Appendix
Great Circle
In two dimensions the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In three dimensions it is a curve. The basic problem this presents can be seen by comparing a conventional map with a globe. On the map, it may seem that the shortest distance from London to New York, for example, is a straight line running southwest across the Atlantic, but in three-dimensional reality, as transatlantic travelers quickly notice, the shortest route actually takes a northerly course passing close to Greenland. Hence the sight of glaciers from an aircraft window and, in an earlier age, the tragic fate of the Titanic. This route, known as a Great Circle, is a circumference of the earth. Extended beyond New York, it passes through the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific to New Zealand on the far side of the globe and returns through Asia to London.
It was this paradox that Mason and Dixon used to check that their line really did run east-west along a parallel. Instead of following a compass bearing of 90° due west from their starting point, Charles Mason calculated that they should follow a Great Circle directed at 89°55’51” west of north. This would bend away to the north from the parallel but recross it after about twelve miles. The separation at its widest point ought to be no more than twenty feet. At every mile an offset, or perpendicular line from the Great Circle, would be measured out to the parallel, and at the point of intersection elaborate checks using a zenith sector, or vertically aligned telescope, were undertaken to establish longitude and latitude.
The quality of the science was reflected in the instrument they used. First constructed in the 1720s, zenith sectors abruptly changed the parameters of accuracy in stargazing. The largest examples were up to twenty-five feet long and suspended vertically so that the viewer had to lie on the ground staring upward, but their magnifying power and concentrated view of stars when they were directly overhead and most clear of refraction almost immediately brought about two discoveries: that the earth wobbles on its axis, and that in the time a star’s light takes to reach earth, a star will have shifted its position slightly. Minute though these distortions were, once they had been eliminated, observation of the stars could achieve new levels of precision. One immediate payoff was the discovery in 1736 by the French astronomer Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis, using a zenith sector in Lapland, that the earth was not round but, as Isaac Newton had predicted, flattened at the poles likes a squashed orange. That Mason and Dixon were equipped with a six-foot-long zenith sector specially built for them by John Bird of London, with such added improvements as a micrometer screw that allowed adjustments to the nearest half second of arc, indicated their status. It was, as Thomas Penn remarked with some pride, “a very well executed and most curious Instrument,” which had cost him three times as much as the inferior one provided by Lord Baltimore.
A Great Circle and Rhumb Line
The stars also provided the direction that Pennsylvania’s boundary was to take. Each night, as they appeared to move from east to west across the heaven, they were tracked with a transit, or rotating telescope. When the selected star reached the angle of 89°55’51” west of north, the telescope was locked in position so that it could swing no farther, then was tipped vertically down toward the horizon where an assistant stood about half a mile away with a lantern in his hand. Shouted commands sent him right or left until he was located precisely in the crosshairs of the telescope. The spot was marked, and in daylight a line was laid out in that direction. Several stars would be tracked in the same way to reduce the chance of error, but in the morning the lantern markers were usually found to be within inches of one another.
At the point where the Great Circle intersected with the parallel, further meticulous observations and calculations taking up to a week established the precise latitude and longitude. Once any corrections had been made, a visto or avenue through the trees was cleared along the line of the parallel back to the previous intersection point with marker stones inserted at every mile.
RHUMB LINE
To confuse matters further, Andrew Ellicott devised in 1785 a method of determining a parallel that relied on a third view of what constituted due east-west. Sailors found it more convenient to follow a constant compass bearing, for example 90 degrees (due east) or 270 degrees (due west). This line, known as a rhumb line, appears on the ground as a slight upward (in the northern hemisphere) curve. The curve occurs because the vertical meridians are in fact converging toward the north pole, and cutting each at right angles imperceptibly pulls the traveler along a circle. Ellicott’s method, whose accuracy depended on multiple celestial observations (Ellicott estimated that at six different points he had made a total of 366 timed sightings) at the meridianal cutting point, became the model for the running of most east-west state lines, and of the U.S.-Canadian border.
Running a meridian or north-south line presented fewer problems. Such lines make a circumference of the whole earth, converging at the north and south poles. Thus a straight line heading due north or south will automatically follow the line of a Great Circle.
Finally, to end on a note of existential anxiety, all geographical terms, including north, south, east, and west, are merely conventions, and we can never be absolutely and precisely sure where we are in the real world. Even the center of the earth, the given point for celestial navigation, shifts, because variable densities of mass below the earth’s surface change the direction of the gravitational pull toward it depending on when and where the force is measured. Indeed to modern geodesists, able to detect the daily rise and fall of oceans and mountains in millimeters, the earth appears as a gigantic, pulsing, pustulating, irregular globule. To make sense of it, they assume that it takes the form of a perfect earth-shape, known as a geoid, round which a series of related but artificial coordinates can be plotted. The most commonly used system, known as WGS 84, is based on the Global Positioning System, but around the world and in different parts of the United States, regional systems using different geoids and coordinates are employed because they produce more useful local results. When questions over the precise line of boundaries in areas of conflict such as the Middle East can result in violence and bloodshed, this is not a reassuring thought.
NEVIL MASKELYNE
To safeguard the ships of the Royal Navy, Parliament offered in 1711 a prize of £20,000 (about $90,000 in an era when $300 a year would keep a family) for the most effective way to work out longitude. The answer had to be a timepiece of utter reliability so that commanders could compare the time at Greenwich, London’s port, with their local time and estimate by the number of hours’ difference how many degrees they had traveled to the east or west. Famously the answer was provided by the self-taught genius John Harrison, whose watches lost barely one second a day. By taking two chronometers, one keeping Greenwich time, the other adjusted to local time, a sailor could estimate his longitude after weeks at sea to within a few miles. To mariners, the villain of the piece was Britain’s astronomer royal, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, whose machinations denied Harrison the money until shortly before his death. In the navigation of the American wilderness, however, the dry, driven, perfectionist Maskelyne is the hero because his method of celestial navigation was more precise than anything achieved with Harrison’s watches.
In 1766 Maskelyne brought together a series of star maps built up by himself, and former astronomers royal such as John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley, and combined the results with the lunar tables produced by Tobias Mayer, a German mapmaker. The results were published in the Nautical Almanac, and for the next forty-five years, Maskelyne personally supervised its annual production. To help navigators, he also brought out four volumes of Tables Requisite to be used with the Nautical Ephemeris for finding the latitude and longitude at sea, containing formulas and calculations for use with the almanac. In all these works, Maskelyne based his calculations on the time at Greenwich.
STATE FINANCES
It is notoriously difficult to arrive at accurate figures for state finances between
independence and the assumption of states’ debts by the federal government in 1790. Taxes were paid, at least in part, in depreciated paper money, and often a year or more late. In Pennsylvania, the numbers are especially confused due to the Enron-like accounting practices of John Nicholson, the state comptroller and financial dictator from 1782 to 1794. Nevertheless, it is clear that wherever borders were run, the states increased their revenues, largely from taxes and duties, but also from land sales.
Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the Society of Authors for generously providing financial assistance in the writing of this book. The great expert in the field of early American measurement in general, and on the life of Andrew Ellicott in particular, is Silvio Bedini, formerly deputy director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. I am deeply grateful for his friendship, his generosity with advice and expertise, and his kindness in making available the fruit of his own research. I thank my friend Dr. Tom Schmiedeler of Washburn University, Kansas, for his encouragement and for sharing his enthusiasm for midwestern geography. I benefited enormously from the advice and assistance of Jack Ericson, archivist at the Daniel A. Reed Library, State University of New York at Fredonia, New York, concerning the background of the Ellicott family in New York and the wider history of the Seneca. I also thank for their help Edwin Danson, whose Drawing the Line is the definitive account of the running of the Mason and Dixon Line; Roger Woodfill of the Surveyors’ Historical Society; Dr. Penry Williams, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford University; Alan Smith, John Roberts, and Lyn Cole. I am profoundly grateful to George Gibson of Walker & Company, who has read, criticized, and tirelessly encouraged far beyond the call of duty. As always, I am indebted to my agent, Deborah Rogers, for her enthusiasm and unwavering support. And to my wife, Marie-Louise, my eternal thanks for her loving support throughout the research and writing.
