The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  As the nation’s expert on running parallels, Ellicott was Washington’s personal choice in 1796 to be the U.S. commissioner responsible for demarcating the southern boundary. At a secret briefing, he warned Ellicott to resist any Spanish attempt to delay putting the treaty into effect. He was also to be wary of influential Americans known to be working for the Spanish government who were trying to detach Kentucky from the Union. “[The president] thought it a business of much importance, both to the honour and safety of the country,” Ellicott noted, “and directed me to pay a strict attention to that subject.”

  The new commissioner moved in a small world. His boss, the secretary of state, was the Teutonic disciplinarian Timothy Pickering, who had made his fortune speculating in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, while Thomas Freeman, the surveyor appointed to carry out the actual legwork on the frontier, had previously been James Dermott’s assistant in Washington. Earlier acquaintance colored Ellicott’s judgments. Pickering remained “the excellent Colonel Pickering” who had brought peace to the frontier, while Freeman, an enterprising, hotheaded adventurer, was regarded with dark suspicion. A personal escort of thirty-five soldiers accompanied the commissioner, as well as a small military detachment under the independent command of Lieutenant Percy Pope. The only members of the expedition that Ellicott had personally selected were the assistants required to look after his instruments and records, his son Andy, and two young surveyors, David Gillespie and Peter Walker.

  In the absence of her husband and eldest son, Sally Ellicott became the head of a family in which the next five children were all daughters. The girls’ lively correspondence showed that they grew up to be opinionated, challenging, and independent, characteristics that must have been fostered by Sally. And since she herself had just become a mother for the eleventh time at the age of forty-five, it is possible that sadness at Ellicott’s departure was tinged slightly with relief. Neither could have guessed, however, that it would be almost four years before they met again.

  . . .

  Although no one could run a parallel like Ellicott, there must have been doubts whether someone so touchy could handle the diplomatic problems that would be involved. In the event, his character rather than his science turned out to be the vital quality on which implementation of the treaty depended. It was clear from the moment the party of surveyors and soldiers assembled in Pittsburgh in the fall of 1796 that he would allow nothing to delay his progress.

  In October, falling water levels stopped river traffic on the Ohio, but rather than wait till the spring Ellicott insisted that his team haul their heavy boats over the half-submerged rocks. Below Louisville they came to the infamous Ohio Falls, which normally appeared as a smooth slide of water, but were now reduced to a welter of white horsetails cascading between black rocks. After a brief examination, he “concluded to risk the boats rather than be detained.” So his three vessels were steered straight for the lip of the falls, “and a little after noon all the boats were over but not without being considerably damaged, the one that I was in had nine of her timbers broken.”

  Nowhere in this headlong dash did he forget to note the daily temperature, the flattening of the Alleghenies and gradual appearance of the prairies, the composition of the soil, the salt springs, and the lives of the pioneer farmers. “The people who reside on the Ohio are brave, enterprising and warlike” ran an entry in his journal that offers an early account of the frontier character, “which will generally be found the strongest characteristical marks of the inhabitants of all our new settlements. It arises from their situation: being constantly in danger from the Indians, they are habituated to alarms, and acts of bravery become a duty they owe to themselves and their friends.”

  On the minus side, they lacked education, science, and the self-restraint required to prevent bravery from degenerating into ferocity, and economically they were in a mess. The Ohio Valley could produce everything people needed for survival—corn, cattle, hogs, apples, whiskey—and any surplus, including the coal that some were mining, could be sent downriver for sale in New Orleans. Anything they couldn’t produce themselves, from rifles to saucepans, had to be imported, and “so long as they depend upon the Atlantic states for their supplies of European manufactures, the balance of trade will constantly be against them, and draw off that money which should be applied to the improvement of the country, and the payment of their taxes.” As always, he felt that he was carrying civilization with him. Once the treaty was implemented, the Mississippi would be opened, imports would become cheaper, the country would improve, and taxes would be paid.

  His goal was Natchez, where Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, governor of the district and the Spanish boundary commissioner, was waiting for him. On the Mississippi, however, Spanish garrison commanders repeatedly tried to prevent them from proceeding, but Ellicott pressed on, claiming diplomatic immunity. In the face of a message from Gayoso demanding that the U.S. party wait for a specific invitation before proceeding farther, Lieutenant Pope decided to remain at Walnut Hills, modern Vicksburg, Mississippi, with the military detachment, but Ellicott was not deterred. An American adventurer named Philip Nolan, whose contract to sell wild mustangs to the Spanish army gave him high-level military contacts, had secretly warned him that Gayoso was under instructions from Madrid to use any means to prevent the treaty from taking effect. Leaving Pope behind, Ellicott hurried on downriver with his assistants and axmen and on February 23, 1797, arrived at Natchez.

  The settlement existed on two levels. The older part, a cluster of dwellings and warehouses, stood round the landing stage at the foot of a tall bluff that jutted into the brown, swirling river, but the new city of Natchez itself and its fort were built high up on the hill so that the Spanish cannon could control navigation on the Mississippi. To Gayoso’s fury, Ellicott’s party ignored all protocol and, having landed without asking permission, simply pitched camp on a level with the fort. The first message from the Spanish was a request that the flag they had hoisted be taken down. “This met with a positive refusal,” Ellicott noted, “and the flag wore out upon its staff.”

  By rights it should not have had time to get even slightly threadbare. According to the celestial observations Ellicott made over the next few nights, the thirty-first parallel, the frontier agreed by Pinckney’s treaty, ran thirty-nine miles south of Natchez, and the Spanish therefore had no legal right to remain. But when the two men met, Gayoso offered a plausible reason for not evacuating the fort. Spanish troops had to stay, he explained, to protect the five thousand inhabitants in the area around Natchez from attack by Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians, and from invasion by Loyalists and British and American freebooters coming south from Canada. The fort could not be evacuated until these dangers passed, and U.S. forces could not take over the fort until it had been evacuated. It was a standoff.

  Strategically Natchez commanded both the river upstream and all the hinterland of what is now Mississippi and Alabama down to the Gulf. The city was at the heart of a new Spanish policy toward American immigrants, adopted in 1788 by the then chief minister, José Moñino, Count of Floridablanca. Instead of keeping Americans out of West Florida and Louisiana, Spain would try “to attract to our side the inhabitants of the Ohio and Mississippi.” They were to be offered free land, freedom to follow their own religion, and no less enticingly freedom to transport their goods down the Mississippi. Gayoso himself had been chosen to proclaim the new regime, and he had selected the location of the city of Natchez and laid out its streets. Its rapid growth, doubling in population every two years, was testament to the policy’s success. Every month of delay brought more immigrants, consolidating the Spanish hold not just on the area round the city but on the vast territory east of the Mississippi that the treaty recognized as part of the United States.

  As Bernard Lintot, originally a New Englander, now a Spaniard, and one of Natchez’s most respected planters, cynically observed to Ellicott, “I have resided many years [in this district], and have ever found the
Spanish Government giving the most liberal encouragement to American and English settlers, and could not perceive that the passing from a land of liberty to a despotic government occasioned any difficulty in the business.” Even Daniel Boone, the epitome of American patriotism, would join the throng in 1799, crossing the Mississippi into Spanish Louisiana, where he took an oath of loyalty to the king of Spain.

  In the spring of 1797, the river overflowed its banks, astonishing Ellicott by rising fifty-five feet and spreading out across the country to create a slow-flowing ooze that by April was thirty-seven miles across, and it did not completely return to its old course until September. But he also understood why it made the land beside it so attractive to settlers. “The Mississippi is a wonderful river,” he told Sally, and the silt it deposited was “uncommonly fertile.” Most of the large plantations grew tobacco as their main crop, although others were turning to cotton, and a few specialized in sugar. The owners raised cattle and hogs, grew their own corn, and could produce with little effort exotic fruits such as peaches, figs, and apricots. From his 250,000-acre plantation, Anthony Hutchins reckoned on harvesting no fewer than thirty thousand pounds of tobacco a year as well as four thousand bushels of corn, with enough pasture left over to feed four hundred head of cattle.

  Such wealthy owners had, Ellicott noted, “a natural turn for mechanics, painting, music and the polite accomplishments,” although being the man he was, he could not help pointing out one major failing. “Their system of education is so extremely defective that little real science is to be met with among them.” More serious in his eyes was that the plantations depended on slave labor, and slaves made up about 40 percent of Natchez’s population.

  The majority of the white inhabitants, however, were either small farmers with few slaves, or storekeepers, craftsmen, and stevedores in Natchez itself. Some were on the run from the law or from creditors, such as Ebenezer Dayton, a shoemaker, generally known to Natchez citizens as “Diving” Dayton, who had faked his own suicide by pretending to drown himself in the Connecticut River after running up huge debts. Two thirds were British or American Tories who had fled the United States because of “their monarchical principles or treasonable practices.” Their unofficial leader was Hutchins, who had come to Natchez as a British officer in the 1770s, and since he was the brother of Ellicott’s old colleague Thomas Hutchins, the commissioner was prepared to trust him.

  By extraordinary coincidence, Ellicott had a still closer connection to Gayoso’s second-in-command, Captain Esteban Minor. Twenty-six years earlier his name had been Stephen Minor, and he had grown up close to the Ellicotts’ mills in Maryland. Now a Spanish citizen, Minor owned a plantation in Natchez, and his divided allegiance could have served as a paradigm for most American-born settlers. As fort commander, he remained loyal to Spain, but he was ready to see the settlement become American so long as his ownership of the plantation was not endangered.

  There was no guarantee that the hearts and minds of this expatriate, multinational population would belong to the United States. In 1763, when the east bank of the Mississippi ceased to be French, the land around Natchez became British and remained so until Spain acquired it in 1783. There was no strong desire to become part of the United States. The settlement’s only experience of American power, a destructive raid in 1778 led by James Willing from Pittsburgh, did not encourage friendly feeling. Willing’s band of marauders shot and looted their way from Walnut Hills to Baton Rouge—“All was fish that came into their nett,” William Dunbar, a prominent cotton planter, recalled. “They took blankets, pieces of cloth, sugar, silver ware, all my waring apparel, bed and table linen: not a shirt was left in the house.”

