The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Having established that he was still too far north, his team of some forty surveyors, soldiers, and laborers loaded the flatboats again and drifted round the long bend that now houses the Angola penitentiary to Willings Bayou— “eight and a half miles distance but fifty miles on the Mississippi,” Ellicott exaggerated. From there everything was transported by hand, boat, and horse through ten miles of swamps and forest to the top of the Tunica Hills, standing almost fourteen hundred feet above the surrounding woodland.

  “The situation of our encampment on the top of the hill was both pleasant and beautiful,” he purred. “The prospect was very fine, particularly to the southwest which opened to the Mississippi swamp, and gave us an uninterrupted view which was only terminated by the curvature of the earth.”

  There he was joined by the new Spanish frontier commissioner, his friend Esteban Minor, and the astronomer who would carry out the actual observations on behalf of Spain, William Dunbar. Already in his fifties, Dunbar had, as he told Ellicott, volunteered for the job so “that I might reap all benefit possible from your lessons and instructions.” Although they only had a month of collaboration in the field, it was enough to motivate Dunbar to build a late second career in astronomy that led to his election as a member of the American Philosophical Society, and from that to leadership of the first U.S. expedition to explore the Red River.

  The sheer quantity of equipment that Ellicott had his team of laborers haul up the mountain testified to his dedication to achieve accuracy at all costs. As well as two zenith sectors, large and small, there were three telescopes plus an equal-altitude instrument he had built himself, three sextants and an apparatus for measuring horizontal angles, a device for creating an artificial horizon for use with the sextants, a chronometer he had made himself and two stopwatches, two copper lanterns, one surveyor’s compass, two surveyor’s chains, and a variety of mapping equipment. After Dunbar’s departure, the Spanish team led by Minor possessed only a sextant, a compass, and a specialized telescope known as an astronomical circle. But the U.S. commissioner’s manifest passion for accuracy made anything more redundant. Describing to Gayoso his procedure for establishing the parallel, Ellicott gave way to the delight he took in astronomy.

  “It is a pleasing and interesting reflection,” he wrote, “that the present state of science is such, that we can extend our views to the Heavens and from them determine with precision the boundaries of the various governments, kingdoms and empires upon our globe: boundaries which when lost by the carelessness or destroyed by the caprice or wickedness of man may be accurately renewed so long as astronomy shall be understood, and the sun, moon and stars continue to shine!”

  This was the scientist’s credo. Whatever the frailties of human nature, the certainties of science could make them good. And so with an intensity that drove his friends, colleagues, and employer to a fury of irritation, Ellicott dedicated himself to forcing an artificial boundary through the wilderness, guided solely by the stars and undeterred by humidity, mosquitoes, and the hostility of the inhabitants. The feat would take another twelve months, and its scientific significance was only properly acknowledged in France, where the publication of his observations led to his election to the National Institute of France, the nation’s premier scientific body.

  From the governor-general’s office in New Orleans, Gayoso wrote back immediately to assure Ellicott of Spain’s faith in his abilities: “The execution of Astronomical observation of such a nature is not to be doubted when performed by such an Eminent character as you.” Early in June, Gayoso came in person to inspect the operation and offer even more direct proof of his support.

  “Governor Gayoso paid me a visit a few days ago at my Camp in the woods,” Ellicott told Sally, still reeling from the experience. “We met and saluted in the Spanish manner, by kissing! I had not shaved for two days— Men’s kissing I think a most abominable custom.”

  Since this was an international frontier where the most precise measurement was required, Ellicott at first attempted to follow Mason and Dixon’s method of tracing a Great Circle to cut the curving parallel. But in the almost impenetrable undergrowth, the party rarely covered more than a quarter of a mile a day. In September, Ellicott reverted to the procedure he had developed for the Pennsylvania–New York boundary, running a guideline taken from a compass bearing and correcting it periodically, usually at each major river-crossing. The true line was then traced back to the previous observation point, and a mound of earth thrown up at each mile.

