The Fabric of America (15 page)

In the end, however, every delegate pulled back from any measure that might endanger even the imperfect Union they already possessed. A proposal to ban the trade in slaves that commanded support from New England and the powerful central states including Virginia and Maryland was stopped in its tracks when Georgia and South Carolina threatened to consider seceding.

“Religion & humanity have nothing to do with this question,” John Rutledge of South Carolina said bleakly. “Interest alone is the governing principle with Nations. The true question at present is whether the Southern states shall or shall not be parties to the Union. If the Northern States consult their interests they will not oppose the increase of Slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers.”

This shrewd reminder that most slaves were carried by northern shippers had the effect of detaching New England from the central states. Under pressure from Boston merchants, an unholy alliance of southern states and
New England was created to keep the slave trade in operation for another twenty years. But another interest kept delegates from questioning the institution of slavery too closely. The right to liberty might be paramount, but it could not be separated from the right to property.

“
The moment the idea is admitted
into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it,” John Adams declared in his defense of the Constitution, “anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet' and ‘Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”

The right to property was enshrined in almost every state constitution, most placing it as Virginia's did next to life and liberty as one of humanity's inalienable rights. And even Pennsylvania's abolition law did not wholly deny that people could be treated as property—it stipulated, for example, that freed slaves must continue to serve their former owners as indentured servants, and that the state should pay compensation to the owner of a slave executed for murder. Nor was there any objection to the Fugitive Slaves Act of 1793, which accepted that free states had to return runaway slaves to their owners as they did other fugitives from justice, as though by escaping the slaves had stolen themselves from their masters. If a state insisted that behind its borders it should be allowed to include people of African origin as property, the newborn concept of the United States was in no position to challenge it. The outcome left slavery as a matter on which each state made its own policy. Only when the federal government grew sufficiently powerful to challenge the sovereignty of the states would any alternative become politically possible.

The Erie Triangle was still U.S. territory when Andrew Ellicott ran its border in 1790, making it the first specifically federal line to be established. Congress had voted no money to pay for it, but President Washington told Knox it was “a matter of too great importance to the United States to await the organization of the Treasury Department,” and he ordered the Indian revenue to be raided to pay Ellicott $1,125 without delay. Consequently when Ellicott returned to Philadelphia that winter with his surveys and his measurements, it was to the president that he reported. With unparalleled
pride he wrote from Philadelphia to tell Sally, as she nursed the latest addition to the family, of the reception his maps and his estimates of Niagara's height received. “General Washington has treated me with attention,” he boasted, “the Speaker of Congress and the Governor of this State have constantly had me dine with them.”

Ellicott's description of Niagara Falls in a letter written to a new friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, suggests the sort of impact his account must have had when accounts of wild and romantic landscapes served as the cinema of the age: “
Down this chasm
[below the Falls] the water rushes with a most astonishing velocity, after it makes the great pitch. In going up the road near the chasm, the fancy is constantly engaged in the contemplation of the most romantic and awful prospects imaginable, till at length the eye catches the Falls:—the imagination is instantly arrested, and you admire in silence!” Even Pennsylvania's Senator William Maclay, renowned for his cynicism, responded in astonishment, “Mr. Ellicott's accounts of the Niagara Falls are amazing indeed.”

As a land speculator and a general, Washington knew the value of reliable maps and accurate figures better than anyone else. Barely twelve months later, he demonstrated his appreciation of the work in visible fashion. In July 1790 the federal Congress authorized the president to choose a site on the Potomac River for the new capital city of the nation, and soon afterward Virginia and Maryland agreed to cede to the United States the one hundred square miles of territory required. The project was publicly launched by the president on January 24, 1791, but the first step had already been taken. On Washington's instructions, Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state, had arranged that the boundaries of the new federal district should be surveyed by Andrew Ellicott.

Speculation, the life of the American, embraced the design of the new city. Several companies of speculators purchased lots, and began to build handsome streets, with an ardor that soon promised a large and populous city. Before they arrived at the attic story, the failure was manifest;and in that state at this moment are the walls of many scores of houses begun on a plan of elegance.

CHARLES W. JANSON,
Stranger in America,
1806

On march 12, 1791, the
Georgetown Weekly Ledger
announced the arrival in town of “Maj. Andrew Ellicott, a gentleman of superior astronomical abilities. He was appointed by the President of the United States to lay off a tract of land ten miles square on the Potomack for the use of Congress; [he] is now engaged in this business and hopes soon to accomplish the object of his mission.”

In this low-key fashion, the birth was announced of what was to become the most powerful capital city in the world. From the start, its growth was expected to depend upon the operation of speculators. The role of the federal government would be simply to create the circumstances in which their activities could flourish. That the government might need to control the speculators was barely considered, a lapse that would cripple the development of the “Federal district” for years to come. Thus the events that Ellicott was to set in motion contained an important lesson for the nation's future expansion.

