The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Nevertheless, when the court of inquiry called for all relevant papers to be made available to it, Jefferson’s relationship with the general forced the president into an uncharacteristically barefaced lie. In a special message to Congress on January 20, 1808, the president claimed to have turned over all the documents called for except Ellicott’s ciphered letter to Pickering, which had been sent on conditions of secrecy. Its contents could be obtained from Ellicott, the president explained, “and directions have been given to summon him to appear as a witness before the court of inquiry.”

  Ellicott’s appearance in court and his testimony of Wilkinson’s corruption would surely have ended the career of a man judged by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to be “the most consummate artist in treason that the nation ever possessed.” But Jefferson’s message ended with a fatal, final paragraph that rendered any simple response impossible:

  “That which has recently been communicated to the House of Representatives, and by them to me, is the first direct testimony ever made known to me, charging General Wilkinson with the corrupt receipt of money.”

  Knowing this to be untrue, Ellicott found it impossible to appear in court where cross-examination might force him to reveal that the president had lied to Congress. He provided the court with an affidavit covering the material he had sent Clark, but refused to appear in person. Without his presence and manifest integrity in court, his written testimony amounted to no more than hearsay evidence. Although Daniel Clark provided confirmation that Wilkinson had received regular payments from Spain, he was deemed a hostile witness, and Wilkinson’s Spanish paymaster testified that the $9,640 was in fact compensation for a spoiled cargo of tobacco. In June 1808 the court found James Wilkinson innocent of treachery.

  The consequences of his acquittal reached far. It led to the dismissal of Ellicott from the Pennsylvania Land Office following the election of Thomas Snyder, a supporter and friend of Wilkinson’s, as governor of Pennsylvania in 1808. In what amounted to a vendetta, Snyder’s administration went on to deny Ellicott the use of a powerful telescope belonging to the state, and to frustrate an attempt by the American Philosophical Society to create an observatory for him in Philadelphia.

  On a national level, the damage went deeper, since Wilkinson’s long tenure as senior officer continued until the eve of the War of 1812 with a corrosive effect on the capability of the U.S. army. Neither Jefferson nor, from 1809, James Madison questioned his assurances about the state of military preparedness. With an overconfidence chillingly familiar to the present day, Secretary of War William Eustis declared, “We can take the Canadas without soldiers, we have only to send officers into the province and the people… will rally round our standard.”

  The U.S. army that marched into Canada in 1812 was the product of the Wilkinson years, and it was easily turned back by a hastily assembled force of Canadian militia who inflicted heavy losses on the attackers. Only in 1813, and after his promotion to major general, was Wilkinson at last dismissed, and then for inefficiency rather than treachery.

  In their contempt for the new boundaries of the United States, Burr and Wilkinson belonged to an earlier era when adventurers like Blount and Se-vier, and secessionists like Rufus King and Theodore Sedgwick, barely considered the frontier to be any constraint to their ambitions. The New England shippers who turned smugglers in defiance of Jefferson’s 1807 Embargo Act forbidding trade with Britain shared the same outlook, as did Governor Caleb Strong of Massachusetts when he set out to explore the possibility of the state making a separate peace with Britain in 1814. Yet, that the entire nation did go to war in 1812, despite the furious opposition of New England and New York, was itself evidence of the growing sense of oneness.

  Out of the conflict came a national anthem, but also a government that, more than any since Washington’s, was seen to be national. When the newly elected James Monroe toured the eastern states in 1817, he was acclaimed not just as president but as the representation of the nation, almost an elected king. His arrival in Connecticut, the New Haven Herald commented with uppercase pleasure, was the occasion “for a general burst of NATIONAL FEELING,” and in Baltimore the welcoming committee “waited upon him and made a speech suitable to the occasion, according to the ancient customs in France, whenever the grand monarch visited different parts of his kingdom.”

  Nowhere did this deepening sense of loyalty to the Union take firmer hold than in the western states, which had been formed out of U.S. land and had never known a separate existence before the Union. But there national feeling took on a different form. The young generation growing up beyond the Appalachians held independent, egalitarian views at odds with the east coast’s instinct for hierarchy. The Atlantic states might have won the Revolution, but as Fielding Bradford, editor of the Kentucky Gazette, irreverently put it in 1821, they also “drowned and burned witches, and stood with their hats under their arms at the doors of great men.” The westerners had their own superstitions, but they did not doff their hats for anyone. They considered themselves to be the very democracy for which the Revolution had been fought.

  The incarnation of their values was Andrew Jackson, who was to prove himself the great champion of the U.S. government against the states. He was also the champion of western farmers determined to win land from the Native Americans for their own use. Like no other president before him, he used the formidable power that the federal government possessed within its frontiers to make property available for Americans. And he chose to benefit a class of Americans that had until then been kept away from power by the restrictive voting demands of the eastern states.

