Five

All this was characteristic of Jefferson, who throughout his long career—he wrote the Declaration at age thirty-three and would live precisely fifty years longer, dying at Monticello on July 4, 1826—was a steadfast devotee of science and technology. Jefferson’s 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, replete with references to Newtonian gravitation, was recognized as the best natural history treatise to have been written by an American. His work in agriculture, which he called “a science of the very first order,” culminated in his inventing an improved plow board based on Newton’s calculus of least resistance. To investigate the Virginia earthen barrows that he correctly hypothesized to be Indian burial mounds, Jefferson invented a method of stratigraphic excavation still employed by geologists today. (He also compiled what was at the time the world’s most extensive compendium of American Indian vocabularies.) He read the classical philosophers in the original Greek and Latin but regarded Bacon, Locke, and Newton as superior to them all, commissioning a group portrait of the three and advising the artist, “I would wish to form them into a knot on the same canvas, that they may not be confounded at all with the herd of other great men.” While recognizing science to be the sole source of what he called “sure knowledge,” Jefferson had a scientist’s caution about the errors present in every observation. Timing the solar eclipse of September 17, 1811, through his telescope at Monticello, he noted that while the timed intervals might be internally accurate with regard to one another, he had “no confidence” that his clocks were accurate enough to yield the absolute time of the eclipse. A modern computer analysis shows that Jefferson was right on both points: His overall times, hindered by his difficulty in setting his clocks against transits of the sun across the local meridian, were off by several minutes, but his internal values—such as the interval between the onset of the eclipse and the moment when the moon was directly centered on the sun—were accurate to within 10 percent.

Jefferson often said that he valued science over statecraft—“Science is my passion, politics my duty”—and his behavior bore him out. Elected vice president in 1797, he tarried at Monticello to study the bones of a prehistoric ground sloth sent him by the frontier scout John Stuart, journeying to his own inauguration only once political opponents began to cite the delay as evidence of haughtiness. He brought the bones along to Philadelphia, presenting them on March 3 to the American Philosophical Society, a scientific body which made him its president, an honor he pronounced to be “the most flattering incident of my life.” On the following day he finally got around to taking the oath of office as vice president of the United States.

While serving in that post he reported to his daughter Martha that he was “abandoning the rich and declining their dinners and parties” in order to consort “entirely with the class of science, of whom there is a valuable society here.” During the bitter presidential contest of 1800, when Jefferson and Aaron Burr remained deadlocked in the House of Representatives through thirty-five ballots over the course of eight anguished days, Jefferson stayed out of the fray, preferring to investigate whether the full moon influences terrestrial climates. (It does not.) As president it was his custom to ride into the countryside on horseback in the mornings, collecting botanical cuttings along the Potomac: A white-flowered herb, Jeffersonia binata, is named in his honor. He worked at his desk with a pet mockingbird perched on his shoulder—the bird would hop up the stairs after him when he went to bed—and conducted animal husbandry experiments that involved keeping a pair of grizzly bears and a flock of Merino sheep on the White House lawn. A veteran who came to the White House seeking a pension complained of being “attacked and severely wounded and bruised by your excellency’s ram.”

The Declaration is structured as a syllogism. Its major premise asserts as axiomatic that people may “alter or abolish” a government that denies them human rights. Its minor premise is that King George has been guilty of just such conduct: “To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.” Its conclusion is that the colonies are thereby justified in severing their ties with England. As an example of clear reasoning this would have pleased Jefferson’s teacher William Small, a Scottish mathematician who taught rhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy at the College of William and Mary. Jefferson remembered Small as “a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication…& an enlarged & liberal mind,” adding, “From his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.” Along with a devotion to science and liberty, Small brought with him from Scotland a cleanly composed logic book written by his teacher William Duncan, a self-taught journalist, classicist, and science professor so admired by his students at Marischal College, Aberdeen, that they chipped in to equip his physics laboratory. Drawing on the thoughts of “the great Mr. Locke,” Duncan taught that science is the soundest method of discovery, and that arguments ought therefore to begin with perception and proceed through reasoned judgment to demonstration. (These “demonstrations” might take the form of either scientific experimentation or mathematical reasoning.) The first example of a syllogism in Duncan’s Logic is not the old, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man;…” but the assertion of a “self-evident” link between reason and human rights:

