The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  “As to our business I can say nothing at present,” he wrote cautiously to Sally, “and candidly confess that I do not yet comprehend the method pursued by the British astronomer and Mr Hastler [sic], it is different from anything I have yet seen or heard of, not more than one observation in ten can possibly be applied to the boundary. Those that can are probably good, but their mode of calculation is laborious in the extreme.”

  In truth time had caught up with him. Unlike his eighteenth-century predecessors, who had to provide their own instruments, Hassler spent thousands of government dollars on the finest apparatus by the most advanced craftsmen in London—telescopes by George Dollond, lens-maker to King George III, a mechanical dividing engine from Jesse Ramsden capable of machining metal to accuracies of one thousandth of an inch, and the jewel of them all, a thirty-inch repeating theodolite weighing three hundred pounds, created by the Tiffany of instrument manufacturers, Edward Troughton, an object so perfect that Hassler named his next son after its creator. Money bought him time as well. While Ellicott congratulated himself on measuring ninety miles on the Pennsylvania border in ninety days, Hassler spent forty-three days measuring a line less than nine miles long. The difference appeared in their results. The late-nineteenth-century commissioners who checked the Pennsylvania border congratulated Ellicott on making errors of less than one foot in a mile, a ratio of less than 1 in 5,280, but in the 1970s Hassler’s work was found to have an error rate of just 1 in 100,000.

  Between them, however, the astronomers succeeded in running the forty-fifth parallel from the St. Lawrence 120 miles east to the Connecticut River. Neither they nor anyone else could resolve the confusion created by the nonexistent Highlands and multiple rivers until 1842, when a compromise line was agreed in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. But sufficient harmony existed in 1819 for the United States and Britain to come to an understanding about the rest of the frontier running west from the Great Lakes. From their shores, it was to follow the forty-ninth parallel as far as the Rockies. Beyond that lay the Oregon Country, the chunk of coast and mountain between the Russian colony of Alaska that stretched as far south as 54 degrees 40 minutes, and Spanish California, which reached a little north of San Francisco. Both Britain’s Hudson Bay Company and the United States’ John Jacob Astor had fur-trapping bases in Oregon Country, and so in the remarkable Convention of 1819 that settled the rest of the Canadian frontier, the two countries agreed to share control of the area for ten years.

  At almost the same time as this agreement was being hammered out in London, the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was bringing to an end two years of negotiations with the Spanish foreign minister, Luis de Onís, about the southern frontier. The talks were triggered by Andrew Jackson’s ferocious campaign against the Seminoles of Florida to prevent their attacking cotton plantations in southern Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. In 1817 he led a militia force across the boundary with Spanish Florida that Ellicott had so meticulously drawn. He burned Seminole villages, captured Pensacola, hanged two British citizens there, and assured the president, “Let it be signified to me through any channel that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.”

  The flamboyant image of Jackson, coughing, cursing, and carrying a bullet in his chest fired during a duel, captured the public imagination and did much to push him toward a political future. Monroe, however, with nearly all his cabinet, disowned the general. Jackson’s one defender was the secretary of state, who argued that the Spanish authorities had brought the raid upon themselves by failing to control the Seminoles. To avoid future trouble, Adams proposed that Spain should “cede to the United States a province [Florida] of which she retains nothing but the nominal possession.” This argument became the basis of his negotiations with the Spanish foreign minister, backed by huge claims for compensation for the damage suffered by American planters, and by brutal hints that Texas by rights belonged to the United States under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase.

  Having set out his negotiating position, Adams then offered to drop the claim to Texas and to find $5 million to pay off the American claimants. In exchange Spain would be required to give up Florida and the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans and agree to establish the western frontier of the Louisiana Purchase. His unremitting hard bargaining coincided with the crumbling of Spain’s immense, three-hundred-year-old American empire as revolution spread throughout South America. The outcome was the remarkable 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty.

  In it Spain ceded Florida and the Gulf Coast on either side of the Mississippi delta as far west as the Sabine River, marking the border with Texas, but what was chiefly remarkable about the treaty was the new western boundary with the United States that Adams insisted upon. This extended northwest from the Gulf in a series of doglegs until it met the forty-second parallel in the Rockies, then ran due west along the parallel until it reached the Pacific Ocean. Officially, this western frontier simply confirmed the extent of the Louisiana Purchase, but not even Jefferson had supposed that the land bought from Napoleon extended west of the Rockies.

  On the day that the agreement with Spain was signed, Adams was exultant. “It was near one in the morning when I closed the day with ejaculations of fervent gratitude to the giver of all good,” he wrote in his diary. “It was perhaps the most important day of my life …The acknowledgment of a definite boundary to the [Pacific] forms a great epocha in our history. The first proposal of it in this negotiation was mine.” Virtually unaided, his diplomacy had parlayed Jackson’s illegal raid into a massive acquisition of territory from Florida to Oregon.

