The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  The fate of its first progenitor mirrored that of the city. For years Peter L’Enfant haunted the doors of Congress, petitioning for compensation, though nothing would satisfy him. He rejected contemptuously both an offer of $3,000 and a post at the new Military Academy at West Point. Gradually he dwindled into a forlorn, angry vagrant wandering the streets he had designed. Then toward the end of his life he was rescued and given shelter by the compassionate William Digges, the son-in-law of L’Enfant’s old enemy Notley Young.

  The failure of the capital’s development was to have a pervasive effect upon the appearance of cities in the United States. In 1811, the New York City commissioners appointed to map Manhattan’s growth looked at Washington’s street plan, which they sniffily described as “those supposed improvements, by circles, ovals, and stars which certainly embellish a plan, whatever may be their effects as to convenience and utility,” and decided that Manhattan should be built “strait-sided and right angled.” The ease with which New York expanded and grew rich, compared with the stagnation of Washington during the next three quarters of a century, was enough to convince almost every new American city to construct itself in a neat square grid.

  If there was any single individual to blame for the capital’s blighted condition, it was the president after whom it was named. Washington’s military genius lay in his tactical ability to sense and take instant advantage of any weakness in the disposition of his enemy—whether in the fogbound withdrawal from Brooklyn to Manhattan or the surprise attack at Trenton. However, in making use of the rivalry between the landowners of Georgetown and Carrollsburg to acquire a site for the capital four times as large as originally thought necessary, he bit off more than could be chewed by the tiny government of which he was the chief executive.

  By 1790, the short history of the states had shown that land speculation and government were inseparable. Nevertheless, a healthy fear of rebellion and the democratic legacy of 1776 forced the state governments to keep some check on the activities of speculators. The federal district had no western farmers to engender fear and, because Washington was determined to prevent Congress interfering, no democratic supervision to bridle the instinct of the Carrolls to look after family interests. What the federal district needed, paradoxically, was more government.

  In its early years, the state of the Union often bore an uncanny resemblance to the state of the capital. To many Americans, the area of the United States seemed impossibly large, and the factions within it impossible to reconcile. What held the Union together were two ingredients missing in the federal district—an increasingly powerful central government and settlers determined that it should be democratic.

  Chapter 6

  Mirrors of the Mississippi

  I am aware, however, that in the meantime, the attempts of nefarious men might, for a moment, disturb your repose. Indeed, the anxieties of some amongst you thereupon have been suggested to me;but fear not;our ability is proportioned to the occasion, and the arm of the United States is mighty.

  Governor winthrop sargent, address to the people of the Mississippi Territory, 1798

  TO ESCAPE THE backbiting in the District of Columbia, Andrew Ellicott took a job as Pennsylvania’s commissioner responsible for laying out the route of a road to connect Presqu’isle with the rest of the state. “We live here like a parcel of Monks, or Hermits,” he wrote happily from upstate Pennsylvania in 1794, “and have not a woman of any complexion among us—our linnen is dirty, our faces and hands brown, and to complete the picture our beards are generally long. O sweet Woman, without thee man is a Brute.”

  Compared to the intricacies of running a parallel or establishing the exact coordinates of latitude and longitude for the capital of the United States, this amounted to elementary survey work. It was only necessary to find a firm surface connecting the few existing settlements that lay between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. Compass bearings corrected occasionally by sightings of the Pole Star for true north guided the choice of route, but on this occasion Ellicott was less valuable for his mastery of the heavens than for his familiarity with the country and the Native Americans who still lived there.

  The road was of vital importance to the Pennsylvania Population Company. Established by John Nicholson and counting Robert Morris as a substantial investor, the company was the principal owner of land within the Erie Triangle, and a direct connection with the rich markets in the south would add enormously to the value of their investment. On the larger scale of history, however, the road was notable for a quite different reason. In 1794, it became the cause of a dispute between Pennsylvania and the United States in which for the first time the federal government won a victory over a state government. The road to Presqu’isle was thus the place where the United States’ long struggle for dominance over the states began to take shape.

