The Fabric of America (9 page)

Beyond the borders of the thirteen states now lay an area where an independent jurisdiction would have to be created, with laws and values outside their control. Eventually too this territory would have to have its own borders, because, like William Penn, the United States needed to retain control of the distribution of its land. The solution that Jefferson proposed was as draconian as that of any colonial proprietor. In March and April 1784, two committees under his chairmanship produced reports on the way the central government's land was to be surveyed and sold, and the steps by which its frontier communities were to become new states.

The committee on the disposal of land drew up a draft ordinance recommending that before the land was sold, the United States should survey it in squares with the lines running north-south and east-west. This shape was simple to measure out and easy for the would-be purchaser to check—or in Jefferson's words, “
the democratic principle is contained in the dimension of the units which facilitated for persons of ordinary attainment the computation of area
.” It would then be given to veterans in exchange for military warrants or sold on the open market but in a way that prevented speculators
from making a profit. In other words, only true settlers would be enabled to buy. And not only would the land beyond the Ohio be pre-surveyed, it was to be preboundaried into states. Jefferson's committee on the Western Lands proposed eleven of them, boasting exotic names such as Cherronesus, Pelisipia, and Polypotamia, with boundaries as straight-lined and rectangular as boxes except where the Mississippi or some other river offered a more convenient frame.

When the population within any of these squared-off Territories reached twenty thousand, the inhabitants could apply to join the Union as a state, but Congress alone could decide upon their admission. Until then the Territories were to be ruled by officers appointed by Congress. The new states were to be admitted subject to five provisions. They would “forever remain a part of the United States of America,” and their inhabitants and territory were to be subject to “the Government of the United States in Congress assembled.” They would have to shoulder a proportion of the huge wartime debts incurred by the original states. Their government had to be “republican in form,” and “after the year 1800 of the Christian aera, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states.”

That Jefferson, the great champion of state and county government, should have proposed these authoritarian measures is a deep irony, for nothing did more to increase the strength of the federal government as the nation exploded across the continent in the nineteenth century. Their prescriptive nature made possible the orderly expansion of the United States, but it also fueled the rivalry between slave and free economies to win control of the increasingly powerful federal government with its iron command over the newly established Territories. To both sides, the survival of slavery in the years before the Civil War seemed to depend on Congress's capacity to prescribe the conditions under which a new state was to be admitted to the Union.

The renewal of his appointment to be minister to France in mid-1784 ended Jefferson's annus mirabilis as congressional representative. In his absence his colleagues stripped his program of some of its decoration—the great state of Cherronesus hit the cutting-room floor as did his attempt to have the backlands measured out in newly invented decimal units, and most fatally of all, the proposal that slavery should be abolished after 1800 was voted down. Nevertheless, on May 20, 1785, when the Congress passed into
law the “Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of Lands in the Western Territory,” the substance of Jefferson's scheme was preserved—the squares, the progression of frontier communities into states, and the draconian steps to instill democracy and republicanism within the boundaries of what were now to be “not less than three nor more than five States.”

The Westphalian system had its limits. For one, the principle of sovereignty it relied on also produced the basis for rivalry, not community of states; exclusion, not integration.

NATO SECRETARY-GENERAL JAVIER SOLANA, Symposium on the Treaty of Westphalia, 1998

In november 1785, Andrew Ellicott arrived in Philadelphia to stay with his friend David Rittenhouse. Compared to Baltimore, whose fourteen thousand citizens lived for the most part in wooden houses fronting un-paved streets, Philadelphia was a metropolis. It boasted a rapidly growing population of forty thousand people, and such modern services as a public library, fire engines, a public hospital, a university. The grid of streets that Thomas Holme had laid out between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were not only cobbled but swept clean. Even Thomas Jefferson, who decried the “disgusting monotony” of its brick houses, did not hesitate to recommend its shape for the future capital of the United States.

The purpose of Ellicott's visit was to seek election to the American Philosophical Society, the leading scientific body in the United States, and he was received, as he proudly noted, “with particular marks of distinction” by his old frontier acquaintance, the university provost Dr. John Ewing, and the professor of mathematics Robert Patterson, who had first introduced him to astronomy. A still greater accolade was an invitation from the seventy-nine-year-old
Benjamin
Franklin, founder of the Philosophical Society, to spend the day in his little house and tell him about the “Western
Country.” Evidently overcome by the honor, Ellicott could remember nothing of their hours together except that “this venerable Nestor of America” had insisted on shaving himself, commenting that happiness at his age consisted in not having to rely on others to do the job for him.

These tributes to his expertise made the edgy temper he displayed during his visit all the more surprising. His unease arose partly from financial pressures. “I expect my pay this Season,” he had optimistically assured his wife during the summer, “will enable me to put Affairs in such a situation that Money will never have charms sufficient to draw me from you another Season.” But Virginia's generous wages had quickly been eaten up by his large family. In nine years of marriage, six children had been born, and although one died from yellow fever—to the family's profound but stoical grief—Sally's attraction and her husband's passion had their inevitable consequences. Pregnancy promised to restore the number of children by December. To support them, he had to work harder than ever through the winter months, not only producing the annual almanac with all the astronomical calculations involved, but taking a job as professor of mathematics in the first public academy to be opened in Baltimore.

