The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  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.

  In practice, however, repeated observations were needed to reduce errors. Then complex calculations had to be made to allow for atmospheric distortion and for the distance of the observer from the center of the earth. The British Board of Longitude estimated that all the figuring would take four hours to complete after the time spent taking the initial lunar observations, but with good instruments, with repeated measurements to average out errors, and with unremitting care over the mathematics, it was possible to achieve an accuracy measurable not in miles but yards or even feet (see appendix).

  Blessed with formidable gifts of concentration and clear thought, and cursed by an almost neurotic fear of failure, Andrew Ellicott might have been born for such a task. To belong to the Ellicott family was to carry a desire for precision in the blood.

  The first Ellicotts, including an earlier Andrew, arrived in America in the 1730s, and, as Quakers, almost inevitably settled in Pennsylvania. Like other members of the Society of Friends, he and his family fitted easily into the orderly structure created by William Penn for the colonists. Solebury Township in Bucks County, where they lived, could have served as a showpiece for his “holy experiment” in harmonious living.

  In 1681, within weeks of receiving a charter from King Charles II awarding him an area of land in North America named Pennsylvania, Penn had ordered his agent “to buy land [round the future Philadelphia] of the true owners which I think is the Susquehanna people.” As a result, Pennsylvania, which to Charles II was no more than a map reference to pay back a debt owed to Penn’s father, appeared to most foreign observers as the ideal example of benign colonization. In the years ahead, the great Swiss philosopher Emmerich de Vattel, whose 1758 textbook on international law, Droit des gens; ou, Principes de la loi naturelle (Law of nations or Principles of natural law), was taken by the Founding Fathers as the ultimate authority on the subject, would cite Penn as the “laudable example” of how title in a new land should be transferred.

  Andrew Ellicott

  Other colonial proprietors followed the same policy, most notably Roger Williams in Rhode Island and the Calvert family, who owned Maryland. Indeed the importance of having clear title to the land they took from Native Americans pushed all governments into coming to some form of agreement involving purchase. The sale of this property to settlers was needed to pay the costs of administering the colony. Until the eighteenth century, the land offered for sale was confined to the coastal regions and rivers, and the number of immigrants was so small that colonial governments could restrict settlement to those territories. In Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, settlers were required to choose their property, then have it surveyed and registered in the colonial land office before they could buy title to it. Governments in New England and Pennsylvania and, sometime later, in Georgia adopted a different method—pre-surveying the land, usually in rectangles, before selling it. Permission to settle beyond the surveyed area was rarely given.

  Like other colonial governments, Penn’s imposed its own conditions on would-be settlers. They were required to buy property that had already been bought from the Indians and measured out in neat rectangles by Penn’s surveyor, Thomas Holme, a condition that virtually restricted early immigrants to Philadelphia and two other counties on the banks of the Delaware River, Bucks and Chester.

  “Our townships lie square;” Penn explained to potential migrants in 1685, “generally the Village in the Center; the houses either opposite or else opposite the middle, for near neighbourhood… so that the neighbours may hold one another in a Christlike manner and praise God together, and that they may accustom their children to do the same.”

  Solebury Township followed this pattern exactly with its forty-acre, rectangular common at the center, and four houses arranged on each side close to one another, while the fields and meadows spread out behind in a broadening wedgelike shape. The Ellicotts would have paid the Penn family a quitrent of six shillings per hundred acres or about twenty cents a year for their land and, like their neighbors, formed part of a society dominated by Quaker morality and ruled by edicts such as those against selling alcohol and bearing arms that emerged from the Friends’ monthly and quarterly meetings. The colonial assembly representing the interests of the colonists was controlled by this Quakerocracy.

  The Ellicotts had good reason to feel grateful for Quaker values. Ellicott’s father, Joseph, and two uncles were all left destitute as children by the death of their parents and were farmed out to be raised by other Quaker families. Proof that craftsmanship was in their genes came when all three turned out to have a gift for making machinery. Originally apprenticed to a weaver, Joseph’s true talents emerged when he went to work for a millwright named Samuel Blaker in Bucks County. Although a family history described Joseph as “a smart, active boy and a good weaver, but his mind ran wholly on mechanics,” the records of the local Society of Friends indicate that his mind must occasionally have been diverted from engineering. In the summer of 1753, Blaker’s daughter, Judith, was reported at the quarterly meeting to be pregnant, and that Joseph Ellicott had admitted to the “misdemeanour.”