  For the first time, the United States ran from coast to coast, and a sequence of events had been set in motion that would lead by way of manifest destiny to the Oregon Trail, and the settlement of the far west. Thanks to Adams, wherever the pioneers went, they would always remain within the jurisdiction of the United States, the beneficiaries of its property-owning, freedom-guaranteeing laws. His frontier made the frontier myth possible.

  That Adams has never received proper credit for his massive contribution to the nation’s growth is due at least in part to his remote and deeply conflicted character. Harvard-educated, first a lawyer, then a diplomat by profession serving in Britain and Russia before being appointed secretary of state, he was deemed too privileged to be in touch with popular opinion, but in 1811, a generation before manifest destiny became the national mantra, he had made it his goal.

  “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation,” he told his father, “speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs. For the common happiness of them all, for their peace and prosperity, I believe it is indispensable that they should be associated in one federal Union.”

  He never lost his passion for U.S. growth, arguing that Canada should become part of the Union, as should Cuba, which he described as a “natural appendage” to the continent. “It is a physical, moral, and political absurdity,” he declared, “that such fragments of territory, with sovereigns at fifteen hundred miles beyond sea, worthless and burdensome to their owners, should exist permanently contiguous to a great, powerful, enterprising, and rapidly growing nation.”

  Yet his astonishing achievements could not prevent Adams from believing his life to have been a failure. For all his cosmopolitan background, he remained a Puritan New Englander, tormented by conscience and convinced that the nation’s future greatness depended not on military force, but on its moral virtue. The United States, Adams declared in 1821, “proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government… Her glory is not dominion but liberty.”

  This was not rhetoric. At the heart of the Monroe Doctrine, the foreign policy strategy that he created for his president, lay his belief in the moral superiority of U.S. dem
ocracy to Europe’s monarchical governments. Warning Europe to stay out of North and South American affairs, James Monroe told Congress in 1823, “The political system of the [European] powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America…We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

  It was not his defeat by Jackson in the presidential election of 1828 that made Adams a failure in his own eyes. It was the realization that the expansion of the United States spread slavery as well as freedom, and that the rights of black Americans to life and liberty were being swamped by the right to property guaranteed by the Constitution. The flaw was so deep, he questioned whether the nation deserved to survive. “If the Union must be dissolved,” Adams concluded, “slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.”

  Within the newly enlarged frontiers of the United States, few would have disagreed with Adams’s first assessment that Divine Providence had intended the expansion of the United States. Indeed, the association of God with the nation’s foundation in freedom and democracy was made explicit in the extraordinary surge of spiritual renewal known as the Second Great Awakening. Like the First Awakening in the 1750s, it was spread by itinerant preachers, and its initial appeal was to western farmers far from centers of organized religion. Ellicott had encountered some of the earliest hot gospelers out in the Alleghenies, and the violence with which they challenged existing beliefs appalled him. “O my God!” he exclaimed. “What mischiefs Arise in this Sublunary World among us small and inconsiderable beings about the forms which will best please thee.”

  The message preached by wandering ministers in the backwoods was utterly at odds with the unquestioning obedience to God’s predestined will that traditional Presbyterian and Puritan churches had always stressed. It was liberty and independence that the mad, unwashed genius of the camp meeting, Lorenzo Dow, used to harp on when he held crowds of thousands electrified during the early 1800s with his theatrical groans, his tortured screams, and shouts of triumph. “But if all men are ‘born equal’ endowed with unalienable right by their Creator in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he cried out, “then there can be no just reason, as a cause, why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.”

  Individual commitment was the first step in the road to salvation mapped out by Dow and other revivalists, followed by good works on behalf of others. To families who had already committed themselves to a life in the unknown far from civilization, and who aimed to get ahead by their own unremitting labor, it was an appealing doctrine. What began as wilderness heresy, however, proved to be in tune with the country’s increasingly activist, optimistic mood. Churches once scandalized by the camp preachers’ antiauthoritarian message—the Methodist assembly in Britain banned its members from even associating with Dow when he preached there in 1805—adapted their own teachings until by the 1820s the precepts of the Second Awakening had virtually become national orthodoxy. Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a respected New England minister, prophesied in 1828 that “the West is destined to be the great central power of the nation, and under heaven must Affect powerfully the cause of free institutions and the liberty of the world.”