  “This mode tho’ less scientific will be much the most expeditious and least expensive,” he assured Pickering, “and in my opinion will satisfy the most scrupulous in both nations.” Since the added costs of his expedition had already gobbled up the original budget of $30,000 plus an extra $12,000 requested by the State Department, this was a welcome economy in Pickering’s view, although it did not stop him from griping at the expense.

  Moving more quickly, they pushed the boundary as far as the Pearl River, about one hundred miles east of the Mississippi, by December. They might have arrived sooner but for a mutiny led by the surveyor, Thomas Freeman, who was responsible for cutting the true line. Ellicott regarded him as “utterly useless,” while Freeman resented Ellicott’s “crusty and unnecessary” interference, and when their quarrel drew in Lieutenant John McCleary, commander of the military detachment, in support of Freeman, work on the line came to a halt.

  At the first opportunity Ellicott wrote letters to the governor, Winthrop Sargent, and General James Wilkinson, demanding their recall. A stern, unimaginative New Englander who soon found Natchez’s boisterous society intolerable, Sargent had no patience with insubordination and readily agreed that Freeman should be suspended. But Wilkinson’s reply was more generous. “My friend, you are warranted in drawing upon my confidence and my friendship at your discretion,” he promised Ellicott on September 30. “Your refractory subaltern shall be relieved and his successor shall be taught how to respect a national Minister.”

  The thirty-first parallel, from the Mississippi River into Florida; the border with Spain then followed the course of rivers to the Atlantic Ocean

  With the removal of Freeman and McCleary, the work accelerated, helped by a change in vegetation as they emerged from the thickset forest into open country. Although numerous creeks meandered southward across their path, Ellicott’s assistants became adept at ranging ahead to lay out the random line and tracking back to establish the true line. When the team paused on Novermber 14 at Darling’s Creek, the commissioner had every reason to be grateful to the army’s senior general.

  Despite Wilkinson’s slowness in sending reinforcements, Ellicott had no firm evidence that he was a traitor. He knew that a spy named Thomas Power was supposed to have traveled upriver in 1797 with a message from the Spanish governor, Carondelet, to Wilkinson, but on the Mississippi every-one, even the upright boundary commissioner, was rumored to be in the pay of his country’s enemies. In the midst of his struggles with Hutchins, Ellicott had passed on to Pickering further allegations that Wilkinson was being paid by Spain, but he had no substantiating proof. Indeed, having suffered from inaccurate gossip himself, Ellicott readily sympathized with the general’s contemptuous dismissal of such talk. “The rats and mice who have been gnawing at my reputation have lost their teeth,” Wilkinson confided, “and some of them now live upon my bounty.” His request to Ellicott for useful military information about paths, defensible points, and the loyalties of local inhabitants was immediately attended to.

  Ellicott was actually at work on a map for the general when a messenger arrived secretly in his camp with documentary proof supplied by Daniel Clark Jr., nephew of Ellicott’s Natchez friend and newly appointed U.S. consul in New Orleans, that Wilkinson was indeed a traitor. The critical item was a letter from Gayoso to Thomas Power revealing the extent of the conspiracy.

  In his accompanying report, Clark described how Power had been sent upriver in 1797 from New Orleans with a c
ask of sugar that contained four dispatches and $20,000 in silver for distribution to Kentucky’s leading separatists. According to Power’s own direct testimony, he had been arrested by a U.S. patrol but released on Wilkinson’s order, then had duly delivered the money and dispatches to the general. As proof, Clark included Gayoso’s letter to Power with his instructions. This revealed that Spain was paying not only Wilkinson but three other influential Kentuckians, Judge Benjamin Sebastian, Michael Lackasang, a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and Senator John Brown, Kentucky’s first U.S. senator. Part of Gayoso’s letter was in the code that Spain used to communicate with its agents, but Clark showed how it could be deciphered using a popular pocket dictionary as the key.

