The Fabric of America Read online

  The principle that conquest in a just war gave a country legitimate possession of enemy territory was universally accepted, and for almost a century afterward force became the principal means in New England and the South for acquiring fresh territory. By the early 1700s, the Powhatan confederation and other Algonquian-language nations around the Chesapeake Bay had been almost obliterated by a combination of outright violence and disease. Then the Piedmont territory occupied by the Tuscarora and Yamasee was cleared as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains after a series of campaigns that lasted from 1711 through 1716. In New England, the 1637 Pequot War and the greater destruction of King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676 achieved the same end.

  Dispossessing the original inhabitants was not enough. English law also required the land to be within the area specified by the royal charters. “No colony hath any right to dispose of any lands conquered from the natives,” ran a royal decree in the 1660s, “unless both the cause of the conquest be just and the land lye within the bound which the king by his charter hath given it.” Thus the vague phrases so confidently used in London had to be given an exact reality in America soil. But even then one more step was required by English common law. To convert the newly acquired territory into individual parcels of lawful property that had a value and could be legally bought and sold, their boundaries had to be surveyed, and a description with a plat or outline map needed to be registered with the colony’s government.

  So important was this final stage that the ability to survey a parcel of ground became an essential part of every settler’s education. Rufus Putnam, Washington’s chief engineer at the siege of Boston in 1775, who asserted that “I never Saw the inside of a School house except about three weeks,” learned how to survey, as did the immaculately educated Charles Carroll of Maryland, America’s richest colonist, who attended the best schools on both sides of the Atlantic. The value of a reliable surveyor was such that even as an apprentice, George Washington could boast of his ability to earn more than $100 a week. “A doubloon [approximately $15] is my constant gain every day that will permit my going out” he told a friend, “and sometimes six pistoles [approxmately $22.50].”

  Boundaries of all kinds—imperial frontiers, colonial borders, property limits— were inseparable from the development of colonial America. When the people of the independent states declared their intention to assume “a separate and equal station” among the powers of the earth, the need for clear-cut boundaries was as obvious to them as the right to life and liberty.

  By far the longest clause in the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union drawn up by the states in 1777 dealt not with representation of the people or defense or finance, but with border disputes between one state and another, and the methods of solving them. With the exception of Rhode Island, every state from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south had a quarrel with its neighbors over its borders. In addition, four states, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, were confronted by breakaway movements engaged in sometimes violent struggles to draw new boundaries that would end in the creation of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And until 1781 Maryland refused even to sign the Articles of Confederation in protest against Virginia’s claims to include huge territories beyond the Appalachians within her limits.

  So deep did the tensions run that violence always threatened to break out. The danger was made clear by one major conflict that occurred in the middle of the Revolution. In December 1775, when they might have been fighting the British, seven hundred Pennsylvanians instead fought a pitched battle with three hundred Connecticut settlers in a boundary quarrel known as the Yankee-Pennamite War. Without a stronger central government to resolve territorial disputes peacefully, Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers, the states would inevitably turn against each other, and the sword would become “the arbiter of their differences.” Thus the most immediate purpose of the boundary-makers on Mount Welcome was to keep the peace, hence its importance. But there were other, longer-lasting consequences that were inseparable from the act of establishing a frontier.

  More than a century before the American colonists declared their independence, the long, bloody conflict of the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic nations, which had torn Europe apart, ended in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In a series of treaties, the European powers recognized that within their own realms, rulers had the exclusive right to exercise jurisdiction over their citizens regardless of the claims to interfere asserted by outside agents, such as the pope or Holy Roman emperor. Constitutional philosophers like the seventeenth-century Dutch authority Hugo Grotius had long argued that a nation consisted primarily of people joined by similar race and culture under the jurisdiction of one ruler, and only secondarily of territory. But the Westphalian agreement changed the emphasis. In future, the extent of the nation and the jurisdiction of the ruler was increasingly defined not by its people but by its territory. And in the words of Emmerich de Vattel’s Law of Nations, it was now important that “to prevent every subject of discord, every occasion of quarrel, the limits of territories ought to be marked out with clearness and precision.”

  Until 1776, Britain’s colonies fell within the jurisdiction of the home country, and so, when Americans first asserted their independence, European powers like France and the Netherlands, accustomed to the obligations of the Treaty of Westphalia, refused to offer military aid or financial loans. They required evidence that the former colonists now constituted a separate entity. Consequently, when the Continental Congress tasked Thomas Jefferson’s committee with producing the document that would become known as the Declaration of Independence, it did so not simply out of patriotism but because, as Jefferson explained in his autobiography, “a Declaration of Independence alone could render it consistent with European delicacy to treat with us, or even to receive an Ambassador.”

