The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  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.

  Where astronomy was concerned, Ellicott’s insecurities vanished. When Virginia’s boundary with Pennsylvania reached the Ohio River in August 1785, his job as the state’s boundary commissioner abruptly ceased, because at that point Virginia’s northern frontier followed the Ohio down to the Mississippi. The western edge of Pennsylvania, however, was to continue northward until it reached Lake Erie. Summoned back to Philadelphia by the demands of the state treasury, Rittenhouse demonstrated his confidence in Ellicott’s skills by recommending him as his replacement. Thus, as they crossed the river, Ellicott immediately became a Pennsylvania boundary commissioner, a change he welcomed, because as he wrote in his diary “[Pennsylvania] is my native Country, and I love it beyond any other.”

  For ten more weeks, Ellicott continued to push Penns
ylvania’s western border north toward Lake Erie until, in November, he and his assistant, Andrew Porter, were halted by boggy ground and freezing weather. The simplicity of running a meridian meant that the final miles to the lake could be run the following year by Porter alone. Ellicott’s expertise was needed for the demands of running a parallel, the line that separated Pennsylvania from New York.

  His solution to the complexities of demarcating an east-west parallel was to make Ellicott’s reputation as the leading boundary-maker of his day. He not only dispensed with Mason and Dixon’s elaborate method of combining the Great Circle and parallel, he also replaced the magnificent, six-foot-long zenith sector they and the 1784 boundary commissioners had used. Although its huge magnifying power offered incomparable accuracy, it was cumbersome to transport and operate—suspended vertically, it required the observer to lie on the ground to view stars directly overhead—and in 1786 the cash-strapped states could afford neither the time nor the money.

  The method that Ellicott suggested as an alternative possessed the American virtues of simplicity and practicality. It depended upon his growing expertise as an astronomer, and a more convenient telescope. Instead of following a carefully navigated Great Circle with the inevitable delays of setting up the six-foot sector, he proposed to run a speedy guideline, also known as a random line, due west for twenty miles with a surveyor’s compass in approximately the right direction. Then, using a more portable zenith sector, Ellicott planned to establish their exact longitude and latitude with a barrage of moon and star observations—he would carry out more than fifty on average at each stopping point—after which the necessary corrections would be made to bring them onto the parallel (see appendix). From there, the actual boundary could be run back along the parallel to the starting point, with markers inserted at mile intervals.

  His growing authority was demonstrated when he convinced both Ritten-house and New York’s boundary commissioners, including the highly regarded young Simeon de Witt, the state’s surveyor general, to adopt this untried procedure. But de Witt’s agreement came with a reservation. “He says they must depend on us for the necessary Instruments,” Rittenhouse reported. They needed in particular a zenith sector that would be more easily managed than Bird’s delicate monster, but still powerful enough to see stars as they reached their highest point in the heavens at any time of night or day.

  A zenith sector

  The solution lay close at hand. Rittenhouse had constructed a five-foot sector, but it lacked an achromatic lens, which was needed to eliminate the rainbow flare that plain glass produced. Manufacturing such a lens was beyond the capacity of American technology, but at his own cost Ellicott bought one imported from England by an amateur astronomer in Philadelphia and adapted Rittenhouse’s instrument to take it.

  The work delayed their start until July, and the tensions over Ellicott’s impending departure continued to build until, for the only time in their marriage, his wife broke down completely. By then Sally was pregnant again and already caring for six children under the age of eleven. She was evidently in tears when Ellicott left, and the letter he wrote the day after his departure suggests the sort of strain that running a boundary inflicted on both of them.

  “My dear, In consequence of your distresses and anxiety about my journey and absence,” he wrote, “my mind is agitated beyond anything I have experienced before, and had not my honour and reputation and perhaps liberty depended upon the execution of this business, I should have returned home to breakfast. We are both young and have a young family to provide for, you have won more than your part, and I am desirous to do mine. If you knew how much my happiness depends upon your peace of mind, I think you would be reconciled to this little, temporary separation.”

  Ellicott’s sympathy was unmistakably genuine, but it was not just financial pressure that drove him out into the wilderness. This boundary was his project. The zenith sector that he had bought from Rittenhouse with magnificent disregard for the family’s rocky finances was his. Most important, the method was his. Indeed, the way in which the Pennsylvania–New York boundary was run would become the prototype for nearly all subsequent east-west borders in the United States, including its immense frontier with Canada.