Jefferson was not alone among the founders in his devotion to science. George Washington was no scientist—his formal education ended at about age fifteen, and by his early twenties he was fighting in the French and Indian War—but he had a sturdily empirical habit of learning from experience and a lifelong scientific curiosity that shone out from the depths of his monumentally composed personality. Having learned mathematics as a surveyor, Washington conducted agricultural experiments at Mount Vernon, designed and tested a new variety of plow, dispatched rare birds for study at Philadelphia’s new natural history museum, and offered to send soldiers to help excavate a mastodon discovered near Newburgh, New York, in 1801. Washington couldn’t even order a sleigh without inquiring whether, “upon philosophical, mechanical, or practical principles, is it best to have the sliders (excepting always the curve in front) a little circular, or quite straight? The longer the bearing the greater the friction; the shorter, the weight is confined to a smaller space of the sliders, and consequently the compressure greater….” Ever the objective observer, Washington is said to have been taking his own pulse at the moment when he died. John Adams, America’s second president, studied physics at Harvard under the astronomer John Winthrop, helped found the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—in Boston, where, he said, “I knew there was as much love of science, and as many gentlemen capable of pursuing it [as may be found in] any other city of its size”—and lamented in a letter to Jefferson that he should have spent more time in scientific pursuits: “Oh that I had devoted to Newton and his fellows that time which I fear has been wasted on Plato and Aristotle [and] twenty others upon subjects which mankind is determined never to understand, and those who do understand them are resolved never to practice.” Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, an influential founder who served as treasurer in the Adams administration, was a chemistry professor and epidemiologist who wrote the first American textbook on psychiatry and pioneered the treatment of alcoholism as a disease. Roger Sherman, a signer for Connecticut described by Jefferson as “a man who never said a foolish thing in his life,” was a sufficiently capable astronomer to have done the celestial calculations for a colonial almanac. And Benjamin Franklin, who soothed Jefferson’s temper while the delegates deleted his denunciations of slavery from his draft of the Declaration, was America’s foremost scientist.

In drafting the Constitution, the founders again had frequent recourse to scientific language, logic, and metaphor. John Adams consulted Newton’s laws of motion for ideas on how to structure the Constitution. James Madison, its principal author, declared, “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire…but it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air.” The founders also drew on the thinking of scientifically inclined English thinkers like the seventeenth-century political philosopher James Harrington and the eighteenth-century colonial governor Thomas Pownall. Harrington had studied democratic precepts during an extended stay in the Venetian Republic; his utopian book Oceana compared the “political anatomy” of a bicameral legislature with the circulation of blood through the human heart discovered by William Harvey: “The Parliament is the heart, which, consisting of two ventricles, the one greater and replenished with a grosser matter, the other less and full of a purer, sucks in and spouts forth the vital blood of Oceana.” Pownall, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, envisioned a future political science “that might become Principia to the knowledge of politick operations.” A free-trade internationalist, Pownall argued that it was in England’s economic interest to grant freedom to its American colonies, since “North-America is become a new primary planet in the system of the world,” and will “shift the common center of gravity of the whole system of the European world.”

The founders viewed science as an engine that could make posterity healthier and wealthier, to be sure, but also freer; and since freedom is both good in itself and a promoter of betterment, they anticipated that humanity might be improved as the light of science and liberty spread across a benighted world. As Jefferson put it, “The progress of science offers to increase the comforts, enlarge the understanding, and improve the morality of mankind.” These were not just pipe dreams but hardheaded political calculations that have in many ways been borne out in the shaping of the modern world. What, exactly, did they have in mind?

Technological innovation put cash in the pockets of persons excluded from such traditional sources of prosperity as inherited land and titles, creating a social mobility that undermined old political structures and strictures. Applied science amplified and accelerated the pace of technological progress, offering not only a source of labor-saving devices in the home—a better loom or plow, a more helpful farmer’s almanac—but a way to make money and move up in the world. Alexis de Tocqueville viewed this dynamic as central to the American character: “Once works of the intelligence became sources of power and wealth, people were obliged to look upon every scientific advance, every new discovery and idea, as a germ of power placed within the people’s grasp.” For those who disdained materialistic motives—arguing that knowledge should be pursued as an end in itself, rather than as a gateway to power and wealth—Tocqueville had two rebuttals. First, it’s not all that clear that pure science is somehow superior to applied science, Tocqueville suspecting that the intellectuals’ habit of esteeming the abstract over the concrete was anachronistic. “Permanent inequality of conditions encourages men to limit themselves to the proud and sterile search for abstract truths,” he wrote, “whereas the democratic social state and institutions encourage them to look to science only for its immediate and useful applications.” Second, pure science benefits from the growth of applied science regardless of whether that growth is impelled by a desire for power rather than knowledge: