The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  The sheer size of the United States that Ellicott had defined—“with room enough for all our descendants,” as Jefferson told Congress in 1801, “to the thousandth and thousandth generation”—created its own impetus toward greater freedom. Many moved west to escape the long-established, hierarchical government of the Atlantic states that always weighed most heavily on the poorest. Squeezed between subsistence farming and county courts geared to the demands of banks and creditors, New England and Pennsylvania farmers headed toward the prairies. And in the south, the exhausted soil and the monopolization of good land by politically well-connected planters pushed tobacco and cotton farmers toward the Mississippi Territory.

  They were moving away from the Atlantic states psychologically as well as physically. Formed by British colonialism and the Revolution, the instinct of the east coast, typified by Jefferson’s recommendation for tight federal control of the territories, was to see itself as the privileged custodian of republican democracy. Until the Spanish were worried out of Natchez, frontier families remained, as Ellicott noted of those in the Ohio Valley, dependent on the eastern states for their markets, their cash, and their protection. With the Mississippi open, however, those ties were immediately weakened. Increasingly the “brave, enterprising and warlike” people to be found on the frontier relied on their own resources, developing an independent outlook at odds with that of the eastern establishment. Had Ellicott retraced his voyage down the Ohio River on his return, he would have found the poverty-stricken past rapidly disappearing. The 1800 census counted in excess of 45,000 settlers on the Ohio side and 220,000 in Kentucky, with more following on their heels faster than ever.

  In one important respect, however, settlers still had to look east. So long as they remained within its frontiers, the United States guaranteed their property and liberty. Thus to safeguard those rights, westerners needed influence in Washington.

  During his absence, the past had almost disappeared from Ellicott’s neat brick house on Market Street. The three eldest children were ready to leave home and begin new lives as married adults. The youngest, born after his departure, had died before his return, to Ellicott’s “inexpressible concern”; the two infants had grown to childhood, and the middle three were now adolescents. In his absence, Sally Ellicott had held the household together, paying bills, wheedling allowances from the State Department, and, when her father died, spending her inheritance as she wanted. A miniature painted of her at this time shows someone solid and unaffected, with a determined chin and steady gaze, but missing from it is the quick, teasing humor that her daughters learned from her. In law, wives might be dependent upon their husbands, but by character and necessity Sally Ellicott demonstrated that she possessed a wholly independent spirit.

  The demands of modern life were soon brought home to her husband. With a gentlemanly disdain for practicalities, Ellicott had refused to draw his salary while away and expected to receive $8,000 in back pay and expenses on his return. In the dying days of the Adams administration that proved impossible. Pickering had been fired, and his successor would not authorize payment of so large a sum. Twice Ellicott wrote to President Adams, asking for an interview to discuss his work, but was ignored. Then, a few weeks after he had presented his report with its accompanying charts, the Treasury where it was housed caught fire, destroying the only official record of his work. It was as though he had no real existence.

  His one political contact was Thomas Jefferson. The first of Ellicott’s letters to him was written within weeks of his arriving back in Philadelphia and was concerned almost exclusively with his discovery that lunar observations could give longitude as accurately as Jupiter’s moons. On every count, as a scientist, a republican, and a friend, Ellicott regarded himself as a Jeffersonian Republican, and in subsequent letters he expressed increasingly desperate hopes that once his hero was elected, he would be paid. But after the hung election of 1800, three months passed before Congress broke the deadlock by electing Jefferson president over Aaron Burr.

  By then Ellicott had his back to the wall. “I have been obliged to sell my valuable library and dispose of my Theodolite to procure money for market to morrow,” he burst out, “and for nothing but faithful services, [I] never used a farthing of public money, never lost a single observation by absence or inattention, and never when out on public business was caught in bed by the sun.”

  Responding to this urgent appeal, Jefferson took up his case, and one of his earliest messages as president promised that Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury, would “receive any application from Mr Ellicott and do justice on it.” Not all his expenses were covered by this belated back payment, however. To earn more money Ellicott responded to an offer from a Philadelphia printer and prepared for publication an edited version of the journal he kept during the running of the southern boundary.

  The Journal of Andrew Ellicott was published in the summer of 1803. It should have been the great public vindication of almost four years of continuous diplomatic and scientific labor that had defined the western and southern borders of the United States. There was an account of his careful scientific scrutiny of weather and landscape on the descent of the Ohio, the detailed celestial observations at the mouth of the river, and judicious commentary on frontier communities. “That some turbulent persons are to be met with on our frontiers, every person possessed of understanding and reflection must be sensible,” he wrote, “but there are few settlements so unfortunate as to merit a general bad character from this class of inhabitant.” He argued strongly against the injustice of taxing the whiskey that was their only cash-making activity: it risked stirring up rebellion that might “terminate in the destruction of all order, and regular government, and leave the nation in a state of nature.” Ellicott never had any confidence in human nature without a government to keep it in order.

