The Fabric of America (7 page)

“The greatest Harmony possible subsists among us,” Ellicott told Sally in June 1785, a month after setting out. “Mr Rittenhouse in perticular frequently complimented me which I confess has somewhat raised my Vanity because he is commonly sparing but where he conceives there is real Merit.”

Enthusiastic as ever, Madison had insisted during the winter that William & Mary College should award Ellicott a degree as master of arts, despite his lack of formal education. He was immensely proud of the honor, but in the presence of
David Rittenhouse
, he recognized that he stood on a lower level.

At the age of fifty-two Rittenhouse was at the height of his fame. Modern commentators downplay Jefferson's estimate of him as one of the world's leading scientists, regarding him rather as a superb observer and craftsman, but in the context of his time, working in a new society without public funds or patronage to support him, he stood supreme. Not only had he constructed two elaborate orreries, he had organized Pennsylvania's observation of the 1769 transit of Venus with meticulous attention and been appointed professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania after the Revolution. To Ellicott he was a hero, the epitome of the speculative, open-minded scientist, and he set himself to emulate Rittenhouse's emotional detachment and attention to detail. What he could never match was his hero's whimsical, inventive humor.

Rittenhouse's health was always delicate, “never absolutely well nor absolutely ill,” by his own description, and his character had developed a self-absorbed, solitary edge. Although his chief employment was secretary to the Pennsylvania Treasury, he had seized the chance as a boundary commissioner to exchange “the plagues of office” for the solitude of the mountains. To his irritation he discovered that they were filled with axmen, chainmen, and surveyors who “hindered me from enjoying a lonely walk or some passage in Milton—or perhaps a loll on my bed. Nay, even our fellow-commissioners, the Virginians, I mean; I sometimes wish their wine was better and flowed more plentifully: not that I might enjoy it with them; but that I might enjoy myself the more alone, alone.”

David Rittenhouse

From this general condemnation, he allowed one near exception—“I could almost call Mr Ellicott a congenial soul,” he admitted—but it was hardly as warm as Ellicott's reference to “my wise and learned friend, the ingenious Mr Rittenhouse.” Nevertheless, they often hiked off into the mountains together to search for fossils and to explore rivers to their source or, in Rittenhouse's words, until it was decided “we should proceed no further for if we did, we should in all probability find some of the water-goddesses—perhaps stark naked and fast asleep.”

In the unexplored wilderness of the Allegheny Mountains, Ellicott and Rittenhouse steered through a mountainous sea whose waves were fifteen
hundred feet high and stretched to the horizon. “
Conceive a Country
composed of an infinite number of very High Hills, narrow at the Top, and only seperated by narrow Crevices or Chinks, as for Vallies, there is none,” Ellicott told his wife. “These Hills are Inhabited at present by Bears, Wolves, Deer, &c. and covered by Tall Timber and Weeds; among the latter are many Serpents, particularly the Rattle Snake.” Even today the dirt roads in west
Pennsylvania
follow the chinks east to west, and anyone who tries to follow the commissioners' trail has to negotiate the steep waves on foot, scrabbling up through the undergrowth and tightly packed trees, and skidding down the pebbly slope on the other side.

They lived from what the land provided, sometimes eating well off venison and bear meat, followed by gooseberry tart, and sometimes surviving on bread and water. The insects stung and bit as viciously then as now, but in far greater numbers. “When we leave our Tents, we have to muffle up our Faces and keep Gloves on our Hands to oppose their attacks,” Ellicott noted. Clouds of horseflies tormented their horses until they broke free of their tethers and ran into the smoke of the campfires for relief. Poison ivy was everywhere, and Ellicott, who had been allergic to it since childhood, found his hands gloved in blisters.

If it was bad for the scientists—and gazing at a dawn star while mosquitoes whined and gnats stung demanded superhuman concentration—the conditions were tougher still for the axmen. Taking down trees in the virgin forest was both hard and dangerous work, and every few days limbs were crushed and broken by falling trees. When William Cross died after being hit by a heavy branch, Ellicott recounted, “We buried him in the Middle of the Line, and raised him a Monument of Logs—such a Circumstance in the Wilderness is attended with an uncommon degree of Solemnity.”

In the face of such hardship, the axmen grew rebellious, but like commanders of a ship at sea, the commissioners could not afford to show weakness. “This evening we discovered a mutiny among our People,” Ellicott wrote on June 7, “but for prudential reasons did not give any intimation of the discovery.” Ellicott had appointed his younger brother Joseph as surveyor, a position that made him responsible for the axmen. Although both Joseph and Benjamin, the youngest brother, had been trained by Andrew in the use of sextant and chronometer, and could make satisfactory telescopes and compasses, neither had their eldest sibling's flair. Throughout his life,
however, Joseph Ellicott enjoyed a reputation as a man who drank and worked hard, and he took no prisoners in such a situation. “Early this morning, one Brown who was the soul of the Mutiny received a severe cudgelling,” Ellicott noted in his journal, “and several others [were] discharged—we then went with the remaining hands and began work.”

Approaching the Ohio Valley, where the population of settlers and squatters was rapidly growing, they recruited more axmen, and the work accelerated. On August 24, Ellicott wrote to his wife, “We now lie encamped on the Banks of the Ohio and intend Crossing it Tomorrow. The Boundary Line between the States of Virginia and Pennsylvania was compleated on the 23rd Day of this Month. It makes a most beautiful appearance from the Hills being between 60 and 70 Miles due North and cut very wide and perfectly streight.”