  This individualized, democratic form of Christianity was inseparable from the politics that came out of the west at the same time. While most Atlantic states continued to impose high property and wealth qualifications for voting so that the electorate was restricted to less than 10 percent of the white male population, the new western states immediately admitted a much wider selection of voters. One third of Illinois’s white males voted in 1820, and an electorate of more than one million sent Andrew Jackson to the White House in 1828. By the middle of the century a majority of states had done what would have been unthinkable to the Founding Fathers and removed voting restrictions for white males altogether.

  The east still regarded frontier manners with a mixture of humor and amazement in 1826 when Congressman Davy Crockett came to Washington from Tennessee. Sophisticated journalists invented a coonskin cap for him and wrote a fake frontier biography in which he boasted that he was “fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping-turtle.” By the time Jackson stepped down from the presidency a decade later, frontier values had become the norm. Even the campaign managers of William Henry Harrison, the unmistakably aristocratic Whig candidate, found it an advantage to portray him on election posters in 1840 outside a log cabin with a pipe in his mouth and a jug of hard cider at hand.

  It had taken a long time, but Jacksonian democracy had demonstrated that eastern government’s exclusive democracy could become more inclusive. Its forebears had, in large part, been Scots-Irish squatters—what George Washington and the planter class called banditti—but their sons had succeeded in capturing the nation’s capital and colonizing its Anglo-American values. They would not be the last immigrants to attempt the feat.

  Yet the most potent agent in distributing power democratically was not the vote but the Public Land Survey, and that too had become a western phenomenon. In 1820 the smallest parcel put up for sale became the half-quarter section (eighty acres), and the minimum price was lowered to only $1.25 an acre. For those who could not afford even this amount, Jackson’s government passed the first of several Pre-Emption Acts, allowing squatters under certain conditions to claim up to 160 acres of any land they had improved.

  Had John Quincy Adams wanted, he could easily have demonstrated the superiority of the United States to the Old World in this area too. Across mainland Europe, peasant was the usual term for someone working the land, meaning that his rights were limited to partial ownership at best or at worst simply to the produce. Even in Britain, where an aggressive program of enclosures in the eighteenth century had created thousands of private holdings from communally owned land, most farms were leased, usually for a term of nineteen years, and the capital value of any improvements the farmer made were retained by the owner.

  “Compare this with the situation of the American farmer,” the Scottish radical John Melish challenged readers of his Travels in the United States in 1818. “He cultivates his own soil, or if he has none, he can procure it in sufficient quantity for 200 or 300 dollars. He can stand erect on the middle of his farm, and say, ‘This ground is mine. From the highest canopy of heaven down to the lowest depths, I can claim all that I can get possession of within these bounds; fowls of the air, fish of the seas, and all that pass through the same.’ And, having a full share of consequence in the political scale, his equal rights are guaranteed to him. None dare encroach upon him; he can sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and none to make him afraid.”

  Essential to the spread of this form of democracy was the transformation of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers into Hamilton’s enterprising speculators, or, as they were called with increasing frequency, capitalists. Land was bought and improved only to be sold, and the profit invested farther west. State banks fed the trend by issuing credit with reckless abandon until the markets abruptly collapsed in the fateful year of 1819. But by the time that Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in 1831 to examine the phenomenon of American democracy, the speculative engine was roaring again. “It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies,” he observed in Democracy in America. “Especially in the districts of the Far West he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it.”

  The dispersal of wealth through the Public Land Survey encouraged the growth of a society unlike any other before it in history. It fostered not only a sense of independence, but also those qualities of resilience, enterprise, and individualism that historians would associate with the frontier. As t
he influential British economist Edward Gibbon Wakefield wrote in England and America in 1833, it was the foundation for a society where “the increase of capital is divided, pretty equally, among a number of capitalists increasing at the same rate as the capital…in such a state of things, the independence and self-respect of all begets a love of equality.” To the numerous European visitors to the United States in the early nineteenth century, nothing was more astonishing than its egalitarian nature.

  “America, then, exhibits in her social state a most extraordinary phenomenon,” de Tocqueville concluded. “Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.”

  . . .

  For all their admiration of democracy in the United States and the freedom given to most of its citizens, foreign visitors, especially from Britain, were struck by one glaring exception. “The existence of slavery in its most hideous form,” wrote James Stuart of Scotland, in Three Years in North America, “in a country of absolute freedom in most respects, is one of those extraordinary anomalies for which it is impossible to account.”

  In Britain, slavery had been dealt its death blow in 1772 when Lord Mansfield, the chief justice, ruled that an American slave, James Somerset, who had been taken into the country must be released because no British law had been passed to legalize the state of slavery. “The state of slavery is…so odious,” he declared, “that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law [i.e., legislation specifically making slavery legal].”