The Fabric of America Read online

  Contents

  Foresight

  Map

  Chapter 1 The First Frontier

  Chapter 2 The Boundaries of Power

  Chapter 3 The State as Nation

  Chapter 4 The Bullying States

  Chapter 5 Capital Speculations

  Chapter 6 Mirrors of the Mississippi

  Chapter 7 Evidence of Treachery

  Chapter 8 The Reach of Government

  Chapter 9 American Tragedy

  Chapter 10 The Values of Government

  Chapter 11 The Limits of Freedom

  Chapter 12 The American Frontier

  Chapter 13 Crossing the Frontier

  Chapter 14 The End of Frontiers?

  Envoi

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  By the Same Author

  Foresight

  The forests and desarts of America are without land-marks … It is almost as easy to divide the Atlantic Ocean by a line, as clearly to ascertain the limits of those uncultivated, uninhabitable, unmeasured regions.

  DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Literary Magazine, 1756

  Trapped in six lanes of traffic, most drivers look impatient or bored as they inch toward the San Ysidro crossing point between the United States and Mexico. A few faces appear anxious. Not one expression conveys surprise. Yet the changes that have happened here in the last few years should be cause for astonishment. A border, once not much more than a line of glass-fronted booths, has become a frontier. Everywhere there is extra security. Black-lensed cameras track the lines of vehicles. Uniformed patrols check registration numbers against computer records. Unsmiling immigration officers inspect faces and documents suspiciously.

  Out in the desert, the signs are more dramatic still: fences, watchtowers, heat sensors, armed vigilantes, border guards, even detachments of the National Guard. Never before in peacetime has the United States devoted so much effort and money to the defense of its national frontier. For most of the last century, the line that demarcates the limits of the nation has hardly entered public consciousness. As drivers wait in the simmering heat for the detailed examination of the car ahead to be completed, the paradox suddenly becomes glaringly obvious. What now rates as the most urgent priority on the political agenda is the zone that history forgot.

  The moment that the U.S. frontier disappeared from the radar screen can be placed almost exactly. On November 4, 1892, the Aegis, a student newspaper published by the University of Wisconsin, carried an article entitled “Problems in American History.” Its brash young author suggested that too much attention had been directed by historians to the formal boundaries that divided and delineated the United States. The epitome of the historian he had in mind was Professor Hermann von Holst, who earlier that year had published the seventh and final volume of his monumental work, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States.

  In his history, Holst concentrated upon the powers contained within state and national frontiers, arguing that the unique character of the United States emerged from the bitter fight for constitutional dominance between state and federal governments. It was this perspective on American history that the article in the Aegis attacked. It condemned “the attention paid to State boundaries and to the sectional lines of North and South” and asserted that the United States owed its unique character to the influence of another, less formal frontier, the line of settlement that “stretched along the western border like a cord of union.” Seven months later, on July 12, 1893, the writer, Frederick Jackson Turner, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, presented his thesis to a wider audience, the American Historical Association in Chicago, under a title that was to become famous: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

  The San Ysidro crossing represents everything that Turner set out to bury. “The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations,” he insisted. “The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”

  It was here that the American character was formed, Turner argued. Whatever their national origin, the settlers became infected with the frontier spirit—“that restless nervous energy, that dominant individualism working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom”—and thereby acquired a common identity. In short, it was in “the crucible of the frontier [that] the immigrants were Americanized.”

  For more than a century Turner’s thesis has loomed over the history of the western United States like a battle-scarred colossus. It has been repeatedly assaulted by professional historians for the way that it airbrushes the Native American experience out of the records, leaves unexamined the contributions of women and frontier communities like the Germans and Mormons, and fails to explain why similar experiences on other nineteenth-century frontiers in Siberia, Australia, southern Africa, Argentina, and Canada conspicuously failed to Americanize those pioneers. But however much it is battered, Turner’s argument has refused to fall down, if only because the opening up of the west did profoundly affect the rest of the country and did call forth a specifically American response.

  In popular consciousness, therefore, Turner’s frontier has until now remained unchallenged. The term continues to be automatically attached to such boundless areas as outer space, the Internet, or intellectual property, implying that here are fresh and unlimited opportunities particularly suited to exploitation by American enterprise and adaptability. The spirit it engendered remains the default explanation for what makes America different from the rest of the world.

  In the era of terrorism and mass immigration, however, a seismic shift is clearly taking place. It is the older meaning of frontier that draws public attention, the line that delineates an area of sovereignty. The history of that frontier began with the first generation of Americans. They had fought to win sovereignty from the British—the right to establish for themselves democratic government and individual liberty. To mark out the scope of that sovereignty, lines had to be drawn in the ground. Among the many consequences of independence, therefore, few were more significant than the curious ritual that took place in the summer of 1784 on top of Mount Welcome, a commanding height in the Allegheny Mountains in what is now West Virginia.

