The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  His lack of diplomacy infuriated the Choctaws, whose suspicions had already been aroused by Gayoso’s hints that the Americans intended to take more of their territory. They expelled the local Indian agent, and word rapidly spread eastward as far as the Creeks in East Florida that the boundary due to come through their territories was intended to take land from the American Indians. Before leaving New Orleans, Ellicott sent Hawkins an urgent message to meet him in Pensacola.

  Despite Pickering’s almost despairing pleas for economy, Ellicott decided to buy a boat in New Orleans for this final part of the frontier and, finding none for sale, had a two-masted schooner built, which he named The Sally. It was not an entirely quixotic decision. His precious instruments and rapidly growing stack of official correspondence could be more safely stored aboard ship than hauled across the rough land beyond the Pearl River. The vessel would be sufficiently shallow in draft to sail up the Mobile and Apalachicola rivers to establish exactly where the thirty-first parallel crossed them, and thereafter it would carry most of the team round the tip of Florida and north to St. Marys. Meanwhile the actual line would be marked out by his young surveyors, and especially by an unstoppable northern Irishman named David Gillespie, who ran random and true lines back and forth like a weaver’s shuttle.

  What was quixotic about Ellicott’s choice of transport was his decision to skipper the vessel himself, never having been to sea in his life. Ahead lay shoal waters and privateers in the Caribbean and blue waters in the Atlantic, challenges to make the most experienced mariner pause. When the forty-ton schooner cast off from a New Orleans dockside on March 1, 1799, with the U.S. boundary commissioner as captain, onlookers must have wondered how so sensible a man, one so dedicated to the pure rationality of science, could be so rash.

  Surprisingly, the plan worked well initially. The schooner was hauled by teams of laborers thirty miles up the Mobile River to meet the surveyors at a point close to the junction between the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers. After three weeks of painstaking celestial observation, Ellicott established that the thirty-first parallel was precisely 518.55 perches, or 1 mile, 1,189 yards, and 9 feet to the south, a distance that was measured out with chain and compass and checked again. On April 10 a boulder was set in place to mark the boundary’s exact position, and this three-foot-high, iron-red marker, despite being half-hidden by trees and blasted by buckshot from drunken hunters, remains intact. On the south side are carved the words “Domino de S M [Kingdom of His Majesty] Carlos IV, Lat.31., 1799,” and on the north, “U.S Lat.31., 1799.”

  A voyage along the coast brought them in July to Pensacola, a larger and more prosperous port than Mobile, whose well-protected bay—“justly considered one of the best on the coast” in Ellicott’s opinion—provided quantitites of succulent fish, oysters, and crabs. There, Ellicott encountered the Spanish governor of East Florida, Vicente Folch, who ruled with a harsher discipline than Gayoso used in New Orleans and exercised an active influence over the roughly twenty-thousand-strong Creek population through bribery and political manipulation. To Ellicott’s relief, Hawkins was there too, a sparely built man with the contained, almost impassive demeanor that Native Americans often looked for in counselors.

  Folch greeted him with the warning that the Upper Creeks, those farthest from the coast, were extremely hostile to the frontier. Hawkins learned, however, that their hostility was being stirred up by Folch himself. Like the Iroquois, the Creek organized their society round a system of checks and balances that divided groups into factions labeled Italwalgi, meaning White or peaceful, and Kipayalgi, which meant Red or war. The agreement of both sides was necessary before a decision was made.

  Far upstream on the Escambia River, The Sally was stopped by the Tallassee, the dominant Creek group in the area, under their leader, Mad Dog. In a dramatic encounter, Hawkins persuaded the White majority that the frontier was an international agreement, accepted by both the United States and Spain, and not a device to take their land. Half-convinced, Mad Dog replied that if Hawkins was right, Folch would not appear at the meeting because “his tongue is forked, and as you are here, he will be ashamed to show it.”

