, explaining that the box containing the moose skin, skeleton, and antlers had been left behind, either accidentally or deliberately. He immediately began making new arrangements to send the unfortunate animal through Boston or New York and eventually onward to France.

For a short time, Jefferson believed the entire shipment had been lost. Imagine explaining that diplomatic crisis: “The good news is that relations with France remain excellent. The bad news is that we appear to have misplaced the moose.”

Fortunately, the shipment eventually resurfaced. By late September 1787, Thomas Jefferson finally had his prize in Paris. On October 1, Thomas Jefferson arranged for the specimen to be delivered to Buffon.

The specimen was not exactly in showroom condition. The long trip had damaged the skin, and much of the moose’s hair had fallen out. Still, the skeleton demonstrated what Thomas Jefferson wanted Buffon to understand: this was an enormous North American animal.

According to Jefferson, Buffon was convinced.

Years later, Thomas Jefferson remembered Buffon admitting that he had been misinformed about several American species and saying that he intended to correct the errors in a future volume of his work. Buffon died in 1788 before making the substantial published corrections Jefferson hoped to see.

It Was Never Really About the Moose. This strange episode in history makes more sense when you remember how new the United States was.

The Revolutionary War had ended only a few years earlier. Americans were trying to convince Europe that the United States was not simply an uncivilized backwater at the edge of the world. Thomas Jefferson believed Buffon’s theory was part of a larger European misunderstanding of America.

Jefferson’s response was wonderfully eighteenth-century: gather measurements, write several thousand words of argument, recruit a Revolutionary War general, send hunters into the snowy wilderness, kill a moose, strip it to the bones, put everything in a box, ship it across the Atlantic, and deliver it to one of Europe’s leading scientists.

Today we might send an email. Thomas Jefferson sent a moose.

And somewhere along the way, that poor dead animal became part of America’s campaign to convince Europe that the new United States was much bigger, stronger, and considerably harder to dismiss than many Europeans imagined.