The Fabric of America (3 page)

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 and 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 constitutional
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.

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.

For day after day the commissioners were unable even to see the sky, and at night the fog obscured the stars. Once, a party of men were trapped in thick cloud and had to spend a night out on the mountaintop. The next morning the swirling vapor remained so thick that those in camp needed to fire guns to guide the lost scientists back. In his journal, Andrew Ellicott commented wearily on the constant rain and mist that prevented them from observing the heavens. “
If we can have clear Weather
for two Days, we shall compleat our opperations for this season,” he wrote in the fall of 1784. “The sun has shined but twice this week, and then but for a few minutes.”

Their task made it essential to be able to see the sun and stars. Surrounded by an uncharted wilderness of steep, tree-covered mountains, they were in effect mariners required to establish both the longitude and latitude of their position in the midst of an expanse without landmarks or charts. Unlike sailors who needed only to know their position to within a few miles, however, the boundary required an accuracy measurable in yards. Their only guide through the trackless wasteland was the hazily drafted charter issued to William Penn in 1681 that decreed that the province of Pennsylvania was “to extend westwards five degrees in longitude” from the Delaware River.

To establish the exact distance on the ground, however, depended on being able to tell the time accurately. Because the spin of the earth carries it through 360 degrees in twenty-four hours, or fifteen degrees in one hour, the time at the most westerly point in Pennsylvania was bound to be exactly twenty minutes later than on the Delaware River. Thus, it was necessary to be able to compare the times in both places at the same exact moment, and that meant using the stars and planets as a heavenly clock. Consequently the eight boundary commissioners appointed by Virginia and Pennsylvania to run the line had split into two teams, one to take observations from the summit of Mount Welcome, estimated to be approximately the right distance from the Delaware, and a second to work on the river itself.

The expertise in celestial timekeeping was still new. It depended upon the remarkable
Nautical Almanac
, compiled annually in Britain from 1766
by the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal. This contained tables showing where the moon would be at different times of day and night relative to the sun, the planets, and thirty-six different stars throughout the coming year. In theory, an observer had only to note the time when the moon was a given distance from a particular planet, and to look up the time when the moon and planet would be in the same relative position at London's port of Greenwich—the point from which Maskelyne made all his calculations—to work out how many degrees he was to east or west.