  So indelibly is Jackson’s name and fiery personality associated with the stunning rout of Britain’s first-line troops at the battle of New Orleans in 1815, it is easy to forget that he was a lawyer by profession. The traditional picture of him is the archetype of the frontiersman administering his own justice in duels and physical violence, in accordance with the sage advice of his mother: “Andrew, never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself.”

  Nevertheless his living came from the law, and in Tennessee’s tangled system of land distribution, the majority of legal cases concerned property boundaries and titles. People might fight over personal issues—and for white men the southern code of honor that developed in the antebellum years insisted on this as a mark of masculinity—but where property was concerned, they went to court. There, as a recent historian put it, they would find that the law “treated property offenders much more harshly than those accused of violence.”

  In fact Jackson’s passionate loyalty to the Union and his adherence to a legal system devoted to defending property were two sides of the same coin. Like many of his contemporaries who bore names like Boone, Calhoun, Crockett, and Houston, Jackson traced his family roots to the self-assertive Scots-Irish immigrants who had settled and often squatted in the backcountry of the old Atlantic colonies. Politically he and his colleagues were the heirs of the Regulators, suspicious of eastern elites, hostile to Indians, insistent on representative government and equal voting rights—at least for white, adult males—and deeply concerned with the efficiency of local administration.

  Andrew Jackson

  It was not by chance that one of Jackson’s earliest exercises in government, as de facto military governor of Florida shortly after its acquisition from Spain in 1819, should have concerned the payment of sheriffs. In a public proclamation creating a structure of administration for the new territory, he stated, “There shall also be a sheriff appointed to each court, to execute the process thereof, whose services shall be compensated by the court to which he is appointed.” In other words he was to be paid a salary rather than living off what he could squeeze from poor farmers. Jacksonian democracy began at ground level. But like the Regulators, the need to safeguard their property also drove the Jacksonians to take an interest in Washington. The reason was simple. Only th
e federal government could take land from the Indians and measure it out as property for its citizens.

  From the moment that Ellicott’s frontier enclosed the greater part of Creek territory, its inhabitants became vulnerable to the same pressures that had removed the Iroquois from their land. But until the War of 1812, Benjamin Hawkins had acted as a bulwark, fending off white attempts to move into Creek land, and simultaneously enabling the Creeks themselves to learn through practical farming and elementary schooling the skills they needed to adjust to the relentless advance of the new Americans. His efforts had bought both sides fourteen years of peaceful coexistence.

  In 1813, Jackson launched his military career when he led the Tennessee militia in a campaign against those Upper Creeks who had supported Tecumseh’s war against the United States. Deriving the name from the Reds or Kipayalgi, meaning the warrior faction, Americans called them Red Sticks. The Italwalgi, or White Stick Creeks, either kept out of the conflict or fought with Jackson’s troops at the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 that crushed the Red Stick forces. Yet the treaty that Jackson imposed applied to both hostile and friendly Creeks indiscriminately, forcing them to cede half their territory, more than twenty million acres, to the United States.

  It was Hawkins’s particular torture to be at Jackson’s side as the forced cession was announced. He was thus seen to be associated with the betrayal of those peaceful Creeks who had followed his advice and abandoned traditional ways in favor of those used by property owners. When he died two years later, it was said to be of a broken heart.

  But as president, Jackson would have an infinitely larger stage on which to act. The frontiers of the United States were about to expand far beyond the wildest dreams of the most ambitious Tennessee farmer. And one of them would be run by Andrew Ellicott.

  Chapter 9

  American Tragedy

  … the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified…If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Journal, 1820

  The first designated U.S. frontier, the line separating it from Canada, was also the most complicated to run. Less than four years had been needed to establish the southern boundary with Spain, but deciding where on the ground Canada began and the United States ended took more than six decades after the frontier had first been delineated on a map.

  The particular difficulty concerned the most easterly part of the line from the Bay of Fundy to the St. Lawrence, in other words the strange, crumpled horn thrusting up into the belly of Quebec and New Brunswick that is Maine’s northern border. On gigantic maps more than six feet tall and four feet across, the American and British negotiators at the Treaty of Paris drew thick red lines to indicate where they thought the United States should extend. Then in 1783 they put in words what they thought they had indicated.

  According to Article II of the Treaty, the frontier would run “from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, viz. that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of the Saint Croix River to the Highlands; along the said Highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St. Lawrence, from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean, to the northwesternmost head of the Connecticut River; thence down along the middle of that river, to the forty-fifth degree of north latitude.”

  If ever there was an argument for defining frontiers by Andrew Ellicott’s star-based calculations rather than by natural features, it was provided by Article II. Two Saint Croix rivers meandered through the woodlands; instead of a neat row of mountains, “the Highlands” revealed themselves to be a bewildering mess of hills with no clear watershed to make a northwest angle from which a line could be drawn; and anyway nobody was able to find the source of the Connecticut River. Astronomers could locate the forty-fifth parallel, but the rest was confusion. Consequently the frontier remained undefined until after the 1812 war, when it was decided in the Treaty of Ghent that commissioners from each country should be appointed to sort out the muddle.