  In July of that year, a company of frontiersmen led by a university professor, a geographer, an Episcopalian minister, and an almanac-maker constructed a log cabin on the mountain’s peak. To the broad-shouldered axmen and laborers who had hewn the trees and shaped the logs, it must have seemed like a foolish enough enterprise. Part of the cabin’s roof was designed to be easily lifted away, and instead of sheltering people armed with rifles, hatchets, and the usual tools of frontier life, it contained nothing but an array of clocks, telescopes, compasses, and sextants. Most days and nights the four leaders spent long hours inside, and their work could only have appeared idle and unproductive, consisting as it did of not much more than peering at the sky through the telescopes and sextants, and jotting down notes of what they saw.

  The youngest of the quartet was the almanac-maker, a thirty-year-old, snub-nosed Quaker named Andrew Ellicott. He had left his young wife, Sally, in Baltimore, and was missing her. On July 30, he wrote to tell her about the routine he had to follow.

  “We are now living very comfortably on the Top of the highest Mount in this part of the World,” he informed her. “Our Observatory is in good order, and Well Stored with Instruments; my Companions are very agreeable Men, and I think we enjoy all the Happiness that people in our Situation could expect.”

  Ellicott’s agreeable co
mpanions included the Reverend James Madison, principal of William & Mary College in Virginia and a cousin of the future president; Dr. John Ewing, provost of the University of Pennsylvania; and Thomas Hutchins, geographer-general of the United States and the outstanding mapmaker of his day. Probably no more academically distinguished company had ever before taken out their skills to work on the frontier.

  The expertise that Ellicott brought was of a different kind. He had little formal education, and his reputation, such as it was, came from the astronomical observations published in his almanacs. Enthusiasts thought them remarkably accurate. But he was also an instrument-maker of the highest quality—Ellicott’s clocks were, and among today’s collectors remain, highly prized—and in such high-flown company, it was probably his skill with his hands that seemed most valuable. He himself appeared somewhat in awe of the people around him and astonished by their habits of working.

  “The following is a True Picture of Our living,” he assured his wife. “We brakefast [sic] between 6 and 7

  “Observe the Sun’s Altitude between 7 and 10

  “Dine between 12 and 1 after which we always drink our two Bottles before we leave the Table

  “Then Observe the Sun’s Corresponding Altitude

  “At 6 we have a large Bowl of Wine Sillybub [a frothy mixture of wine and milk]—

  “This rule we never break—We have each of us a Cow—

  “We drink our Tea about 7—

  “And sometimes observe the Heavens the greatest part of the Night.”

  Apart from the amount of wine required for the astronomy and the caliber of those taking part, the most striking aspect of their work was the cost. Their wages—$6 a day per person—were roughly equivalent to what the governor of Virginia was paid, and the final bill for their work would come to more than $4,000. The purpose of all their endeavors, however, was simply to establish the boundary between the states of Virginia and Pennsylvania.

  After seven years of war, both states were burdened by mountainous debts, and in the effort to keep their creditors at bay, they had trimmed every item of unnecessary expenditure from their budgets. Yet on the frontier no expense was spared in the quest to run an accurate line through the uninhabited wilderness. Evidently the seemingly mundane business of determining where one state ended and the other began possessed an importance that may not be immediately obvious today.

  The only precedent for what Ellicott and his friends were doing on Mount Welcome had been provided by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their epic struggle between 1763 and 1767 to establish the frontier between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The way the two enterprises used the heavens to locate a precise point upon earth was very similar, but Mason and Dixon could claim the distinction of being pioneers. Never before had the newly systematized knowledge of the movement of stars, sun, and moon been combined with the developing technology of telescope construction to establish an artificial boundary. Mason and Dixon, however, were simply dividing the property of William Penn’s descendants from that of the Calvert family. The result of all their meticulous work merely increased the financial value of Pennsylvania and Maryland to their colonial owners.

  The boundary run by Andrew Ellicott and his fellow scientists on top of Mount Welcome had a wider purpose: to define the limits of two states. Its consequences would inevitably shape the economic and political growth of Pennsylvania and Virginia, creating a sense of sovereignty that grew with the power of the states. These two states were not alone. In the years after independence, every other state took steps to demarcate the extent of its territory, both by natural features like rivers and mountaintops, and by lines of latitude and longitude. On a map, the result of the boundary-makers’ work might appear to be nothing more substantial than a carefully inked line, but it carried a political and constitutional weight that has reverberated through the history of the United States.