  They were married in December, a month before the child was born, and although this regularized the situation officially, in the conventional society of Bucks County the sight of an eight-months-pregnant bride must have produced gossip as remorselessly as a stream turning a
mill wheel. Whatever her character was like before, as a mother Judith Ellicott showed herself to be anxious and demanding to a degree that left an indelible mark on her first child, Andrew.

  Ellicott was born in January 1754, and proof that he had inherited his father’s engineering skill comes from a remarkable musical clock, now kept in the Smithsonian Museum, that he helped Joseph to build. It not only told the time, but displayed the movement of the planets and played a selection of twenty-four popular tunes. Looking at the rows of tiny cogs and wheels provides a sobering reminder that, until the first machine tools arrived in America in the nineteenth century, each one had to be cut and ground by hand, and that Ellicott was just fifteen when they were made.

  Joseph and Andrew Ellicott’s clock

  This masterpiece was the forerunner of more than a hundred other clocks on which father and son worked together, and the collaboration suggests a close relationship between them. Their intimacy stood in sharp contrast to Ellicott’s chilly relations with his mother. It is difficult to know how Judith Ellicott managed to alienate her sons. All four left home as soon as they could, and the few writings of hers that survive are filled with recriminations against them for failing to write or visit her. “As thou art the only son of 4 that seems to retain me in their remembrance,” she wrote bitterly to her third boy, Joseph, “I would wish thee therefore to write often—I should be very glad to hear from David Ellicott [her second son] as he has never yet favourd me with one single line. I have nothing particular to write.”

  Her driven personality was presumably responsible for the anxious tone that appears like a trademark in Ellicott’s reports, so that even late in life, he often sounded more like a boy accused of laziness than a respected astronomer. “I never was caught in bed by the sun,” he protested when questioned about the time he took over his surveys, and referring to his months running the line of the Spanish frontier, “I never went to bed before midnight and was up every morning, one excepted, at five o’clock.”

  That double impulse toward perfectionism—craftsman’s pride compounded by underlying anxiety—was an essential ingredient in Ellicott’s mastery of celestial observation. Every aspect of it, from the initial adjustment of clocks through measuring the relative positions of different stars and the final comparisons with existing records and astronomical tables, required a relentless, even finicky attention to detail that he possessed to an inordinate degree. But as he showed when he first left the civilized society of the coast in 1784 to begin work in the mountains, he detested disorder.

  “I do not like the Country,” he told his wife, Sally, in a letter from Old-town, Pennsylvania, or, as he put it, “the Very Border of the Wilderness.” He was repelled by the untamed country, by the bug-infested inn, and by the lawless behavior of the inhabitants, epitomized by a shoot-out with a gang in which “one of their Company was Killed in Robbing a House in the neighborhood where I was.”

  Experience would change his hostility to such affection that he could not refuse any chance to escape into the wilderness, but that first encounter was significant. It was impossible to grow up in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, even in the harmonious surroundings of Bucks County, without being aware of the disorder that convulsed the western part of the colony.

  Before the Ellicotts first arrived in Pennsylvania, immigrants from Germany and northern Ireland, attracted by its policy of religious toleration, were beginning to flood into the foothills and the valleys of the Alleghenies, far beyond Penn’s squares. In 1724, James Logan, one of the Penn family’s lieutenants, wrote in exasperation of “these bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when challenged for titles [to property], that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly.” Others were ruder, calling them banditti or “Goths and Vandals” or, most plainly of all in Benjamin Franklin’s phrase, “those mad People on the Frontier.”

  They quickly exposed one of the major shortcomings of Penn’s colony— no one knew its true extent. As specified in its royal charter, its boundaries were to extend as far north as “the three and fortieth degree,” somewhere beyond Albany, New York, and as far south as the fortieth degree of latitude (north of Maryland’s present northern boundary), where it would intersect “a Circle drawn at twelve miles distance from New Castle [on Delaware Bay].” Although this might have looked clear enough in London, it bore no relation to the realities of American geography. Drawn out on the ground, Pennsylvania’s southern border would have left Philadelphia deep inside Maryland.

  Pennsylvania was not unique in being overwhelmed. In the Carolinas, the proprietorial system of surveys gave way under the flood of incomers in the 1720s, and as Carolinians moved south into Georgia in search of uncontrolled land, they then brought down James Oglethorpe’s idealistic dream of building a society there for veterans and poor farmers around pre-surveyed property. Similar strains emerged in New York as new arrivals clashed with well-established patroons over the extent of their manors and their powers in the Hudson Valley, and on the New England frontier the governments of Massachusetts and New York found their power flouted by settlers moving into what would become Maine and Vermont. But nowhere did the impact of immigration occur more dramatically than in Pennsylvania.