  In 1817 the U.S. boundary commissioner Cornelius Van Ness wrote to the sixty-three-year-old Ellicott asking for his help in running the forty-fifth parallel. His presence was vital, Van Ness said, not only “so that great accuracy should be attained, but … so as to gain to both governments entire confidence in its accuracy.”

  It was a belated tribute to a man who by then had almost been forgotten. His obscurity was partly the consequence of his prickly personality, but mostly because he had blown the whistle on President Thomas Jefferson’s favorite general. Denied the chance to earn a living from his science, Ellicott had survived largely on handouts from his wealthy brother Joseph, chief agent for the Holland Land Company, who earned a commission on every acre sold in upstate New York and ended up owning most of Buffalo and assets worth half a million dollars.

  Money had never been Andrew Ellicott’s priority. What he valued was civilization, by which he meant a proper respect for science. But as though Wilkinson’s hostility were a curse, even a contract in 1811 to run the state line between Georgia and North Carolina turned sour. Convinced that the existing line drawn along the thirty-fifth parallel was almost twenty miles too far south, Georgia’s governor, David Mitchell, a feisty immigrant from Scotland, employed Ellicott to establish the true line, hoping to gain about eight hundred thousand acres from North Carolina. In his usual, meticulous fashion, Ellicott spent weeks establishing that the existing line was in fact too far north. “All that part of the country [was] erroneously laid down in all the maps of the state,” he explained to Joseph. “This discovery embarrassed me extremely as our subsequent operations would have to be performed in the most rugged and mountainous part of the United States.” It was far more embarrassing to Governor Mitchell, who learned that instead of gaining land from North Carolina he was about to lose almost 625,000 acres of Georgia. In his frustration, he refused to pay more than $3,000 of Ellicott’s bill for $5,000.

  Only when Wilkinson was at last relieved of his command did Ellicott’s luck turn. Appropriately, the realization that the army needed better-trained commanders was what led to his rehabilitation. In 1813, James Monroe, secretary of war in Madison’s administration, wrote asking him “if the appointment of Professor of Mathematics in the Military School at West Point in the State of New York with the pay & emoluments of a Major of Infantry in the Army, equal to One thousand Dollars per annum, with allowance for quarters, fuel & servants, will be acceptable?”

  Originally chosen as the site of a fort for its strategic command of the river below, West Point consisted of a scattering of white-walled, red-tiled barracks, schoolrooms, and houses that looked out across a vast parade ground to the Hudson Valley. The military academy had been founded in 1802 with the intention of training officers for the Corps of Engineers and was at first restricted to just twenty cadets, whose selection and education depended largely on the whims of the superintendent. At the outbreak of war, Congress authorized a dramatic increase in its roll to 250 cadets, and the introduction of a more structured curriculum.

  “The emoluments it is true are small, but I believe sufficient to support myself and small family,” Ellicott acknowledged, “but in point of respectability it is inferior to none in the government, and in the Europe the first scientific characters are attached to their military academies. And there, as well as in this country, the professor of mathematics is considered the principal or president of the institution.”

  He had always enjoyed passing on knowledge to his “family” of young assistants, and it is clear from their affectionate memories that he was equally good with the cadets. They nicknamed him Old Infinite Series, in reference to his fondness for the circle-squaring sequence, 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 + 1/9 − 1/11, that Rittenhouse had taught him long ago on the Pennsylvania frontier and that had beguiled the silences
of many long Quaker meetings. Cadets would remember how he used to carry a miniature blackboard and sponge attached to his watch chain so that he could work out problems on the move, how his lectures on astronomy began with beguiling ease on the way the sun rose higher in summer than in winter and ended with fearsome equations to work out longitude from the position of Castor and Pollux, and how perfectly he drew geometric shapes on the blackboard with a cord and straightedge. “There are some,” ran one account, “who will recollect Professor Ellicott sitting at his desk at the end of a long room, in the second story of what was called the Mess Hall teaching geometry and algebra, and looking and acting precisely like the old-fashioned school-master, of whom it was written,

  “‘And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew

  “‘That one small head could carry all he knew.’ ”

  From this comfortable existence he was summoned to help establish the northern frontier as he had the southern. His first summer in 1817 on the line from the St. Lawrence to the Connecticut River was an uneventful exploration of the route. On his return two years later to establish the exact frontier, he had the disturbing experience of being overtaken by history. On the forty-fifth parallel, he was joined by the new generation of boundary-makers, Ferdinand Hassler, the Swiss-born U.S. surveyor, and the British representative, Dr. J. L. Tiark. From August through the end of September, Ellicott followed the old routine of viewing, timing, noting, and calculating that had served him throughout his life. He observed the alpha stars in the constellations of Aquila and Aquarius, the Pole Star, and the beta star in the Little Bear, bodies as familiar as those of his children; he measured their movements and read up his findings, but this time the routine did not quite give him the confidence it always had in the past.