  However, neither the Declaration nor the Articles of Confederation made clear whether one nation or thirteen had been created. Each state retained “its sovereignty, freedom and independence” but also delegated some of its jurisdiction to “the United States in Congress assembled.” What the founding documents left ambiguous, the founding geography began to make clear.

  Pennsylvania and Virginia already possessed the rights to issue their own currencies, set their own tariffs, and negotiate their own treaties with Native American nations. The line that Ellicott and his fellow commissioners ran through the mountains with such painstaking attention to accuracy created a frontier that defined the extent of the states’ jurisdictions as understood by the Treaty of Westphalia. The states, in short, were acquiring most of the characteristics of nationhood.

  Since Andrew Ellicott’s career was spent in that unmapped territory that Turner would later describe as “the frontier,” they present two views of the way the land was settled that are in direct conflict. “The frontier is productive of individualism,” wrote Turner. “The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.” But wherever the boundary-makers’ lines ran, they introduced government, law, and taxes to areas where little or none had existed before. They also paved the way for the operation of land speculators who might, and often did, buy up the farms worked by the pioneers without ever setting eyes on them. A century before Turner pictured the romantic freedom of the frontier, the work of Ellicott and the other boundary-makers had introduced a reality that undermined his central thesis.

  At the heart of Ellicott’s character lay a contradiction, between his deep-seated desire for regularity and a tendency to emotional extravagance. A career devoted to mapping the unmapped expanse of the wilderness often seems to have been the only way that he could satisfactorily reconcile two conflicting impulses.

  As the eldest child in a Pennsylvania Quaker family, he came from a background firmly grounded in order and method. His father was a clock-maker, his uncles designed an
d constructed technologically advanced water mills, and having learned at his father’s side the meticulous skills needed to build accurate timepieces, Ellicott became a surveyor of the utmost reliability before devoting his life to astronomy.

  Yet as he demonstrated in a remarkable series of letters written to his wife, Sally, he was also a man convulsed by passionate desire and agonies of remorse. Throughout thirty-five years of marriage, he invariably addressed her by such endearments as “Dearest of all Earthly Beings,” “My Love,” and “My Darling,” and whenever he left her side, he would write to her with undisguised longing, as he did in 1785 from the Alleghenies, “many are the waking Hours I spend in my Tent, in the dead of Night, anticipating my return to your Arms and once more enjoy the Charmes of your Mind and conversation.” He worried ceaselessly over the health and education of their numerous children and was devastated by the death of the youngest in 1784, and yet, as he exclaimed to Sally, “I love our children, but I adore you.”

  Despite this powerful inducement to stay at home, a cocktail of motives drove him from her arms to earn a living on the frontier. One ingredient, as he explained to an unfeeling secretary of state, was “[my desire] to support a government I venerate, and my pride to serve faithfully a country which I love, the country in which I was born, and which contains everything I hold dear.” Another, and no less deeply held, was his devotion to the science involved in running a boundary.

  To draw a straight parallel from east to west across a curving globe with reliable precision required an accumulated body of astronomical knowledge, a command of mathematics, and an accuracy of observation that simply did not exist until the mid-eighteenth century. In his lifetime, Ellicott became the acknowledged master within the United States of each stage in the process, from the first delicate construction of a telescope through the final rugged work of clearing a path through the undergrowth. Wherever he went—and his lines helped define the shapes of no fewer than eleven states and the District of Columbia, as well as the southern and northern frontiers of the United States—he took a profound satisfaction in the scientific underpinning of his work. Even if his boundaries were “lost by the carelessness, or destroyed by the caprice or wickedness, of man,” he once commented, “[they] may be accurately renewed so long as astronomy shall be understood, and the sun, moon and stars continue to shine!”

  Ellicott never made any secret of his conviction that government was essential to stop men from behaving capriciously or wickedly. Encountering the notorious icon of frontier justice, Captain William Lynch, Ellicott listened with horror to the handsome old man—“he has the appearance of an antient [sic] athlete”—telling how he and his Lynchmen would first whip a suspected lawbreaker until he confessed to the crime of which he was accused, then tie him to a horse with a rope suspended from a branch round his neck, and wait for justice to be administered when the animal moved away. “These punishments were not unfrequently inflicted upon the innocent, through spite or in consequence of answers extorted under the smarting of the whip,” Ellicott noted with astonishment. “It seems almost incredible that such proceedings should be had in a civilized country governed by known laws.”

  Wherever a state or a national boundary was established, however, the law followed. Before Ellicott died in 1825, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated treaties with Britain and Spain extending the limits of the United States along the forty-ninth parallel in the north as far as the Rockies, and in the south from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Less than a generation later, the borders had been pushed out to include the entire coastline from northern Oregon to southern California. Within that national frontier, U.S. common law, strengthened by legislation specifically concerned with the distribution of public lands, enabled settlers to acquire landed property not only by purchase or by credit, but by clearing the ground and often simply by occupation. However far west the creaking Conestoga wagons traveled, their intrepid passengers knew that their desire to own the land was backed by the Constitution and the entire panoply of law. Thus, contrary to Turner’s picture of the pioneer at odds with government and legal contraints, every new wave of settlers had a vested interest in introducing government, and law and order, to the wilderness as quickly as possible so that their claims could be recognized as property.

