Empiricism applied to native peoples in Jefferson's 'Notes'

After reading the English translation of our excerpt's opening statements, I expected to find Jefferson defending the inferiority of natives throughout his work. I assumed Jefferson would use his reason to dehumanize the natives and reflect the attitude of his time.

I was wrong, and instead found a clinical point-by-point comparison of whites and natives. I would like to highlight two of Jefferson's well-crafted phrases:

"The man with them is less strong than with us, but their woman stronger than ours; and both for the same obvious reason; because our man and their woman is habituated to labour, and formed by it."

This is nothing more than an application of cause and effect, but the context in which it is written could have been startling at the time. As Count de Buffon noted, the man is smaller because his race is inferior. I mean c'mon, everyone knows that. Now Jefferson explains the observed difference without appealing to European superiority.

"... to form a just estimate of their genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and great allowance to be made for those circumstances of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only."

This key phrase, "circumstances of their situation, which call for a display...", is nothing less than the idea of natural selection which we take for granted today. But in Jefferson's time, how strange it must have been to read! That one should judge the strength of a people by how they adapted to their given circumstances. Europe, lacking any such thought at the time, happily used themselves as the standard to judge the rest of the world. Jefferson, ahead of his time, decided otherwise.