  Having purchased the Triangle from the federal government and persuaded the Senecas through negotiations with Cornplanter to relinquish ownership of their lands, Pennsylvania had good reason to believe that it was entitled to act as it pleased within its own borders. On the ground, conditions were more confused.

  An unofficial buffer zone had been created south of the Great Lakes by the British policy of encouraging Native Americans to resist the settlers’ advance into their territory. A decade after the Revolution, British troops still patrolled and garrisoned forts south of Lake Erie, and in the Ohio Valley the Western Confederation of Miamis, Delawares, and other nations led by Little Turtle had inflicted a stinging defeat on federal forces under General Arthur St. Clair in 1791. In the Triangle itself, the majority of Senecas furiously contested the area claimed by Pennsylvania under the terms of the agreement with Cornplanter. Their anger suggested they were ready to take up arms in alliance with either the Western Confederation or a revived Six Nations.

  Aware of the sensitivities involved, Governor Thomas Mifflin warned the Pennsylvania militia who acted as guards to the road commissioners that they were “to avoid giving any occasion of offence to the Peaceable Indians or to the British Garrisons in that quarter.” Ellicott let his teenage son, Andy, join the party, but added his own bleak advice that they could expect “privation and exposure… the risk of sickness, and the dangers arising from the revengeful feelings of the Indians.”

  During 1793 when the route was being explored, their presence was scarcely noticed, but in May 1794 Ellicott and General William Irvine, his fellow commissioner, returned to the Triangle accompanied by seventy militia, who doubled up as axmen to clear a path through the woods. Their arrival provoked immediate hostility, and when a man from the Six Nations was murdered by American settlers, Ellicott’s party faced the possibility of war with something like sixteen hundred Senecas. Sensibly they decided to take refuge in a wooden stockade grandly known as Fort Le Boeuf, now Waterford, Pennsylvania, where they were penned up for most of the summer.

  Responding to the crisis, Mifflin called up one thousand more militia— an aggressive move that brought Pennsylvania into direct conflict with the interests of the United States. To the west, General Anthony Wayne with a federal army was slowly encircling the Western Confederation, and in London the last details of the Jay Treaty under which the British would withdraw from their forts were being negotiated. All of this would be put at risk by an outbreak of hostilities with the remains of the Six Nations federation.

  “The President of the United States, on mature reflection,” wrote Henry Knox, secretary of war, to Mifflin, “is of opinion that it is advisable to suspend, for the present, the establishment at Presque Isle… [due to] the high probability of an immediate rupture with the Six Nations, if the measure be persisted in.” This was an unwarranted interference. The Triangle was certainly within Pennsylvania, and since all Seneca title to it had supposedly been extinguished, the state was entitled to defend its settlers within its own borders. Even his attorney general, William Bradford, deemed that the president was exceeding his authority.

  Mifflin, for his part, was
outraged. “What power is there,” he demanded of the president, “to pass a law which could control the Commonwealth in the legitimate exercise of her territorial jurisdiction?” Nevertheless, the president had in effect declared the situation to be a national emergency, and reluctantly Mifflin decided he had no choice but to give way. The call-up of militia was rescinded, and orders were sent to Ellicott to suspend the road making and settlement of Presqu’isle. In his letter, Mifflin explained that failure to cooperate “in the measures of the General Government, at a crisis deemed by the President to be peculiarly delicate, may be rendered a subject of condemnation.”

  Mifflin’s decision left Ellicott bewildered. “The interference of the General Government with the internal politics of the State on that occasion appears to me highly improper,” he replied to the governor. “The military arrangements of the General Government will leave a valuable portion of our citizens a prey to savage barbarity…[The Indians] have nothing to fear from the circuitous route of 300 miles! taken by General Wayne.”

