The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  42 “Very few in this Town”: “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania” by Terry Bouton, Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000).

  42 “these cursed hungry caterpillars”: “A Serious Address to the Inhabitants of Granville County, containing an Account of our deplorable Situation we suffer… and some necessary Hints with Respect to a Reformation” by George Sims, June 6, 1765, quoted in Henderson, Conquest of Old Southwest.

  42 The Regulators: “The North Carolina Regulation, 1766–1776: A Class Conflict” by Marvin L. Kay, in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976).

  42 “How long will ye”: An Impartial Relation of the First Causes of the Recent Differences in Public Affairs Etc by Herman Husband (New Bern, 1770), http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6233/.

  44 “New Jersey is our country”: “Obstacles to the Constitution” by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Supreme Court Historical Society 1987 Yearbook.

  45 Thomas Jefferson’s emotional devastation at Martha’s death was widely noted. Patsy’s account and Randolph’s are cited in Understanding Thomas Jefferson by E. M. Halliday (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). I incline to the view of his biographer Joseph P. Ellis that in his grief Jefferson learned “he would rather be lonely than be vulnerable.” American Sphinx by Joseph P. Ellis (New York: Knopf, 1997).

  46 “Nature intended me”: Jefferson to P. S. Dupont de Nemours, Washington, March 2, 1809, The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743–1826, http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/ writings/brf/jeflxx.htm.

  47 “proposed to lay off every county”: Autobiography by Thomas Jefferson, in Thomas Jefferson:Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters (1984).

  48 “if we can obtain an indisputed title”: Thomas McKean to Samuel Adams, August 6, 1782, Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774—1789, ed. Paul H. Smith et al. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000).

  49 by his estimate it could be run: “Report on the Reduction of the Civil List,” March 4, 1784, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–5).

  50 “leave it to [the other delegations] to come forward”: Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Harrison, governor of Virginia, March 3, 1784, ibid.

  50 “the democratic principle is contained”: Origins of the American rectangular land survey system, 1784–1800 by W. D. Pattison (University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Paper 50, 1957).

  CHAPTER 3

  53 Although the 1790 census recorded the population of the city of Philadelphia as only 28,522, the number more than doubled with the addition of the rest of Philadelphia County. According to the census, Baltimore contained 13,503 inhabitants. Benjamin Franklin was responsible for such prewar innovations in Philadelphia as the fire service, municipal cleaning, public library, etc., and postwar Philadelphia was home not only to the American Philosophical Society, but to painters such as Gilbert Stuart, Benjamin West, and Charles W. Peale.

  54 AE’s state of mind emerges both in his letters to SE, and in a personal journal kept during this period. AE Life.

  55 “If you are not in fashion”: Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son went through twenty-nine full editions between 1775 and 1800. Its popularity in the United States led to the publication of nine exclusively American editions during the same period. More than a hundred abridgments and adaptations also appeared, many in the United States, occasionally bound in with Benjamin Franklin’s homelier precepts. Chesterfield’s advice heavily influenced numerous manners books, such as John Gregory’s popular A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, that were published in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See “Authorship, Print and Public in Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son” by Ann C. Dean, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 45, no. 3 (2005).

  56 The Wyoming Valley dispute is well described in Alfred Van Dusen’s Connecticut (New York: Random House, 1961), and in the folksy History of Luzerne County, ed. H. C. Bradley (Pennsylvania: SB Nelson & Co., 1893).

  58 AE’s new method of running a guideline is described in AE Life, and in greater depth in AE’s “A Letter… to Robert Patterson,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 32–51.

  59 “My dear, In consequence of your distresses”: AE to SE, June 12, 1786, Papers.

  61 “This circumstance must be”: AE to SE, May 29, 1787, AE Life. For Wyoming Valley, see Bradley, ed., History of Luzerne County.

  62 The distorting effects of paper money on the political and economic society of the United States appear in John Ferling’s excellent A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Earlier and opposite perspectives come from Beard and the nineteenth-century commentator Alexander del Mar in History of Money in America from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Constitution (Hawthorne, CA: Omni, 1966 reprint of 1899 edition). The most authoritative modern source on taxation is Woody Holton’s “ ‘From the Labours of Others’: The War Bonds Controversy and the Origins of the Constitution in New England,” William & Mary Quarterly 61, no. 2 (April 2004).

  62 Index of wholesale prices: Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1780–1861 by Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, and Miriam Hussey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936).

  62 “I lent the old Congress”: Benjamin Franklin, February 1788, quoted in the preface to 1935 edition of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard (New York: Macmillan Company, 1962).

  63 There is no modern work on boundaries and land sales, but contemporary references indicate that the connection between establishing secure borders and selling land to raise revenue and soak up paper money was taken for granted. The citizens of the “town of Glocester,” for example, petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1786 “to hit upon some mode to cause the back Lands to be Settled in such a manner: as it can be done: as will Discharge the Public Debt.”

  64 “These lands might enable us to pay off ”: North Carolina delegates Hugh Williamson and William Blount to Alexander Martin, October 22, 1782, Letters of Delegates to Congress: Volume 19, August 1, 1782–March 11, 1783 by Paul Smith et al., eds.

  64 The most complete account of early land sales in Pennsylvania is to be found in the Pennsylvania State Archives, Land Records, http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/dam/landrec.htm. The essential guide is Donna Munger’s Pennsylvania Land Records: A History and Guide for Research (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1991). Donation Lands were intended for the redemption of paper money paid to officers and soldiers in lieu of cash. Depreciation Lands were intended to compensate for the falling value of paper money. The 1780 Depreciation Act set the face value of its certificates as equal to gold and silver. The falling value of paper was reflected in subsequent acts that increased the ratio of paper to cash from 3:1 up to 75:1 in 1781—at which level a cash-rich buyer could make a killing.

  64 “All I am now worth”: Beard, An Economic Interpretation.

  65 Distress in western Pennsylvania is the subject of Terry Bouton’s moving “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000).

  65 figures issued by Alexander Hamilton: Alexander Hamilton, “A General Statement of the Domestic Debt, according to the Returns Made to the Treasury by the Several Commissioners Authorized to Issue Certificates of the Public Debt,” American State Papers: Finance (Washington, DC, 1832), 1:239.

  66 In 1786, Pennsylvania simply ignored: Burger, “Obstacles to the Constitution.”

  66 The fiscal weakness of the Continental Congress is underlined by Holton’s “ ‘From the Labours of Others.’”

  67 “almost the whole of the Specie”: Board of Treasury Report, Journal of the Continental Congress, September 2
9, 1786.

  67 The definitive history of the U.S. Public Land Survey is C. Albert White’s A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982). See also W. D. Pattison, The Beginning of the American Rectangular Land Survey System (Ohio Historical Society, 1970), and Dividing the Land: Early American beginnings of our private property mosaic by Edward T. Price (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995). Andro Linklater’s Measuring America (New York: Walker Books, 2002) presents the survey as the hidden infrastructure of western expansion.

  68 the United States sold fewer than one hundred thousand acres: Pattison, Beginning of the American Rectangular Land Survey.

  68 “Nothing occurs as a probable mode of relief ”: Treasury Report, September 29, 1786.

  68 The strength of the secessionist movement in New England is explored in A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America by Jon Kukla (New York: Knopf, 2003).

  69 The nature of Shays’s Rebellion remains hotly debated. The traditional context, that subsistence farmers were protesting the arrival of the cash economy, was put forth by David Zatmary in Shays’Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); but Leonard L. Richards makes a convincing case for a particular cause, the pressure of taxation to pay bondholders, in Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). However, the rebels’ name and the nature of their demands also offer obvious connections to the prewar Regulators and the later Whiskey Rebellion.

  80 For Washington’s correspondence concerning Shays’s Rebellion with Henry Knox and James Madison, see The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series, vol. 4, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995).

  CHAPTER 4

  72 AE’s encounter with the Seneca is described in his report “Observatory on the West Side of the Conawango,” August 29, 1787, to the President and Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, and in a letter to SE, September 13, 1787, Papers.

  73 “with chain and compass”: Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, ed. Paul A. Wallace (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958).

  74 The competition between New York and the United States for control over the Iroquois lands emerges from The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution by Alan Taylor (New York: Knopf, 2006), and Max M. Mintz’s Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

  79 “it is in our United capacity we are known”: George Washington to his brother John Augustine Washington, June 15, 1783, George Washington Papers.

  79 “all the parts combined”: George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796, George Washington Papers.

  79 “that all business between them”: George Washington to Timothy Pickering, September 4, 1790, George Washington Papers.

  81 “It will be fortunate”: George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, April 1, 1791, George Washington Papers.

  81 “The States individually”: George Washington to Alexander Hamilton, April 4, 1791, George Washington Papers.

  82 Unfortunately no reliable biography of John Nicholson has yet been published. The details of the accusations against him as comptroller general are taken from The Pennsylvania state trials:containing the impeachment, trial, and acquittal of Francis Hopkinson, and John Nicholson, esquires (Philadelphia: printed by Francis Bailey, 1794).

  83 “This Mr Gorham”: AE to SE, August 15, 1789, Papers.

  84 “I have long known Mr Andrew Ellicott”: Manuscript reproduced in AE Life.