  “Here, every citizen, whether by birthright or adoption is part of the government, identified with it, not virtually but in fact,” declared Morris Birkbeck, one of Illinois’ pioneer settlers, in 1824, ending his tribute with the embarrassing gush, “I love this government.”

  What made the immigrants American was not the frontier experience but the context in which their experience took place. During the nineteenth century, most of the world’s grasslands, from the Russian steppes to the Argentine pampas, were seized from their original occupants, and the newcomers all faced challenges similar to those on the U.S. prairies.

  Turner himself implicitly acknowledged the universality of the frontier spirit when to describe the restless, adventurous impulse that inspired American pioneers, he quoted lines from a poem called “The Song of the English” by his favorite poet, Rudyard Kipling:

  We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;

  We yearned beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down.

  Had he wanted, Turner might have found equally appropriate, though less poetic, lines in the tribute paid to Australian pioneers by Banjo Paterson, the nineteenth-century bard of the outback:

  ‘Twas they who rode the trackless bush in heat and storm and drought;

  ‘Twas they who heard the master-word that called them farther out;

  ‘Twas they who followed up the trail the mountain cattle made,

  And pressed across the mighty range where now their bones are laid.

  Or he could have spread his net wider. In 1821, Alexander Pushkin evoked the wild appeal of Russia’s frontier in The Prisoner of the Caucasus, setting a trend that was followed by some of the great examples of frontier literature, such as Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Leo Tolstoy’s The Cossacks. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russia’s eastward push into Central Asia evoked responses so similar to the excitement produced by the United States’ westward expansion that when Fyodor Dostoevsky tried in 1881 to explain what the Asian frontier meant to Russians, he used an analogy that would surely have resonated with Turner: “Asia for us is that same America which we still have not discovered. With our push towards Asia, we [too] will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.”

  What distinguished the American pioneers in their covered wagons was not their resilience and enterprise, but the rewards open to them for their resilience and enterprise. Russia’s pioneers occupied the land either as peasants with no ownership rights or as gentry holding it as part of the imperial government’s administration. In New France and New Spain, land was distributed to the colonizers within a fundamentally feudal framework. Even in Canada, where property rights grew from the same basis of English common law as in the United States, the land was sold subject to the government’s overriding jurisdiction in a way that profoundly affected the availability of frontier territory. To put it crudely, what made the frontier experience described by Turner uniquely American was the fact that it took place inside the American frontier.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, the frontier of the United States suddenly appeared desperately vulnerable. With the pressure of immigration, legal and illegal, adding to the threat of terrorism, many commentators have chosen to portray the border as all that divides a healthy, democratic society from a hostile world. The desire to protect this seemingly fragile line of defense has become a driving force in foreign and domestic policy.

  The history that made the frontier tells a different story. The intrinsic strength of any boundary is what lies behind it. Today’s national boundary is only the outermost layer in a pattern of lines that make up the political fabric of the United States. These lines represent a unique cons
titutional system. They evolved from the clash of sectional interests and competing visions of the way American society should develop. They contain within them values of personal liberty and public democracy that were hammered out as the nation grew. And they began with that first precisely calculated line that Andrew Ellicott helped draw through the Alleghenies.

  Map

  Chapter 1

  The First Frontier

  Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt ‘em,—’tis the first stroke.—All else will follow as if predestin’d, unto War and Devastation.

  THOMAS PYNCHON, Mason & Dixon, 1997

  The summer of 1784 was unusually cool, and it followed an exceptionally cold winter. Benjamin Franklin noted that the strange weather had begun in the fall of 1783 and occurred not just in North America but throughout Europe. Its most peculiar aspect was a grayish film that colored the sky.

  “This fog was of a permanent nature,” he commented. “It was dry, and the rays of the sun seemed to have little effect towards dissipating it, as they easily do a moist fog, arising from water. They were indeed rendered so faint in passing through it, that when collected in the focus of a burning glass they would scarce kindle brown paper.”

  With typical insight, Franklin conjectured that the atmosphere might have been polluted by a volcanic eruption, although the only one he knew of had occurred in 1768. In fact the Icelandic volcano of Laki had exploded in five massive eruptions during the summer of 1783 and continued to pump out huge quantities of sulfur and other acid fumes until February 1784. As temperatures plunged, almost one quarter of Iceland’s population died from starvation, the Thames froze over in London, and high in the Allegheny Mountains, heavy clouds and lingering fogs delayed the work of demarcating the boundary between Pennsylvania and Virginia.