  Inevitably his role in keeping the peace in Natchez and maneuvering the Spanish troops out of the fort served as the centerpiece, and he was careful to link Hutchins and Blount as colleagues in the British plot, although Wilkinson and the other participants in the Spanish conspiracy were identified only as “some gentlemen residing in the western part of the US.” Despite the immense labor of running the actual frontier, his enjoyment of doing what he was good at was unmistakable, and the last section concerning the voyage home of The Sally read so like an adventure story that the detailed maps and long appendix filled with minutely observed and calculated celestial sightings almost seemed out of place. It was, and is, a remarkable record that should have earned him lasting fame.

  However, in June 1803 while the book was still in press, the astounding news broke that the United States had agreed to purchase Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte, a territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Once owned by Spain, it had secretly been transferred to France in 1800 to become the basis of a new French empire in North America, in exchange for a small kingdom in northern Italy. Despite his promise not to let it leave French control, Napoleon had no compunction in selling Louisiana for the $15 million he needed to finance his war with Britain. At a stroke, the western frontier Ellicott had been at such pains to establish had jumped from the banks of the Mississippi to the Rockies.

  In a hastily rewritten introduction, Ellicott acknowledged that the Louisiana Purchase would secure free navigation on the Mississippi, but drew on his Natchez experience to point out that the “sale of the lands west of the Mississippi might have a tendency to scatter our citizens, already too widely extended to experience all the advantages of society, civilization, the arts, sciences, and good government, and to lower the price of our public lands by bringing too great a quantity to market.” Far more valuable to the United States, he suggested, would have been the acquisition of the two Floridas with New Orleans, because then superb harbors such as Pensacola and great rivers such as the Mobile would allow not only settlers in the Mississippi Territory but also those in western Georgia to export their produce.

 
; Nothing he could say altered the fact that the immensity of the Louisiana Purchase had utterly overshadowed the first enlargement of the United States through the San Lorenzo Treaty. Yet without the earlier acquisition that brought American territory to within seventy miles of New Orleans, the second might never have taken place. Had the treaty not been implemented, the territory that France received from Spain would have stretched on both sides of the Mississippi as far north as the Ohio River. The strategic pressures that persuaded Napoleon to sell his American empire—the failure of his troops to quell the slave revolt on Haiti and the wish to defeat Britain—would have remained, but the importance of the land he owned, especially with its control of the whole length of the river, would have been immeasurably greater. Had the idea of selling such an asset even arisen, the price would have increased dramatically, perhaps beyond reach of the United States.

  In real terms, however, the critical achievement of Ellicott’s short-lived western frontier was to be found in its effect on the loyalties of the settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee. Until Ellicott’s arrival in Natchez, plans to detach the western states from the United States still seemed feasible. Once the Spaniards had been worried out of their forts, however, General James Wilkinson, the most active conspirator, believed that the opening of the Mississippi had killed any prospect of secession.

  Two years after the Louisiana Purchase was arranged, the general had second thoughts. The substance of his earlier plot to create a western empire was resurrected and became the structure of the confused events known as the Burr conspiracy. Since it still depended on enlisting the loyalties of a large number of western settlers against the interests of the United States, it provided a direct check on what changes, if any, had taken place in their allegiance.

  The conspiracy began when Aaron Burr, the former vice president and nearly president, shot Alexander Hamilton in July 1804 and thereby killed his own political career. He sought refuge in the Philadelphia house of Charles Biddle, a close relative of James Wilkinson’s wife, Ann Biddle. Still ambitious, Burr found a kindred spirit in the general, who was approaching the apogee of both his careers, as Spanish spy and American officer.

  Jefferson had publicly demonstrated his confidence in Wilkinson by appointing him military commander of New Orleans in 1803. On the very day that the Stars and Stripes was hoisted in the city, the American general met Governor Folch, recently promoted from East Florida to Louisiana, to complain that his payment as a Spanish agent was $20,000 in arrears. Once that matter was settled, he specified that to protect his cover in future, his handlers were always to communicate in cipher, and never to write his name: “[I] always shall be designated by the number 13.”

  One of Agent 13’s first betrayals after his New Orleans meeting concerned a project that Jefferson deemed vital to the future of the United States, the mission being prepared by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Ostensibly, the interests of their expedition were scientific, extending no further than a wish to acquire specimens of soil, vegetation, and fauna, but Wilkinson informed his paymasters that the real purpose of the mission was to discover a route to the Pacific Ocean. The president’s close interest was shown when he sent Lewis to Ellicott for three weeks’ intensive instruction in mapmaking using an equal-altitudes telescope for star and moon observation (see appendix). Lewis visited other experts such as Robert Patterson and Dr. Benjamin Rush for instruction in navigation, medicine, and botany, but in Jefferson’s grand plan for the expedition, the importance of creating an accurate map of their route was second only to the exploration of the land itself.

  It was this secret that Wilkinson betrayed. His report enabled the Spanish to send out a series of armed patrols to intercept Lewis and Clark when they set off in May 1804. By luck the Americans evaded the searchers, but subsequent expeditions were less fortunate.