The result of their grueling work was dramatic. Ever since Fort Pitt had been erected in 1759 on the fork of the Ohio and Monongahela rivers, the entire surrounding territory had been regarded as belonging to Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of the colony, had garrisoned the fort with Virginia militia, and settlers registered their claims with the Virginia Land Office and paid Virginia taxes. The beautiful, straight line cut by Ellicott and Rittenhouse changed all that. It crossed the Ohio River almost thirty miles downstream from Pittsburgh, opposite the
modern
city of East Liverpool, thereby transfering thousands of settlers and several hundred square miles of territory to Pennsylvania.

This was more than an administrative adjustment. For both government and governed, the establishment of a secure border had a profound impact. For Pennsylvania, it marked the start of a process of definition that would free it from claims to its territory by Virginia, New York, and Connecticut and see its area grow by about fifteen million acres, approximately 20 percent larger than its size as a colony. As the limits of its jurisdiction were defined, the state would behave like its colonial predecessors, surveying territory, establishing new counties, taxing inhabitants, and selling unoccupied land to pay its debts. In the gilded drawing rooms of Philadelphia where politicians and financiers gathered, this would appear to be a highly desirable outcome.

In the Ohio Valley, the new boundary took on a different aspect. Although it changed nothing in the crumpled landscape or the harsh living conditions, it radically altered the lives of frontier families by placing them within
Pennsylvania's
jurisdiction. The new state's taxes were higher than Virginia's, and the burden of them much harsher because Pennsylvania, unlike Virginia, was short of hard currency with which to pay. On the frontier, people were accustomed to grow or hunt most of what they needed and to barter for the rest. But taxes had to be paid in cash, and lack of coins and bills forced many to sell the livestock and tools on which they depended for survival. “
Very few in this Town can procure Money to go to market
,” a Pittsburgh merchant complained in 1786. “And as to pay… a Debt, it is out of the question.”

Yet if they failed to pay, county courts issued orders to seize property, and the county sheriffs who executed them charged the debtors a heavy fee for the service. Resentment against Pennsylvania's government soon began to grow in the western counties that were created inside Pennsylvania's new state boundary. By the late 1780s, the farmers were beginning to fight back, digging up the roads and felling trees to prevent law and revenue officers from entering the counties. It was not the first time that the backcountry had staged a revolt against eastern governments.

In 1765, North Carolina's western farmers found themselves enclosed within the extensive new counties that the colonial government created in its drive to impose order in the backcountry. Forced to travel long distances to the county courts to register properties and pay taxes, the farmers were further incensed by the actions of unpaid county sheriffs, who charged often outrageous fees for duties such as serving subpoenas and collecting fines. To regulate the activities of these officials, “
these cursed hungry caterpillars, that are eating and will eat out the bowels of our Commonwealth
,” as George Sims of Granville County described them, and to force the eastern-based government to listen to their demands, the western farmers organized themselves into armed bands called Regulators. In language strikingly reminiscent of that of Samuel Adams in Boston lambasting British taxation in the name of liberty, the spokesman for
the Regulators
, Herman Husband, appealed to his followers, “
How long will ye
in this servile Manner subject
yourselves to Slavery? Now shew yourselves to be Freemen, and for once assert your Liberty and maintain your Rights.”

Wherever colonial governments moved to establish their control of the western lands, they adopted similar tactics and encountered similar resistance. The struggle focused on the county because, except in New England, where township meetings ran affairs, government for the backcountry happened at the county level. The colonial legislatures created huge new counties to cover the backcountry, then appointed county justices of the peace to administer the law, county surveyors to register and measure out property, and county sheriffs to ensure that lawbreakers were arrested, justice was done, roads were maintained, taxes were paid, and men of military age showed up for service in the militia.

Significantly neither in North or South Carolina, where Regulators were also formed in reaction to the corruption and ineffectiveness of county officials, nor in western Pennsylvania, where the “Paxton Boys,” a force of around fifteen hundred western farmers, rode east out of the Appalachians to terrorize Philadelphia in 1764, nor in upstate New York, where the Green Mountain Boys drove government surveyors off their land at gunpoint, nor in the other colonies where resistance occurred, did the frontiersmen want less government. What they demanded was better representation in the colonial legislatures to give them parity with the east coast, and at county level, more efficient courts, less oppressive officials, and fairer taxes.

The independence that the American states won from London's government did not remove the backcountry farmers' resentment against eastern rule. State governments in general, and Pennsylvania's in particular, might be more democratic than their colonial predecessors, but power was still weighted toward the eastern elite, and the taxes bore even more heavily on western farmers. There were just twenty-eight hundred taxpayers in Westmoreland County, one of the new counties created inside Ellicott and Rittenhouse's frontier, but in six years the county court issued no fewer than sixty-one hundred orders to sequester their goods and land for nonpayment of taxes. Such pressures soon brought the backcountry revolution to life again.

The lines that Ellicott and Rittenhouse were drawing had another effect that went far beyond Virginia and Pennsylvania and was to dominate U.S.
politics for generations to come. The boundary not only promoted greater administrative efficiency and social injustice within the states, it was helping to transform them into nations.

This was an unintended consequence, yet an inevitable one given the amorphous nature of “the United States of America” as constituted by the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Neither seven years of warfare nor military victory had resolved the contradiction implicit in the title of the founding document—was the new entity to be a confederation or a union? It left a constitutional vacuum that the increasingly powerful states threatened to fill.

The United States, by contrast, barely existed except in the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence. Given Hugo Grotius's definition that the people constituted the nation, it was significant that someone as ardently patriotic as Thomas Jefferson should have consistently referred to Virginia as “my country” in
Notes on the State of Virginia
in 1782. Even in the deepest crisis of the war, New Jersey troops reporting for duty at Valley Forge had initially refused to swear allegiance to the “United States of America” because, as they said, “
New Jersey is
our
country
.”