  To establish a frontier was to create an area of separate jurisdiction. Within it, a specific framework of laws, of government, and eventually of values would be formed. How separate and distinct was the jurisdiction that grew up behind a state’s borders posed a question that would give rise to eighty years of constitutional friction and the bloodiest of civil wars. It would also produce the most sophisticated guarantees of individual freedom and democratic government that human society has yet seen. To a degree unknown in previous nations, the United States was the product of the formal divisions that the boundary-makers marked in the wilderness.

  The need for such boundaries, between states, properties, and individuals, was inseparable from American history. As the editors of the authoritative western history Under an Open Sky put it, “Boundary setting is so inclusive a frontier and regional process that it encompasses all the others; all social life is in some sense a struggle to define the difference between ours and theirs, mine and yours, self and other.” The process began with the arrival of the first colonists.

  From the other side of the Atlantic, eighteenth-century commentators like Dr. Samuel Johnson habitually referred to colonial America as a desert or an ocean where no clearly defined boundaries existed. Its “unmeasured regions” made a contrast with Europe, whose national frontiers had evolved over generations through warfare, the growth of population, and the influence of religion. Except in time of war, these boundaries were generally recognized and respected. Even when some major adjustment of them took place, such as the partition of Poland in 1772 between the neighboring powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the rivers that constituted the new borders were well-known and clearly mapped.

  The New World lacked this essential feature of European politics. Skirmishing between the colonial powers was endemic because, as a governor of Nova Scotia put it, “there hath never as yet (properly Speaking) been any Adjustment of Limits.” The royal charters creating British colonies attempted to specify their borders, but the vagueness of the wording betrayed their authors’ ignorance. The 1665 charter issued for the new colony of Carolina, for example, stated baldly that it would extend from “thirty six and thirty Minutes, Northern latitude, and so West in a direct line as far as the South Seas [meaning the Pacific Ocean]; and South and Westward as far as the degrees of twenty nine, inclusive, northern latitude; and so West in a direct line as far as the South Seas.”

  On the basis of this phrase, an independent North Carolina would claim all of what is now Tennessee. Connecticut used similar wording in its charter to justify occupying parts of Pennsylvania, while Virginia’s various charters allowed the state to argue that it should possess everything west of the Appalachians between the Great Lakes and the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

  The need to mark out on the ground exactly what the charters were attempting to describe became of such importance that blood was shed, fortunes were lost and centuries-long lawsuits were conducted to establish a line of latitude or the position of a river. The reason was simple. Unlike the Portuguese, who came in search of spices, and the Spaniards, who were seduced by gold, and the French, who traded in furs, the constant preoccupation of the English was how to own the soil before them.

  “Many good religious devout men have made it a great question, as a matter in conscience, by what warrant they might go and possess those countries which are none of theirs but the poor savages,” wrote John Smith in his Advertisements for the Inexperienced Planters of New England, published in 1631, and offered several reassuring answers. Most were the stock ones of seventeenth-century colonizers—that the land belonged to England because she had discovered it, that settlement was justified by the need to spread Christianity among the heathen, that disease had already cleared the original inhabitants from much of New England, and that from Florida to Canada there was enough space for everyone, natives and newcomers alike. But then he added another that specifically answered any would-be colonist’s doubts about title to his American land. “If this be not a sufficient reason for such tender consciences,” he wrote offhandedly, “for a copper
knife and a few toys as beads and hatchets, [the Indians] will sell you a whole country; and for a small matter their houses and the ground they dwell upon.”

  On the Southampton dockside, as John Winthrop’s company of settlers were about to depart for Massachusetts Bay in 1630, the Puritan preacher John Cotton preached an entire sermon on their divine right to the land, assuring them, “Where there is a vacant place, there is liberty for the sons of Adam or Noah to come and inhabit, though they neither buy it nor ask their leaves.” And Winthrop himself reinforced the message by pointing out that the few indigenous inhabitants had no real claim to the land, at least by the standards of English owners, whose property was exactly surveyed, neatly hedged in, and well grazed. “As for the Natives in new England,” he argued, “they inclose no Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to prove [their title to] the Land by … and Soe if we leave them sufficient for their use, wee may lawfully take the rest.”

  There was, however, a more violent method of acquiring land. In Jamestown, the colonists had originally been guided by John Smith into buying the land from the Powhatan confederation, but relations deteriorated as the colony became better established. In March 1622 the confederation turned on the colonists in outlying villages and massacred more than 350 of them, almost a third of the colony’s population. The Virginians’ reaction, after the first horrifed shock had passed, was unexpected—a desire not just for revenge, but for something more.

  “Our hands which before were tied with gentleness and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Sauvages,” wrote one colonist in a pamphlet entitled The Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in Time of Peace and League, treacherously executed by the native infidels upon the English, “So that we … may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us, whereby we shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious mattacke into the victorious sword … and possessing the fruits of others’ labours.”