  Folch duly stayed in Pensacola and sent a deputy instead, who was forced to declare publicly that Spain supported the need for a frontier. With that assurance, Mad Dog agreed to accompany Gillespie on the increasingly dangerous task of running the guideline through to the next major river. Two weeks of laborious observations amid clouds of mosquitoes and stinging insects allowed Ellicott to complete his observations on the Escambia. Then The Sally slipped back down the river to Pensacola, and out into the Gulf of Mexico once more, rounding the promontory of Cape San Blas that protects the harbor of Apalachicola from westerly storms, and into the port then known as St. Marks.

  To Ellicott’s dismay, the officer in command of the Spanish fort was Captain Thomas Portell, the man who had physically delivered the sum of $9,640 to Power for payment to Wilkinson in 1796. The money, he testified, was indeed for the general’s services as a Spanish agent. Ellicott’s bitterness at this independent confirmation of Wilkinson’s treachery found an outlet in his reply in July to yet another of Pickering’s dispatches protesting the cost of the expedition. Angrily Ellicott reminded him of the length of the Natchez negotiations, the difficulties of running the line through swamp and forest, and the threat of Indian attack. He ended with a declaration that sounded as though it were addressed not to Pickering but to Wilkinson: “My desire is to support a government I venerate, and my pride to serve faithfully a country which I love, the country in which I was born, and which contains everything I hold dear.”

  By then he was almost alone in his determination to persist with The Sally strategy. Pickering wanted him to cut the expedition short, and Minor, Spain’s boundary commissioner, was growing desperate to get back to Natchez. But Ellicott pressed on up the Apalachicola River to meet the survey party. Here the overhanging trees were covered in poison ivy, and a childhood allergy caused blisters from head to foot. “The evaporation from the dew from this plant in the morning falling upon me is sufficient to produce the effect,” he observed, and the intensity of the inflammation forced him to plunge into the river, “which was the only relief I could find.”

  Nevertheless, three weeks were spent taking delicate measurements from the edge of the moon’s circumference to the dazzle of the sun and the shimmer of Castor and Pollux at their zenith. On August 21 Ellicott wrote wearily to Thomas Pickering, “I positively am almost worn out by the excessive heat, want of sleep, long, tedious and laborious calculation, in which I have no assistance.” He promised himself three hours sleep, then “near three o’clock in the morning, I shall observe an immersion of the first satellite of Jupiter.”

  On the banks of the Apalachicola they constructed the last observation point marking the thirty-first parallel, loaded the canoes, and while Gillespie returned with his Tallassee escort to run the true line back to the Escambia, Ellicott and the main party paddled down to the junction with the Flint River. There he set himself to another marathon of sky-gazing, but by now his relentless pursuit of exactness had tried everyone too far.

  Sixteen months after he had set out with Ellicott from the banks of the Mississippi, the uncomplaining Minor had finally had enough. So long as the Upper Creek inhabited the area, he argued, Europeans would be kept out, and so an exact boundary was irrelevant. They should sail immediately to St. Marys on the Atlantic coast and simply calculate back from there where the boundary should run. Without warning, he dismissed the Spanish military escort and most of the Spanish laborers, telling them they were no longer needed because the line would not be run any farther east. “I suppose you will be angry,” he said to Ellicott, “but I must now tell you those men of yours are no longer necessary either.”

  It was a fruitless protest, and with infuriating persistence, Ellicott once more had an observation hut constructed on the nearest high ground to establish the precise location of the mouth of the Flin
t River. But the patience of the Upper Creek had also broken. Despite Hawkins’s intervention, warriors from the Red factions began to circle the camp threatening to attack. Reluctantly Ellicott packed up his instruments, and under cover of darkness and torrential rain he and his assistant sailed back to Apalachicola while Minor traveled overland with the remainder of the party and the escort to St. Marys.

  Esteban (Stephen) Minor

  Ellicott’s despair was clear in the report he sent to Pickering. “It is with the most sensible mortification I have ever experienced that I have to inform you of the failure in part of our business,” he wrote, seemingly oblivious to Pickering’s repeated hints that it was time to abandon running the last part of the line in order to save money.