The
Ledger
was late with its news, however. Major Ellicott had been at work for a month, his preliminary inspection of the one-hundred-square-mile federal district was half-complete, and he had begun to miss his wife savagely. On the frontier, he had only been able to write to her, but the site he was now surveying stood just next to Georgetown, a prosperous community of five thousand souls whose stores offered another way of telling her what he felt. With his next letter, he enclosed a pair of black silk mitts and a bottle of perfume, “which I hope you will receive as a small testimony of as pure an affection as ever had a place in a Human Breast.” His message ended, “It is now late at night, and my letter carried to a great length, but when I call to mind our happy connection, the consequence of an early attachment, founded in Virtue and in Love, I know not where to conclude; so many objects pleasing to my recollection crowd in upon me—I am my Dear Sally Your Affectionate Husband.”

Compared to the hardship of running the Pennsylvania borders, the federal district should not have presented a serious physical challenge. Weekends could be spent in the comfort of Suter's Tavern in Georgetown, and after the jagged landscape of the Alleghenies, the flat woodland on either side of the Potomac made for easy traveling. Nevertheless, Ellicott did not think much of the area chosen for the nation's capital. “The Country thro' which we are now cutting one of the ten-mile lines is very poor,” he told her in June, “there is not one House that has any floor except the earth, and what is more strange, it is in the neighbourhood of Alexandria and George-Town… As the President is so much attached to this country, I would not be willing that he knew my real sentiments about it. But this country, intended for the Permanent Residence of Congress, bears no more proportion to the Country about Philadelphia than a [scrawny] Crane does to a [fat] stall-fed Ox!”

The Residence Act passed by the First Congress in July 1790 had set aside an area “not exceeding ten miles square” on the Potomac River for the “permanent seat of Government of the United States.” The decision to create a capital for the nation on a greenfield site rather than use an existing city such as New York or Philadelphia represented a victory for the Virginians, and especially Washington and Jefferson, over northern interests. Yet the one hundred square miles set aside for it also represented the first indication that the freshly created sovereignty of the United States might become a territorial power to rival the states.

Strategically the site stood at the center of the United States, almost midway between New Hampshire and Georgia. It was easily reached by ship from every major city, and needed only a canal between the Potomac River and the Ohio to connect it directly with the rapidly growing settlements beyond the Appalachians. That George Washington himself was a major shareholder in the Pawtomac Canal company and owned property near the federal district did not present a conflict of interest to contemporary minds. There was no federal cost in creating the capital—Maryland and Virginia agreed to put up seed money of $192,000 for a development clearly in their interests—and the general presumption was that in benefiting himself the president was benefiting the country.

Jefferson and Washington had first discussed locating the capital on the Potomac as early as 1783, but not until 1790 did Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton broker the famous deal that persuaded northern representatives in Congress to accept a southern capital. In return, southern congressmen would support Hamilton's proposal that the federal government should take on the states' debts, including much of the paper money they had issued.

From Ellicott's first measurement on the Virginia side of the river, the complexities created by the site were inescapable. Washington's announced intention was to include the thriving seaport of Alexandria on the Virginia side of the river, and two locations on the Maryland side, Georgetown and the Eastern Branch, a tributary flowing into the Potomac. Ellicott's preliminary calculations led to the exclusion of most of Alexandria because, as he told Jefferson in February 1791, it “would neither produce straight lines, nor contain quite the ten miles square, besides the utmost impropriety of running such lines without tolerable exactness.” In the growing chaos of the years ahead, that passion for exactness proved to be both a blessing and a curse.

His starting point was Jones Point, a spit of land on the Virginia bank pushing into the Potomac below Alexandria, where he calculated the meridian, or true north—and the painstaking care he took became the central issue in determining responsibility for the capital's shape. His instruments included both the five-foot Rittenhouse zenith sector and a smaller nineteen-inch version, a transit used for taking equal altitudes that he had constructed the previous year, as well as a circumferentor, or combined
compass and telescope, for horizontal measurements, three conventional telescopes, including one made by Dollond of London, and the all-important chronometer that he had built himself. As had become his habit, he cleared a place on high ground, erected an observation tent to protect the intruments, securely attached the clock to the stump of a felled tree to serve as a platform, and began the achingly minute observation of the heavens that would reveal precisely where he stood on earth. His assistant during these first crucial sightings was one of the most notable astronomers of the day, Benjamin Banneker.

Against all odds, Banneker, a fifty-nine-year-old farmer with no education, had taught himself astronomy, helped by advice and the loan of books and instruments from Ellicott's cousin George. What made the feat still more astonishing was that it had been achieved by an African-American living in the slave-owning economy of Maryland.

Benjamin Banneker on the title page of his 1795 Almanac

Although Ellicott would have known him from childhood—Banneker farmed next to the Ellicott Mills—he first learned of his abilities in the summer of 1790 when Banneker wrote asking for help in checking a set of astronomical calculations he had made for an almanac. “I hope that you will be kind enough to view [any errors] with an eye of pitty,” ran Banneker's letter, “as the Calculations was made more for the Sake of gratifying the Curiosity of the public, than for any view of profit, as I suppose it to be the first attempt of the kind that ever was made in America by a person of my Complection—”