  “The first object of these plotters is to detach the States of Kentucky and Tenesee [sic] from the Union,” Ellicott wrote in his own ciphered message to Pickering. “If that could have been effected this season, the Treaty would never have been carried into effect.” This was only part of a larger plan. Once the secession of the two American states had been achieved, “Genl Wilkinson is to proceed from Kentucky with a body of troops through the country into New Mexico which will be a central position.” It was the scope of the plan that made New Mexico central. From Kentucky to Mexico, a new empire would be created.

  Whatever Ellicott’s inner dismay at this discovery, he immediately went back to work. During the next three days and nights, he studied with a steady eye the distance from the sun’s disk to that of the moon and, as a check, from the moon’s nearest limb to the meridian of Arcturus and discovered that allowing for magnetic variation the random line was a few inches more than 1,175 yards to the north of the thirty-first parallel and adjusted the course of the true line accordingly.

  The State Department, overwhelmed by French attacks on American shipping and the diplomatic crisis known as the XYZ Affair, which saw U.S. protests ignored by France, proved to be less efficient. Ellicott’s dispatch detailing the general’s treachery was filed without any action being taken. A second message adding what came to be a telling detail—that in 1796 Power had personally delivered the exact sum of $9,640 to Wilkinson on behalf of the Spanish authorities—suffered the same fate.

  In a flurry of activity, the line was extended from the Pearl River to the Mobile, and a week before Christmas, Ellicott took time off to report to Gayoso that the first half of the frontier had been put in place. The journey down the Pearl, now Louisiana’s eastern boundary with Mississippi, to New Orleans took almost six weeks through pounding rainstorms and waterways choked with fallen trees. As soon as the formalities with Gayoso had been completed, Ellicott hurried to see Clark.

  The detailed knowledge that Clark possessed about Wilkinson’s treachery came from more than a decade of close intimacy with the general as business associate and confidant. On Ellicott’s recommendation, Clark was appointed U.S. consul in New Orleans in 1797, and convinced that the Spanish would shortly be forced to abide by the Treaty of San Lorenzo, he decided to become an American citizen, and to break with Wilkinson. The plan that Clark revealed to Ellicott betrayed an uncanny resemblance to the one hatched by Wilkinson and Aaron Burr eight years later. Clark himself came under suspicion in the aftermath of what became known as the Burr Conspiracy, and only then did he publicly disclose what he knew of the general’s treachery in a pamphlet entitled Proofs of the Corruption of General James Wilkinson and his Connexion with Aaron Burr. Until its publication, he preferred to have others blow the whistle while his participation was kept under wraps.

  “From the manner by which I have obtained the fore-mentioned information (which I am convinced is correct),” Ellicott assured Pickering, “I am unable to make any other use of it than to communicate it to our first magistrate [the president] and the department of state [in order] that the plan so far as it affects the U. S. may be counteracted—it must remain secret.”

  Under those conditions, Clark produced from a safe a personal letter in Gayoso’s handwriting dated June 1796 in which the governor declared “that the court of Madrid has no design of carrying the treaty into effect.” But perhaps the most striking part of Clark’s information was that Wilkinson had finally abandoned the plan of detaching Kentucky and creating a new empire in the west after the Spaniards evacuated Natchez. What persuaded him was largely Ellicott’s doing. Once the Mississippi was open and the needs of the western settlers had been met, Wilkinson had concluded there was no longer any reasonable chance of detaching Kentucky.

  By the time Ellicott came to report to the secretary of state in January 1799, Clark had opened his eyes to the full range of forces facing him during his year at Natchez. “When you consider the parties under Spanish influence which were combatted,” he boasted to Pickering, “the plans of the officers of his catholic majesty [the king of Spain] which were counteracted, and that contrary to their instructions they were dragged into a cooperation with us in carrying the treaty into effect, I hope you will conclude that my time has not been badly employed.”