  His view was shared by most Pennsylvanians, and through the summer of 1794 Washington’s influence hung in the balance. In the fort, the militia who planned to settle in Presqu’isle when their tour of duty ended almost mutinied in frustration, and the attempts by state officials, including Ellicott, to find a compromise with Cornplanter and the Senecas all ended in failure. Refusing to back off, however, Washington insisted that a U.S. negotiator, Timothy Pickering, by then his postmaster general, take charge, and Mifflin, thoroughly humiliated, withdrew altogether from the negotiations.

  Almost immediately, however, the governor received a second, sharper reminder of the power that his president could exert. In July, farmers in western Pennsylvania saw off at gunpoint a U.S. marshal serving court orders on them for failing to register their whiskey distilleries for taxation, then burned the house of the federal tax collector. Although the Whiskey Rebellion, as it became known, was centered in western Pennsylvania, resistance spread throughout the Appalachians, from Kentucky as far north as New Hampshire, and the list of grievances went beyond the whiskey tax to include the familiar Regulator protests against unresponsive government, unfair fees charged by court officials, and the long distances to be covered to reach the nearest county court.

  Having discussed the violence at length, however, Mifflin and senior Pennsylvania officials decided that it did not even merit calling out the militia. President Washington decided otherwise. His decision to call up a huge militia army of almost thirteen thousand men drawn from four states and lead them in person against the rebels was motivated, he said, by “the most solemn conviction, that the essential interests of the Union demand it.” These certainly included putting an end to the sort of social unrest, like Shays’s Rebellion, that he felt to be a risk to the nation’s unity, but the massive response was also designed to impress Mifflin and Pennsylvania too. In a barbed comment in his journal made in late August, Washington noted that he had spent the day overseeing the assembly of the militia, “or rather I ought to have said urging & assisting Genl. Mifflin to do it.” Mifflin attempted to duck out of these duties, but he could not miss the wider import of the armed might that the federal government could summon up.

  As President Washington led out his troops to overawe the rebels, he received what he called the “official & pleasing accounts of [Wayne’s] engagement with the Indians.” On August 20, 1794, General Wayne’s long encircling maneuver had finally trapped the Western Confederation’s army in an opening in the forest, close to modern-day Toledo, Ohio. Firing from behind trees felled by a tornado, his troops annihilated the enemy in a stunning victory that was given the name Fallen Timbers.

  The result was a triumph for Washington’s use of federal power. For three crucial months during the summer, he had kept Pennsylvania in check and avoided driving the Senecas into alliance with the Western Confederation. In November, his peace policy paid a second dividend when the British signed the Jay Treaty, committing themselves to withdrawal from their forts.

  Wayne’s victory made it possible for a disgruntled Ellicott to complete the road to Presqu’isle, and to lay out the streets and shape of the city now known as Erie, Pennsylvania. His work brought rewards to both the Population Company and Pennsylvania, but the territory that the United States secured rendered their gains insignificant. The following summer, at the Treaty of Greenville, Wayne would force the defeated members of the Western Confederation to cede most of their territory to the United States. Suddenly the area of federal lands available for settlement stretched far beyond the Ohio River as far west as Wisconsin.

  In Pennsylvania, the Whiskey Rebellion quickly disintegrated in the face of Washington’s overwhelming force. One of the few rebels to be captured was the elderly Herman Husband, once a spokesman for the North Carolina Regulators, and driven to rebel again because he saw in the federal government “the old form of a beast’s head.” For seven months he languished in a Philadelphia jail awaiting execution, before being released. Broken in health, he died soon afterward, and his death signaled the end of the latest phase in the backcountry’s revolution.

  The flood of migrants traveling into the newly opened lands in the west would in time provide the next generation to rebel against the exclusive eastern elite who had always monopolized government in northern America. To that elite, however, the trains of wagons creaking through the Wilderness Road in the Alleghenies and the convoys of flatboats floating down the Ohio River presented the same problem that had earlier faced the states, and before them the colonial proprietors: how could the government retain control of the settlers and banditti moving west beyond their jurisdiction? The solution turned out to be no different from before—like its predecessors, the United States needed to establish a clear-cut boundary marking the area within which its laws held sway. Almost inevitably, it would be run by Andrew Ellicott.