I acknowledge with gratitude the professional assistance of the staff at the London Library, the British Library, the Library of Congress, the District of Columbia Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the West Point Military Academy Library, the New York Public Library, the Daniel A. Reed Library, the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Notes
FORESIGHT
2 “stretched along the western border like a cord of union”: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (paper presented to the American Historical Association at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois).
3 The scene on top of Mount Welcome is described by Andrew Ellicott (AE) in a letter to his wife, Sally (SE), July 30, 1784, quoted from Andrew Ellicott: His life and letters by Catherine Van Cortlandt Matthews (New York: Grafton Press, ca. 1908) (referred to as AE Life).
8 John Cotton’s sermon “The Divine Right to Occupy the Land” (London, 1630).
9 “I never Saw the inside of a School”: The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam, ed. Rowena Buell (Marietta, OH: Houghton Mifflin, 1904).
9 “A doubloon is my constant gain”: Draft letter in George Washington’s journal, 1748. Quoted in George Washington by Henry Cabot Lodge, vol. 1, reprint of 1898 edition (New York: AMS Press, 1972).
10 The so-called Yankee-Pennamite War, in reality rarely more than skirmishes, lasted from 1754 to 1775. Connecticut’s claim to the valley was based on its 1662 royal charter allocating it all the land from “Norrogancett [Narragansett] Bay on the East to the South Sea [Pacific Ocean] on the West parte.” This battle saw the seven hundred Pennsylvania militia under Colonel William Plunkit defeated by about three hundred Connecticut settlers under Colonel Zebulon Butler, with, however, only one casualty.
11 Treaty of Westphalia: Despite the tendency to downplay Westphalia’s significance in the development of the nation-state, it remains the most convenient moment from which to date the growing importance of territory over person as the chief symbol of the state. This trend is reflected in the different emphases offered by Hugo Grotius’s 1625 De jure belli et pacis and by Emmerich de Vattel in The Laws of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law in 1758. www.lonang.com/exlibris/vattel/index.html.
12 “many are the waking Hours”: Andrew Ellicott to Sarah Ellicott, September 11, 1785, AE Life.
12 “to support a government I venerate”: Andrew Ellicott to Timothy Pickering, June 19, 1799, Papers of Andrew Ellicott, Library of Congress, control number mm 75019679 (referred to as Papers).
13 “he has the appearance of an antient [sic] athlete”: entry in Ellicott’s personal journal, AE Life.
14 “Here, every citizen”: Morris Birkbeck, Letters from Illinois (1818).
14 “ ‘Twas they who rode the trackless bush”: “Pioneers” by Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson, first published in Town and Country Journal, December 19, 1896.
15 “Asia for us is that same America”: Quoted in Natasha’s Dance:A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes (London: Allen Lane, 2002).
CHAPTER 1
17 The summer of 1784: “Meteorological Imaginings and Conjectures” by Benjamin Franklin (May 1784), printed in Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester (London, 1819).
18 “If we can have clear Weather”: Personal journal entry, November 12, 1784, AE Life.
20 “laudable example”: Bk. 1, chap. 18, “Of the Establishment of a Nation in a Country,” The Laws of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law by Emmerich de Vattel (1758), www.lonang.com/exlibris/vattel/index.html.
21 The history of Solebury Township can be found in chap. 18, The History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania by W. H. Davis (Philadelphia, 1905).