  No one exploited the confusion of Pennsylvania’s frontier to better effect than Thomas Cresap, the founder of Oldtown. It pointed to the change in Ellicott’s feelings about the wilderness that when he next passed through the settlement, he called on the man who was a legend among the frontier’s banditti, and living testament to the importance of clearly defined boundaries. “He is now more than 100 Years Old,” Ellicott reported with admiration, “he lost his Eye sight about 18 months ago, but his other faculties are yet unimpaired, his sense Strong and Manly, and his Ideas flow with ease.”

  By most accounts, Cresap was in fact ninety-one and would live another five years, a tribute to the healthiness of the outlaw’s life. From his arrival in 1710 as a sixteen-year-old from England, his past was a history of eighteenth-century America. He came as part of the flood of immigrants that overwhelmed the colonial governments’ plan to settle them within defined limits. For the first time, most of the immigrants to British America were not English and were quite prepared to defy the English common law that underpinned the ownership of land in the colonies. People with names like Paxton, Crockett, and Houston from northern Ireland, and German-speaking Wetzels and Weisers from the Rhine Valley, simply ignored the law and divided up the western land themselves.

  Taking advantage of the confusion, Cresap made a specialty of registering in Maryland claims to land that lay in Pennsylvania and selling it to German immigrants whose lack of English left them unsure of what was happening. In his home state of Maryland his activities earned him the name the Border Ruffian, but elsewhere he was more generally known as the Maryland Monster. He farmed one such claim himself, close to Oldtown and lying well inside modern Pennsylvania. In 1736, when Pennsylvania settlers who had bought the same land from the Penns arrived to claim their property, Cresap drove them off at gunpoint. The settlers retaliated by bringing in Sheriff Samuel Smith, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but he was greeted by bullets flying round his ears. On his next visit, the sheriff took the precaution of arriving with a posse of fifty-five heavily armed farmers and succeeded in cornering Cresap and fourteen companions in his house.

  According to Smith’s deposition, when called upon to surrender, “Cresap, with several horrid oaths and the most abusive language against the proprietor and people of Pennsylvania, answered that they should never have him until he was a corpse.” A furious gun battle broke out, and as the sheriff later recalled, “They would not surrender but kept firing out ‘till the House was set on fire.” Despite his defiant promise, Cresap was among the outlaws who eventually gave themselves up, singed but unrepentant. As he was marched in chains through the streets of Philadelphia, he exclaimed to his guard, “Damn it, this is one of the prettiest towns in Maryland!”

 
; Released from his shackles, Cresap decided to settle legally in what would become Oldtown. According to his own account, he used to offer such hospitality to the Indians who came into western Pennsylvania to trade furs that they called him the Big Kettle. The seventeen-year-old George Washington, who took shelter with Cresap in 1749 on his way to survey Lord Fairfax’s five-million-acre estate across the border in Virginia, recorded being “agreeably surpris’d by the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from War with only one Scalp. We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them Part. It elevating there Spirits put them in the Humour of Dauncing of whom we had a War Daunce.”

  The war party almost certainly came from the Iroquois federation in the north, who were then engaged in long-term hostilities with the Catawbas in the Carolinas. But the contact with the Europeans was not untypical of what modern historians call “the borderland,” the ill-defined area where squatters, natives, fur dealers, and missionaries lived and bred, absorbing each other’s culture, and forming an uneasy, mutually rewarding, self-adjusting society.

  A memorial to Thomas Cresap in Cumberland, Maryland

  What none of them could have known was that the arrival of the apprentice surveyor working on behalf of his patron, Lord Fairfax, presaged the end of the borderland. The huge Fairfax property, almost amounting to a separate colony, stretched across the northern neck of Virginia up to the Maryland and Pennsylvania boundary. The previous year his lordship had employed Thomas Lewis and Peter Jefferson, father of the future third president, to map the southern boundary of his gigantic holding. With its outer limits defined, the task of his new team of surveyors, including Washington, was to establish who was living on the Fairfax estate and how many acres they were working. Squatters paid no rent, and Fairfax’s kingdom had to turn a profit. Within a few years of Washington’s survey, dozens of illegal settlers had either been evicted or had signed ninety-nine-year leases paying a rent of about $5 annually for one hundred acres. Fully surveyed, the Fairfax property might produce as much as $250,000 a year. The lesson did not go unheeded.