  The advantages of Ellicott’s method were immediately apparent. In 1786, the commissioners succeeded in running the first ninety miles of Pennsylvania’s northern border from the Delaware River as far west as the Tioga River in less than three months. Clearly marked “with substantial milestones,” it showed beyond doubt that the disputed Wyoming Valley was part of Pennsylvania. Their progress was accelerated by the effectiveness of the Rittenhouse sector, which proved to be a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Incorporated into it was the maker’s own device for making the crosshairs in the focal lens. Instead of the usual strands of silk thread, which, however fine to the naked eye, appeared ropelike to astronomers trying to measure star locations precisely, Rittenhouse used the thread from a spider’s web, an innovation that allowed unprecedented refinement of observation. When a survey team went over their line in 1881 using modern instruments, it found that Ellicott’s system had tracked the parallel with exceptional accuracy.

  The political consequences were immediate. The Pennsylvania assembly promptly created an immense administrative area, named Luzerne County, between the Delaware and Tioga rivers, including the Wyoming Valley. Then it sent in surveyors and a new set of commissioners to supervise the election of an assemblyman, sheriff, and other law officers. The commissioners were headed by the stern disciplinarian Colonel Timothy Pickering, formerly Washington’s adjutant general, and when Ellicott returned in 1787 to continue the boundary, he was delighted to find that Pickering had already opened the county court and set in motion the administration of the newest part of Pennsylvania.

  “This circumstance must be one of the most pleasing kind to the honest, well-disposed People of this unhappy District which has constantly been in a state of anarchy and confusion since its first settlement,” he wrote approvingly to Sally. “General Pickering has great merit for his exertions in bringing the Connecticut claimants to a quiet submission to the jurisdiction of the State.”

  Not everyone agreed. To Ellicott’s annoyance, anti-Pennsylvania rebels broke into the stables and stole the boundary commissioners’ bridles and saddles. But he was correct in supposing that there was a strong inducement for Yankee settlers, legal and illegal, to metamorphose into Pennsylvania farmers, however unappealing the prospect of paying taxes and accepting the authority of sheriffs and revenue men and county courts. The classic answer came from John Locke in the second of his Two Treatises on Government: “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”

  No doubt the Butlers—by far the most numerous family living in the Wyoming Valley—remained more inclined to reach for their rifles than their books when they saw the Pennsylvania judges coming, but their actions illustrate vividly the truth of Locke’s diagnosis. So long as Connecticut laid claim to the valley, the Butlers had nominally accepted its authority and registered their titles to valley land with the state. But once Ellicott had run his line, the Butlers and most of their valley neighbors were persuaded to accept government from Philadelphia when Timothy Pickering promised that their title to the land would be confirmed by Pennsylvania. To put the matter crudely, the settlers’ allegiances followed their title deeds, and those were now being registered in the Land Office of Pennsylvania.

  The other side of Locke’s equation was the price that government exacted for securing its citizens’ property, and Pennsylvania’s protection did not come cheap. The distress suffered by farmers in the newly created western and northern counties was caused not only by the shortage of cash in circulation, but by the power that the state possessed to enforce its demands.

  The fashionable set in Philadelphia would surely have agreed with Ellicott’s assessment of the benefits tha
t Pickering brought to the Wyoming Valley. In their eyes, government was undoubtedly for the good of all honest people— but it was especially good for those with money.

  What gave Robert Morris and his friends a head start in the race to make money when peace came was the simple fact that they had access to large quantitites of gold and silver while the rest of the population had to make do with paper money. To finance operations in the Revolutionary War, all thirteen states and the Continental Congress had issued paper currency in staggering quantities, as much as $400 million in the course of the war. It came in every guise, from interest-bearing bonds to military warrants entitling veterans to hundreds of acres of land. One Philadelphia dealer advertised for sale no fewer than twenty-two different types of bills, warrants, bonds, and certificates. Putting such a flood of money in circulation created galloping inflation. By the end of 1780, the index of wholesale prices in Philadelphia had risen a hundredfold in five years, and the bills themselves had lost up to 80 percent of their face value.

  “I lent the old Congress £3000 [about $10,500] hard money in Value, and took Certificates promising interest at 6 per cent,” Benjamin Franklin moaned after the war, “but I have received no Interest for several years, and if I were now to sell the principal, I could not get more than 3s 4d [just under 60 cents] for the Pound [about $3.50] which is but a sixth part.”

  The drop in value prompted many holders of paper money, especially desperate veterans who had been paid in military warrants, to take the loss and sell. Since they were sold for cash, these different forms of currency were soon concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, who bought them for as little as ten cents on the dollar. Of the $4.8 million that Pennsylvania issued in paper money, much of it in interest-bearing bonds, no less than 96 percent was owned by just over four hundred individuals, and fifty percent ended up in the hands of Robert Morris’s circle. It was an investment that quickly paid dividends.