  Waiting for him at Apalachicola was an appeal for rescue that briefly revived his hope. Lieutenant James Woolridge of Britain’s Royal Navy had been shipwrecked on a nearby island, and among his passengers was William Augustus Bowles, who claimed to be leader of all the eighteen Creek tribes. “Understanding that you have been driven by the Indians from the country where you were employed,” wrote Woolridge, “I beg leave to inform you that General Bowles, the Chief of the Creek Nation expresses his wish to see you much, as he thinks your unfortunate differences may be settled.” To Ellicott the message appeared to offer a final opportunity to establish an exact frontier between the Flint and St. Marys.

  Loading supplies into an open boat, he sailed with a couple of crew for the sandy strip of land where the British ship was wrecked. There they were stranded for a week by a ferocious storm, in which time Ellicott discovered that Bowles was an adventurer being used by the British against Spain, and that like Cresap and every other adventurer living beyond the reach of formal government, Bowles loathed boundaries. Far from encouraging the Creeks to accept Ellicott’s work, he promised to mobilize them to prevent the establishment of any sort of frontier, and to capture the fort at St. Marks, as part of a general uprising to resist any extension of Spanish rule.

  With his last hopes dashed, the U.S. commissioner finally did what everyone from the secretary of state, Esteban Minor, and the court at Madrid down to the least important Creek warrior wanted and, in mid-October, set sail for St. Marys. A warning was sent to Hawkins and Pickering of Bowles’s plans, but no mention was made of his own folly in aiding them.

  Yet the future provided some vindication for Ellicott’s obsession. In 1800, Bowles launched his promised attack on St. Marks fort and captured it before embarking on a general campaign of Creek resistance to Spanish rule. The mayhem he created forced Governor Folch to put a reward of $4,500 on his head, but the bounty did nothing to prevent Bowles’s influence from spreading in East Florida. It was Ellicott’s frontier that proved his nemesis. North of it, Hawkins’s influence pervaded everywhere, and when Bowles made the mistake of crossing it to stir up trouble in the United States, Hawkins had him arrested by friendly Creeks. In 1803 he was taken to Pensacola and handed over to Folch, who kept him imprisoned until his death.

  Unexpectedly, Ellicott proved a masterly skipper, although he had never been out of sight of land before. The majority of sea captains still relied on dead reckoning—calculating direction from compass measurement and distance from the passage of a float attached to a line thrown overboard—but with a sextant, an equal-altitude instrument, and a chronometer, Ellicott could estimate their location so precisely that when they reached Tampa Bay in October, he could confidently state, “[It] is laid down on our charts too far north by at least 15 minutes [about seventeen miles].”

  As they swung eastward through the Keys, the sort of eighteenth-century science practiced by members of the American Philosophical Society allowed him to make himself at home in islands he had never visited before. He ran chemical tests on a specimen from the rocks and “found it to effervesce with the vitriolic acid,” showing that it was lime made from dissolved shells. He examined the reefs and concluded, “Coral is not as was formerly supposed a vegetable substance, but a vast collection of small animals which build up those rocky edifices from the bottom of the ocean!” He found freshwater that had been filtrated through the lime and was stored in natural cavities in the rock. He told the crew that it was safe to eat the prickly pears growing wild on the islands, although “my people were not a little surprised the next morning on finding their urine as if it had been highly tinged with cochineal.” He identified a score of different kinds of fish pulled from the surrounding sea, ranging from hogfish, grunts, and groupers through snappers, turbot, and stingrays. He fed the crew on three different kinds of turtle and supplied them with meat by shooting deer and plover.

  In the Atlantic, The Sally and her crew faced starvation, a long chase from a hostile privateer, and a storm that threatened to capsize them. Their hunger was ended by the gift of a fresh turtle and a barrel of pork from friendly privateers, and having “crowded all our sail,” they were able to draw away from their sinister pursuer. And off the coast at Cape Canaveral, “a sudden and violent gale [that] laid the vessel almost on her beams before the sails could be handed” proved that The Sally was not only fast but seaworthy. “The appearance of the sea was truly alarming,” Ellicott wrote in his journal, “and though our vessel laid to with ease, and laboured but very little, the main deck was constantly covered with water, and the seas broke over us with such rapidity for some hours that I was seriously apprehensive of foundering.”