The contrast between his harried existence in the provincial confines of Baltimore and that of Rittenhouse living comfortably on a state treasurer's salary, with two grown-up daughters from a previous marriage helping their stepmother tend to all his needs, aroused Ellicott's envy. “Although my Family are constantly in my mind whenever I am distant from them,” he confided to his journal when it was time to return to the sound of wailing babies in Baltimore, “I nevertheless cannot help feeling some emotion leaving a Family where I have lived with so much ease and satisfaction.”

More generally, Philadelphia's wealth evidently brought to the fore the underlying insecurity that was an integral part of Ellicott's character. When a longtime acquaintance, John Fitch, inventor of an early steam-driven boat, stopped him in the street to ask for his help in promoting the idea, Ellicott angrily dismissed the request as “persecution.” A few days later he became involved in an absurd altercation in a bookshop. He was browsing through the shelves when he overheard a fancily dressed young man—“a Maccarony looking fellow,” in Ellicott's opinion—complain to the storekeeper that Americans had no taste for “the fine arts.” At this, Ellicott waded in because, as he put it, “I conceived myself aimed at by the general reflection.”

“Upon my word, sir,” he recalled himself saying to the man, “it is very Extraordinary to pass a general reflection upon all the Natives of the United states—to condemn the whole Continent for want of a taste in the ‘fine Arts' as you term them. If you had a genious for visiting our seminaries of Learning and possessed one degree of Candour, you would freely Acknowledge your Mistake.” Standing over six feet tall, weather-beaten and hardened by six months in the wilderness, an irritated Ellicott must have been a daunting proposition because the young man took one look at his unexpected adversary, “saw my ill-nature and left.”

In some circles in Philadelphia, however, the young man's sophistication would have been applauded. Wealth had produced a definable aristocracy in the city marked out by their fine carriages and matched horses, their extravagant parties, and a studied form of superiority known as “English manners.” “
If you are not in fashion
,” Lord Chesterfield had written in
Letters to His Son
, “you are nobody,” and the book's popularity in Philadelphia showed that high society there paid heed to its snobbish wisdom.

It was the Revolution that had allowed this circle to grow wealthy, and many were connected to the Philadelphia trading house of Willing and Morris. This was the conduit used by the Committee of Secrecy set up by Congress in 1776 for the purchase of strategic materials, and from the first season of fighting when the company had made a risk-free gain of nearly $50,000 on a contract for supplying gunpowder, the profits had poured in. The accumulation of money allowed Robert Morris to lend directly to Congress and underwrite other wartime loans, a situation that led to his appointment as superintendent of finance in February 1781. Three months later, Congress granted him a charter to set up the Bank of North America with other Philadelphia merchants, and from then on disentangling private interests from public became impossible.

Robert Morris's partner, Thomas Willing, was the president of the bank, and other friends and business colleagues, such as Judge James Wilson and John Swanwick, were directors. The most glittering couple in Philadelphia's social set, William and Anne Bingham, belonged to the same network. Anne's father was Tom Willing, and William had been sent to the West Indies with government funds to buy materials for the war effort and had come back so wealthy that he could afford to build himself a Pennsylvania house modeled on a duke's mansion in London.

By Chesterfield's definition, Ellicott's poverty and provincialism made him a nobody, hence no doubt his crossness with the “Macarrony.” But between Philadelphia's wealthy aristocracy and the unfashionable nonentity, there was this connection—when peace came, the city's moneyed classes piled into land speculation, and the boundaries that Ellicott drew were, for a time, to make them wealthier than ever. The process had already begun in the west. In the summer of 1786 it moved to the north, allowing Pennsylvania to establish its jurisdiction over the most fiercely disputed frontier in the United States.

The long and bloody quarrel over
the Wyoming Valley
in northeast Pennsylvania began in the 1760s when the Connecticut-based Susquehanna Land Company sold land there, based on Connecticut's charter granting it all the territory westward from Narragansett Bay to “the South Sea.” Well-watered with good pasture, the valley was an oasis of farmland straddling the Susquehanna River, and customers had quickly moved in. The land lay within the territory of the Six Nations, the confederation of Native Americans headed by the Iroquois who held sway over a gigantic swath of territory south of Lakes Erie and Ontario. Both the land company and the Penn family claimed to have bought the valley from the Six Nations, and when farmers from Pennsylvania tried to move in during the 1770s, the Connecticut settlers drove them off at gunpoint.

The Wyoming Valley in northeast Pennsylvania, separated from Connecticut by New York Territory

Belatedly, Connecticut asserted that the valley lay within its jurisdiction, ignoring the hundred miles of New York that lay in between. An enraged Pennsylvania sent in six hundred militia to assert its authority, and with the United States already at war with Britain, they fought a daylong battle with the settlers in December 1775. Fearful that the strife would spread, the Continental Congress issued a grave warning of the danger of civil war breaking out “between the inhabitants of the colony of Pennsylvania, and those of Connecticut.” Under intense pressure, the two sides agreed to allow Congress to adjudicate, and in 1782 it decided that the valley belonged to Pennsylvania, a verdict Connecticut was persuaded to accept in exchange for almost five million acres in the territory beyond the Ohio River.

The settlers were not so easily won over. In 1784, their anger erupted into armed rebellion when Pennsylvania's commissioner declared that titles to land registered in Connecticut were invalid. Whatever Congress might decide, on the ground the Wyoming Valley would remain contested land until it was established beyond doubt that it lay within Pennsylvania's northern boundary. In accordance with the amendment to Penn's charter, the line was to run due west from the Delaware River along the parallel forty-two degrees north.