  84 AE’s report to Washington, January 15, 1790.

  86 James Madison’s extensive, unofficial notes are the source for the flavor of debates in the Constitutional Convention.

  87 “the U.S. are sovereign”: Oliver Ellsworth, August 20, 1787, James Madison’s “Notes on Debates.”

  89 “The moment the ideais admitted”: John Adams, “A Defense of the American Constitutions,” 1787.

  90 “Down this chasm”: AE Life.

  CHAPTER 5

  91 In the 1890s, when Washington, D.C., was being stripped of its nineteenth-century clutter to bring it back to the original design, Pierre L’Enfant was romantically portrayed as the tragic genius who had single-handedly brought the city into being. The contributions of Washington, Jefferson, and the commissioners were largely pushed aside, and AE was ignored or vilified. Later scholarship has redressed some of the balance, as in Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital, ed. Saul K. Padover (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946), and Kenneth R. Bowling’s Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1991); the Library of Congress’s unrivaled collection of maps is invaluable; and the Mary Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project—www.capitolhillhistory.org/index.html—offers particularly useful ideas about the forces involved.

  91 Report in the Georgetown Weekly Ledger, March 12, 1791: quoted in “The Survey of the Federal Territory,” in With Compass and Chain: American Surveyors and Their Instruments by Silvio Bedini (Frederick, MD: Professional Surveyor Publishing, 2001).

  92 Jefferson had discussed the exact site in “Notes on the Permanent Seat of Congress,” April 13, 1784, Ford, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson.

  93 AE’s work and instruments: Bedini, With Compass and Chain.

  94 The most reliable biography of Benjamin Banneker is Silvio Bedini’s The Life of Benjamin Banneker (New York: Scribner, 1972).

  95 Pierre L’Enfant has been the subject of innumerable biographies and articles. The most useful are Elizabeth S. Kite’s L’Enfant and Washington, 1791–1792 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929); and H. Paul Caemmerer, The Life of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Planner of the City of Washington (New York: Da Capo Press, 1950).

  96 “ ‘The plan should be drawn”: L’Enfant to George Washington, September 11, 1789, Caemmerer, Life of L’Enfant.

  97 Correspondence between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, L’Enfant and the commissioners, is to be found in “The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress,” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mgwquery.html.

  99 “If the commissioners live near the place”: Thomas Jefferson, “Opinion on the Capital,” November 29, 1790, Ford, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson.

  101 On the influence of Versailles, see The Making of America: A history of city planning in the United States by John W. Reps (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).

  101 AE’s help to L’Enfant, see Bedini, “Survey of the Federal Territory.”

  107 L’Enfant’s dismissal and the growing interference of the commissioners emerges from Washington’s correspondence. See “George Washington Papers” and Bowling’s Creation of Washington.

  109 The evidence for AE’s responsibility for naming Pennsylvania Avenue lies in the maps. Much ink has been spent in identifying one or another map as L’Enfant’s or AE’s, but since L’Enfant could not draw a scale map, the December map is manifestly a collaboration. The February map is AE’s.

  110 The deterioration of relations between AE and the commissioners emerges in his letters to SE, AE Life; his correspondence with Jefferson, in Ford, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson; and the commissioners’ correspondence with George Washington, in Padover, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital.

  114 For the effect of the capital’s failure on urban developments in the United States, see Reps, Making of America.

  CHAPTER 6

  117 The battle of wills between the president and the state of Pennsylvania emerges from his correspondence and journal. See “George Washington Papers.”

  117 “The President of the United States”: Henry Knox to Thomas Mifflin, May 24, 1794, “Papers relating to the Establishment at Presqu’ Isle,” in John B. Lynn and William Egle, eds., Pennsylvania Archives, second series (Harrisbu
rg, 1890).

  117 “The interference of the General Government”: AE Life.

  118 the Whiskey Rebellion: see Bouton, “A Road Closed”; and Thomas P. Slaughter’s Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  120 The background to the San Lorenzo Treaty is covered in Kukla’s Wilderness So Immense.

  121 “The people of this region”: The Conquest of the Old Southwest by Archibald Henderson (New York: The Century Company, 1920).

  121 “This country will in a few years Revolt”: Kukla, Wilderness So Immense.

  123 AE’s accounts of his work in demarcating the boundary with Spain come from his Journal of Andrew Ellicott; his correspondence with Timothy Pickering and other official letters held by the Library of Congress, Papers; and his letters to SE, AE Life. For his chief adversary, see Gayoso: The Life of a Spanish Governor in the Mississippi Valley, 1789–1799 by Jack D. L. Holmes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965).

  125 Brief notes on Natchez personalities appear in Professor Kenneth Stampp’s introduction to the Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution Through the Civil War (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1985).