  The Treaty of San Lorenzo signed in 1795 with Spain gave the United States its first practical opportunity to demarcate the extent of its power. It provided a salutary reminder of the disparity in power between the young republic and the hemisphere’s superpower.

  When the American Revolution dismembered Britain’s North American empire, Spain was the other great beneficiary. Between 1781 and 1783, it took advantage of the war in the north to seize the provinces of East and West Florida—modern-day Florida and the coastal areas of Alabama and Mississippi—that it had lost to Britain in 1763 after the French and Indian War. In the absence of any opposition, it also gained undisputed control of the entire Mississippi River. With those additions, the grandeur of Spanish America reached its apogee. Its total length stretched from Cape Horn to Canada, and in North America alone, the Floridas with the vast expanses of Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California gave it territory three times that of the United States.

  The borders of this gigantic empire were rarely clear. Not until 1771, more than 250 years after it first laid claim to the New World, did Spain find it necessary to try to define its boundaries with Portugal’s possessions in South America. Its limits in North America were equally fuzzy. According to the Americans, the Mississippi River served as the unmistakable frontier between the empire and the United States, but Spanish galleys patrolled the waters and its forts commanded strategic points from New Madrid (near Cairo, Illinois) to Natchez. In 1782, John Jay reported that Count d’Arada, the Spanish ambassador to France, had designated the border, as Spain saw it, from a lake “east of the Flint River to the confluence of the Kanawa with the Ohio, thence round the western shores of Lakes Erie and Huron and thence round Lake Michigan.” This included most of Kentucky and Tennessee, and although Jay did not take the claim seriously, there was no doubt that Spain’s influence reached far to the east of the Mississippi.

  How far was suggested by a letter sent in 1788 by John Sevier, Revolutionary hero and pioneer settler in Tennessee, to Diego de Gardoqui, the Spanish envoy to the United States. “The people of this region,” Sevier wrote, “hav
e come to realize truly upon what part of the world and upon which nation their future happiness and security depend and they immediately infer that their interest and prosperity depend entirely upon the protection and liberality of your government.”

  The liberality that western settlers sought was permission to ship their goods down the Mississippi to the great port of New Orleans. Unless the United States could secure freedom of navigation on the river for its citizens, the transfer of loyalties to Spain seemed an obvious step to take. “There is nothing which binds one country or one State to another but interest,” Washington had predicted in 1783. “Without this cement the Western inhabitants can have no predilection for us.”

  Infuriated by the indifference of the eastern states to their needs, Kentucky’s attorney general, Harry Innes, predicted in 1787, “This country will in a few years Revolt from the Union and endeavor to erect an Independent Government.” That same year, when the territory’s constitutional convention met, a powerful group lobbied for Kentucky to secede from the Union and set itself up as an independent ally of Spain serving as “a permanent barrier against Great Britain and the United States.”

  To preserve the Union, it was therefore essential to secure for the western settlers the right of free navigation down the Mississippi to the great port of New Orleans. Fuzzy zones of influence had to be replaced by a border that reached to the middle of the river. All the United States had to offer its powerful neighbor in return was a guarantee to demarcate an unmistakable frontier between the Spanish Floridas and its own land-hungry citizens.

  By brilliant diplomacy, emphasizing the threat of making an alternative alliance with Britain against Spain, Thomas Pinckney, the American envoy in Madrid, persuaded Spain’s chief minister, Manuel Godoy, to accept this lopsided bargain. In exchange for granting American citizens freedom of navigation on the Mississippi, a clear-cut frontier between Spain and the United States would be established along the old colonial border between Georgia and the Floridas. As laid down by the British in 1763, this would follow the thirty-first parallel for most of its length. So clearly were the terms of the Treaty of San Lorenzo in the United States’ favor that even the president doubted Spain’s intention to carry them out.