  There was reason for self-congratulation. Before Ellicott’s arrival in Natchez, Spain’s control of the Mississippi had extended beyond the mouth of the Ohio. Now it was only a few miles north of New Orleans, and the effects of the new frontier were already being felt. U.S. citizens had begun to exercise their right to warehouse goods in New Orleans—Clark’s customs records show that he had in store cotton from Natchez and Nashville to be shipped on to Virginia, as well as flour from the Ohio Valley and tobacco from Kentucky in transit to Atlantic ports. Less obvious but in the long term no less significant was the way the line was beginning to separate the old mixture of nationalities. In 1798 Gayoso had issued a proclamation that no one living north of the thirty-first parallel could own land south of it except with his express permission. On the other side of the line, people such as Minor and Dunbar, formerly Spain’s most useful citizens, as well as British supporters like Hutchins, now transferred their loyalties to the United States. The nation was taking shape in the south and west.

  Ellicott’s sense of triumph burst out in full splendor when he wrote his wife late in February. With the letter came gifts—a cask of sugar, fans, pecan nuts, and a miniature portrait painted by a Spanish lady. In it he appears serious and gray-haired with shadows beneath his dark eyes. But the dress is that of a hero: silk stock, ruffled shirt, high-collared broadcloth coat, a man of distinction.

  “When you look at the picture,” he told Sally, “you will see the face of a person whose life has been devoted to the service of his country, who has ever since he left Philadelphia been up by brake of day and through the encampment. A person who disconcerted all the plans in this country injurious to the interests of the United States, and tho frequently attacked by a set of as complete villains as ever fled from one country to another, he succeeded in every attempt to serve his country, and will without bloodshed have the treaty in a very few months completely carried into effect.”

  It would have been administratively neat had the frontier continued along the thirty-first parallel right to the Atlantic coast. However, for the last third of its length, it followed the old British line, which was dictated by geography rather than the stars. From the point where it reached the Apalachicola River, the boundary was to descend about twenty miles downstream to its junction with the Flint River—now drowned by the massive, dam-created Lake Seminole—“thence straight to the head of the St Mary’s river and thence down the middle thereof to the Atlantic Ocean.”

  All this was Creek territory. A reputation for ferocity, and the shrewd diplomacy of their half-Scots chief, Alexander McGillivray, who, until his death in 1793, played off Spain against the United States, kept outsiders at bay. Apart from twelve hundred British and Americans living around Fort St. Stephens on the Tombigbee River, there were no settlements between the Pearl River and the Atlantic, and Spain’s possessions were situated on the coast. That situation would change once Ellicott’s line showed how far U.S. jurisdiction reached. A road conne
cting the Mississippi with the Atlantic coast would soon follow, and the knowledge that federal troops offered protection brought an increasing flow of settlers into the area. In the long run, a boundary would prove as fatal to the Creeks as to the Iroquois. But for almost twenty years, Benjamin Hawkins, the chief Indian agent for the south, was responsible more than any other for preventing conflict between the settlers and the Creeks.

  A former senator and aide to General Washington, Hawkins was committed to his old chief ‘s program of inclusion. Almost alone in the federal government, he had developed a coherent policy so that Native Americans could live alongside incomers. “The plan I pursue is to lead the Indian from hunting to the pastoral life,” he told a Moravian missionary, “to agriculture, household manufactures, a knowledge of weights and measures, money and figures, to be honest and true to themselves as well as to their neighbors, to protect innocence, to punish guilt, to fit them to be useful members of the planet they inhabit and lastly, letters.”

  Despite its undertones of cultural superiority, his policy of peaceful assimilation earned him the title Iste-chatelige-osetat-chemis-te-chango or The Beloved of Four Nations—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek— a marked contrast to the derisory nickname the Dirt Captain that his predecessor, Blount, had earned for his greed in stealing land. Hawkins’s approach was most effective among the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, earning them the label of “the civilized nations” in the nineteenth century. But paradoxically, Hawkins felt most at home with the more hostile Creek, among whom he lived and farmed with his Creek wife.

  Ellicott badly needed the help of this legendary figure. He had mishandled the existing policy of the United States, to buy goodwill with gifts and money, by failing to discuss with the West Florida Choctaws his plans to run a frontier through their territory. Belatedly he sent them a message in the summer assuring them, “As soon as the line is marked all our Choctaw brothers who fall on the north side of it will be remembered with our Chickasaw brothers and receive good presents.”