  The following year, the president again enlisted Ellicott’s aid in finding people to lead further missions to explore the Red River, the Padoucas, and other tributaries of the Mississippi. Candidates’ talents had to include “astronomy enough to take the latitude and longitude, the latter by lunar observations indispensable, this being the main object of the enterprise. Bravery, prudence, habits of hardy living, some knowledge of Indian character, a degree of knowledge of the subjects of botany, Nat[ural] history and mineralogy would be useful qualifications.” The president asked whether one of Ellicott’s former colleagues, William Dunbar or David Gillespie, was available and, with Ellicott’s endorsement, chose Dunbar, along with the botanist George Hunter to lead the exploration.

  In 1805, the year that he began to conspire with Burr, Wilkinson’s fortunes reached a new height of prosperity. On the U.S. side, President Jefferson appointed him governor of Upper Louisiana, while the Spanish, having paid arrears of $12,000 for his past service, arranged a new financial package paying him as much for his work as Agent 13 as he received as a general in the U.S. army. His fortunes were reflected in his face. A contemporary portrait reveals the alert dark eyes sunk to the size of raisins in his swollen pink cheeks, and the jowls inflated until they blur the outline of his jaw and compress his mouth to a pout. But his mind remained sharply attuned to the advantages of playing both sides of the street.

  He followed up his treachery over the Lewis and Clark expedition by systematically betraying to the Spanish no fewer than four subsequent exploration teams. Although William Dunbar was lucky enough to escape on his first journey up the Red River, his second mission ended in capture by the enemy, as did Thomas Freeman’s and finally Zebulon Pike’s. With cold logic, Wilkinson also urged on his paymasters a long-term strategy to hold up the United States’ expansion westward by exchanging the two Floridas for the Louisiana Purchase.

  The match between Wilkinson and Burr came in their desire for land, the ultimate measure of wealth in the early nineteenth century. The plot they concocted was to seize territory in southern Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico, but the key lay in finding support in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Mississippi Territory. With a corps of seasoned troops, the conspirators hoped to harness the ambitions of several hundred Americans in New Orleans who had formed themselves into the Mexican Association with the aim of acquiring Mexico’s silver mines. Wilkinson undertook to divert U.S. regular troops and militia to Natchitoches near the Red River border with Texas, leaving New Orleans and the southern route into Mexico open to Burr’s supporters.

  In the course of 1805 Burr sounded out potential allies from Kentucky to New Orleans, including Andrew Jackson and Daniel Clark. The change that had taken place in the new west since 1795 was evident in their response. Jackson’s initial friendliness, which extended to providing boats for Burr, evaporated when he discovered that the intended empire included U.S. as well as Spanish territory. “I fear you will meet with an attack from quarters you do not expect,” he warned the governor of Orleans Territory, which included New Orleans. “Be upon the alert; keep a watchful eye on your general…You have enemies within your own city that may try to subvert your government and separate it from the Union.” Clark had moved so far from his earlier intrigues with Wilkinson that he was then planning to run for election as territorial delegate to Congress. Long before Burr had completed his preparations, Clark too was warning New Orleans officials to be on alert against the coup.

  As information about the conspiracy began to reach both the Spanish and American governments, each turned for confirmation to Wilkinson. Clearly alarmed by so much attention, the general acted true to form by betraying his friend. In the fall of 1806, both Foreign Minister Cevallos and President Jefferson learned of the conspiracy. Early in 1807 Wilkinson arrested two of Burr’s advance guard in New Orleans, and with Jefferson publicly proclaiming his guilt as a traitor, Burr himself was taken shortly afterward.

  The significance of the Burr conspiracy lies precisely in its failure. Sentiment in Kentucky and Tennessee had changed, and as Jefferson commented, Burr “very early saw that the fidelity of the western country was not to
be shaken.” The loyalty that Ellicott had struggled to gain from former French, British, and Spanish citizens in the Mississippi Territory had clearly taken root. The U.S. government had kept the Mississippi open for their trade, and the U.S. Constitution guaranteed their freedom and their property. Whatever their previous inclinations, the settlers had become unmistakably Americanized.

  . . .

  That the first loyalty of settlers in Natchez and the Mississippi Territory should have been to the United States rather than to a particular state illustrated a simple principle: as the territory of the United States expanded so did the power of the federal government. Only Congress could admit a state to the Union, and until its admission, Article Four of the Constitution gave Congress “Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.”

  Although this draconian power might be limited in practice by local interests, Ellicott’s experience in Natchez left no doubt that the federal government possessed the authority to decide the crucial issues of distribution of land and the legitimacy of slavery in a territory. In 1802, when Georgia at last ceded to the United States its claims to western territory, the Natchez demonstration was repeated, this time as the state’s gigantic Bourbon County was incorporated under federal law into a larger Mississippi Territory. And what happened on a small scale in Mississippi would occur on a gigantic scale in the Louisiana Purchase.

  It was ironic that Jefferson should have arranged the purchase that made this increase in federal power possible. In 1798 he had established the case for states’ rights in response to John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts with their catchall description of sedition as “writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States.”