  On December 2, the gale blew itself out after forty-eight hours, and the same day they sighted land. Ellicott’s noon observation showed that they were just north of St. Marys River, where the frontier began and ended. Waiting impatiently for them were the remaining members of the expedition, Esteban Minor, David Gillespie, and George Cochran, who had walked there from the Flint River. They had arrived in early October and, as an irritated Minor informed Ellicott, “have been in daily expectation of seeing you arrive. This state of suspense and expectation joined to the desire of returning to our families has made these two months go with a leaden step, and increasing tediousness and anxiety. Do for heaven’s sake be quick, and let us have done with this disagreeable business.”

  Being quick was impossible for Andrew Ellicott if it meant skimping on accuracy. Because the treaty stated that the line from the Flint was to run to the source of the St. Marys River, he was determined to find it. Unfortunately it was lost somewhere in the seven-hundred-square-mile expanse of the Okefenokee Swamp. Almost everyone, but especially Gillespie and Minor, was prepared to accept an educated guess at a place just outside the swamp, because no one, not even the Creek Indians, went into it. But Ellicott insisted on hiking right into the waterland until he found a lagoon that fed the stream. From there he ran a traverse line back to the first solid bit of land where an observatory hut could be built and endured two nights of mosquito torture to take his observations.

  “The trip was a disagreeable one,” he told Hawkins with masterful understatement, but could not help boasting of having gained some unexpected territory for his country. “The United States extends further south than we had any Idea of, and the source of the river is 30 degrees 34′ North.”

  On February 26, 1800, he and Minor marked the spot with “a mound of earth thrown up on the west side of the main outlet, and as near to the edge of the Swamp as we could advance on account of the water.” With that the boundary was complete. They descended downriver to St. Marys, drew up their official report, and went their separate ways.

  Minor, Ellicott’s childhood friend and constant supporter, never spoke to him again, driven as near to outright enmity as someone of his patient nature could be by the torture of the Ellicott passion for exactness. Gillespie too departed in a fury of irritation. But George Cochran, who only had to supply the food, left a testimonial expressing his admiration for Ellicott’s “indefatigable zeal and perseverance” and his “gratitude and esteem for the man that so highly contributed to the fortunate issue of affairs at Natchez.”

  A remnant of the crew helpe
d sail The Sally to Savannah, Georgia, where she was unloaded and sent back to the U.S. fort at St. Stephens on the Mobile River for use by the garrison in patrolling the river. Meanwhile a letter dated April 5 was being delivered to Sally Ellicott in Philadelphia: “My Love, I once more have a speedy prospect of returning to you, for whom alone with our dear children, relations and friends, does life appear desirable—I have done my duty to my country to the extent of my abilities, and my ambition is fully gratifyed. I am my dear Sally Your affectionate Husband.”

  Contrary winds held up the boat from Savannah to Philadelphia, but finally on May 18, 1800, more than than three and a half years after he’d left, he arrived back in his home city. It was dark by the time he stepped inside the door, but once it closed behind him, “all the fatigues, hardships and difficulties I had been exposed to during a long absence were more than compensated by the pleasure I experienced in meeting my family in good health.”

  Chapter 8

  The Reach of Government

  The farther we go northward, the more undecided is the frontier [of Louisiana]… this part of America contains little more than uninhabited forests or Indian tribes, and the necessity of fixing a boundary never yet has been felt there.

  DENIS DECRÈS, France’s minister of marine and colonies, 1802

  Ellicott returned like Rip Van Winkle to a country he barely recognized. Philadelphia was no longer the capital, Timothy Pickering no longer the secretary of state, George Washington was dead, so too was David Rittenhouse. Robert Morris, John Nicholson, and James Greenleaf, the millionaire land speculators who had dominated the economy, were all bankrupt. Most astonishingly, a nation that had stretched only raggedly beyond the Appalachians now ran west to the Mississippi, south to the thirty-first parallel, and was overflowing northwest through the territories of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as far as Michigan. The new republic was growing into what Andrew Ellicott proudly described as “the American Empire.”