  Nevertheless, under U.S. jurisdiction every male landowner would enjoy three freedoms denied to him under Spanish rule: he could vote for his own government, express his opinions openly, and be free of the risk of arbitrary arrest, an important consideration since Governor Hector de Carondelet had recently exiled to Cuba several inhabitants of New Orleans, for no other crime than expressing what he called “diabolical ideas of freedom and equality.” The United States also offered a double guarantee against the loss of property. The Bill of Rights declared that property could never be taken except “by due Process of Law,” and the Constitution prohibited governments from passing “a Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” This last was especially attractive to those who feared that the Spanish authorities might find grounds to cancel land grants made simply on the basis of a royal proclamation.

  In reports to Pickering, Ellicott estimated that these considerations might persuade most landowners—”

  Having Wilkinson on his side transformed Gayoso’s position. From the Gulf to Illinois, Spanish forces amounted to fewer than one thousand regular troops and slightly more than five thousand militia, scattered by Gayoso’s policy in forts along the whole length of the river. Recognizing Spain’s military weakness, Ellicott appealed directly to Wilkinson and with increasing urgency for more U.S. forces to be sent to Natchez. The general repeatedly promised to send reinforcements, but none arrived. Blandly and affably, Wilkinson assured Ellicott, “You have a warm place in my heart,” and offered his personal support—“I trust in heaven the execution of the treaty may follow to avert consequences painful to contemplate”—yet not a soldier moved south. Gayoso could be confident that with Wilkinson in command there would be no military pressure from the United States.

  Unaware of his general’s treachery, the new president, John Adams, told Congress in June 1797 that he had reluctantly decided “to leave it to the discretion of the officers of His Catholic Majesty when they withdraw his troops from the forts within the territory of the United States.” Congress showed itself still less inclined to act. Ignoring the president’s request to create a framework government for the Natchez district in readiness for Spain’s eventual withdrawal, the legislature went into recess, leaving Ellicott to cope unsupported. But more than one man’s betrayal lay behind the United States’ inability to force the Spanish out of Natchez. It was too weak even to keep the states out of federal territory.

  The most forceful attempts at seizure were made by Georgia. Alone among the states, it maintained its claims to western lands based upon its royal charter and did not give them up until 1802. In 1789 it created the largest county in American history, Bourbon County, to administer the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, and in 1795 its heavily bribed legislature sold almost forty million acres, most of modern Alabama and Mississippi, to a syndicate of land companies in what became known as the Yazoo Land Fraud. Georgia had some constitutional grounds for its land grab, but the plans of William Blount, once governor and now senator of Tennessee Territory, depended upon pure expediency.

  As he foolishly explained in a letter in March 1797, Blount planned to seize Spanish-occupied territory, including the Natchez area, by force, keeping some for himself and leaving the rest to British control. The plot hung on the war in Europe: under pressure from France’s citizen armies, Spain had declared war on her former ally, Britain, in 1794, a development that created the serious possibility of a retaliatory British attack on the Floridas and New Orleans. Blount needed the land to rescue the Blount Land Company from bankruptcy, and conspiring with a foreign power to take U.S. territory was not a crime that weighed heavily with him or, as it transpired, with the people of Tennessee. “[I] probably shall be at the head of the business,” he boasted to a friend, “on the part of the British.”

  Unfortunately for Blount, the letter was stolen while its recipient was drunk, and its contents became public knowledge. Presented with evidence of his treachery, the Senate voted twenty-five to one for his expulsion and arrest on the charge of “high misdemeanour inconsistent with public trust and duty.” But, when Blount fled back to Tennessee, the United States proved powerless to compel his return despite the constitutional obligation on states to send back fugitives from justice. Tennesseans demonstrated their own opinion of hi
s offense by electing him to the state legislature, where he served as speaker until his death.

  Left to fend for himself by a government that was too weak to help, either militarily or politically, Ellicott immediately had to deal with the reverberations of Blount’s conspiracy. Fear of British participation prompted Gayoso to issue a warning that martial law might have to be imposed. The settlers reacted with fury, egged on by Blount’s chief lieutenant in Natchez, Anthony Hutchins, the silver-haired planter who was the recognized leader of Natchez’s large contingent of British-born settlers. Gayoso should be kidnapped, he told Ellicott, and taken into the prairie on the other side of the Mississippi to be dealt with by the Chickasaw. By early June the state of public opinion in Natchez, Ellicott told Pickering, “might be compared to flammable gaz; it wanted but a spark to produce an explosion!”

  In this complex and unstable situation, Ellicott was inexorably drawn from his role as boundary commissioner to act as the representative of the United States. An attack by the settlers on the Spanish garrison might trigger a wider conflict with Spain and would certainly kill the already shaky Treaty of San Lorenzo. Given the hostility of the Spanish government, the incapacity of the U.S. government, the treachery of its senior general, and the influence of a British planter over American settlers, Ellicott’s actions over the following weeks entitle him to most of the credit for ensuring that the treaty was finally enacted.