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Natural Icons, National Icons
Humboldt had traveled to Washington specifically to meet Thomas Jefferson, but even that goal had multiple aims. Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia was a case study for American independence, with much of the argument reliant on facts about the physical geography and natural history of his home state. Jefferson had deployed the data he had amassed to argue for the robust prospects for the new nation's politics as well as its agricultural potential. His evidence included America's status as a home to the mammoth (later understood to be a mastodon), the largest land animal then known, and his home state's Natural Bridge, in his words the "most sublime of nature's works."
Using the American landscape as an inspiration for the nation, Jefferson took the first steps toward defining the United States' national goals in metaphorical terms based on natural monuments instead of architectural wonders. Looking beyond Virginia, Jefferson lauded Niagara Falls as the eighth Wonder of the World. The information Humboldt had amassed while traveling in the Americas expanded on Jefferson's defense of the United States. The two men became influential allies in extolling the natural wonders of the Americas and inspired artists to do the same through painted depictions of these sites. In large part thanks to the popularity of those images, by the 1820s the Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls had replaced the mastodon as emblems of the scale and scope of America's ambitions. |