21 The Ellicott family history was assembled by AE’s great-niece Martha E. Tyson in A Brief Account of the Settlement of Ellicott’s Mills. With fragments of history therewith connected (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, Peabody Fund Publications no. 4, 1867). Joseph Ellicott Sr., AE’s father, inherited ten run-down houses in Devon, England, in 1767. A typescript record of his journey to sell them and invest the proceeds in clockmaking tools can be found in his Journal to England from December 18, 1766, to September 21, 1767, Holland Land Company records, Reel 15, Buf 17, Daniel A. Reed Library, SUNY Fredonia (referred to as HLC). The will of Samuel Blaker revealed a feud with his son-in-law over a loan of $200 and near disinheritance of his daughter, Judith. She had good grounds for her shortness of temper.
23 “I would wish thee”: Judith Ellicott to Joseph Ellicott, June 5, 1804, HLC, Reel 5.
23 “I never was caught in bed”: AE to James Wilkinson, April 4, 1801, Papers.
23 “I never went to bed”: AE to Thomas Pickering, January 31, 1799, Papers.
23 “I do not like the Country”: AE to SE, July 2, 1784, AE Life.
24 “bold and indigent strangers”: The Conquest of the Old Southwest by Archibald Henderson (New York: Century Company, 1920).
24 “those mad People”: Benjamin Franklin to Dr. Dadwaldr Evans, July 13, 1765.
24 Thomas Cresap: Thomas Cresap: Maryland Frontiersman by Kenneth P. Bailey (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1944). AE’s meeting: May 17, 1785, AE Life. Meeting with George Washington: March 17, 1747–48, The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 1, ed. Donald Jackson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976).
27 “The greatest Estates we have”: Washington to John Posey, June 24, 1767. George Washington Papers.
28 Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon: The complications of Mason and Dixon’s methods are lucidly explained and illustrated in Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America by Edwin Danson (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001). Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). A. H. Mason, ed., Journal of Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 76 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1969).
31 “You were in your young days”: AE to Robert Patterson, March 23, 1800.
31 “[Pennsylvania] is my native country”: Note in personal journal, December 6, 1785, AE Life.
32 Almanacs: “The Maryland Press, 1777–1790” by Joseph Towne Wheeler (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1938). “The Archives of Maryland,” vol. 0438, p. 0103.
32 “the most despised”: A History of American Literature by Moses Coit Tyler (New York: Putnam & Sons, 1881).
34 “The old Gentleman had always too much”: David Rittenhouse by Brooke Hindle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).
35 The results showed that the Mount Welcome observatory: Ibid.
CHAPTER 2
38 David Rittenhouse: Hindle, Rittenhouse.
40 “Conceive a Country”: AE to SE, June 20, 1785, AE Life.
40 Running Pennsylvania’s western border and the conditions encountered come from AE’s journal and letters in AE Life.
41 Modern Pennsylvania measures just over forty-five thousand square miles. Of this, the northerly wedge claimed by Connecticut and New York between the Delaware River and Lake Erie accounted for almost five thousand square miles. The western slice claimed by Virginia would have removed close to one thousand square miles south of the Ohio River, and almost twice as many more to the north of it would have gone to the United States. Many different reasons are advanced for Pennsylvania’s nickname, the Keystone State: the fixing of its boundaries along with those of six of the original states—New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—seems the most plausible contender.
42 Pennsylvania’s economy: Only Germany after the First World War compares with the economic roller coaster that took the United States from hyperinflation to hypodeflation between 1775 and 1785. Within that general picture, the shortage of cash from the early 1780s in the northern states exacerbated the problem there. From Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1935) by way of Forrest Macdonald’s We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) to David B. Robertson’s The Constitution and America’s Destiny (St Louis: University of Missouri, 2005), the literature on the economic effect upon constitutional reform is intense and combative. That the deliberations in Philadelphia generated an inspired dynamic is undeniable, but they did so against a background created by the economic power and ruthlessness of the states.
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