The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  127 Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama and incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi from the earliest times (1851), now online—http://homepages.rootsweb.com /~cmamcrk4/pktfm.html—is dated but has firsthand memories and accounts of events.

  128 James Wilkinson’s character emerges most clearly from his self-serving autobiography, Memoirs of My Own Times (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1816). The opposite view comes from Daniel Clark’s devastating exposé, Proofs of the Corruption of General James Wilkinson and of His Connexion with Aaron Burr (Philadelphia: Hall & Pierie, 1809), http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/98/hhr98_1.html. Jon Kukla offers a modern interpretation in A Territory So Immense, and James Savage’s online essay “Spaniards, Scoundrels, and Statesmen: General James Wilkinson and the Spanish Conspiracy, 1787—1790,” http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/98/hhr98_1.html, gives a useful summary.

  131 “to leave it to the discretion”: John Adams, “Message to the Senate and House,” June 12, 1797.

  131 Blount’s letter is quoted in William Masteron’s William Blount (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954).

  134 For Lintot’s warning about “the Distribution of Land,” see Papers.

  135 “That domestic slavery is wrong”: Journal.

  136 “I feel a consciousness”: AE to Pickering, October 18, 1797, Papers.

  136 William Dunbar’s life is covered in Life, Letters and Papers of William Dunbar by Mrs. Dunbar Rowland (Jackson: Press of the Mississippi Historical Society, 1930). His letters to AE are in Papers.

  137 “I would not by this”: AE to Daniel Clark, September 15, 1797, Papers.

  138 For the inheritance of Margaret Gayoso, see U.S. Supreme Court docket, Robinson v. Minor, 51 U.S. 627 (1850).

  139 “By a packet just arrived”: Gayoso to AE, January 10, 1798, Papers.

  139 “My Love”: AE to SE, February 8, 1798, Papers.

  CHAPTER 7

  141 The sources for AE’s account of his onerous running of the boundary and dramatic journey are his Journal, Papers, and AE Life.

  141 “The situation of our encampment”: Journal.

  142 “It is a pleasing and interesting reflection”: AE to Gayoso, May 22, 1798, Papers.

  143 “This mode tho’ less scientific”: AE to Pickering, July 12, 1798, Papers.

  143 The account of the mutiny is contained only in letters in Papers.

  145 The discovery of Wilkinson’s treachery is referred to in the Journal, AE Life, and AE’s letter to Daniel Clark in 1808.

  147 “When you consider”: AE to Pickering, January 12, 1799, Papers.

  148 “When you look at the picture”: AE to SE, February 17, 1799, AE Life.

  149 The fullest picture of Benjamin Hawkins comes from The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810, ed. Thomas Foster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

  150 The voyage of The Sally is well told in the Journal, which deserves reading for that if for no other reason.

  154 AE’s bizarre meeting with Bowles and Lieutenant James Woolridge appears in the Journal. Woolridge’s career in the Royal Navy reached its apogee in 1809 when, as captain of a fireship, he steered with suicidal bravery into the midst of a French fleet, throwing himself overboard just before it exploded, and destroyed four enemy frigates, a feat for which he was awarded a gold chain, one hundred guineas, and a ceremonial sword.

  156 “a mound of earth thrown up”: Ellicott’s Mound became famous when the dispute between Florida and Georgia about their border was finally resolved in 1872 with both sides agreeing that since it was the one obvious point their surveyors could identify, the border should run from the Mound rather than the center of the swamp.

  CHAPTER 8

  159 AE’s domestic life back in Philadelphia is covered by letters to his daughters and wife in AE Life and Papers. His correspondence with Jefferson is in Papers and Ford, ed., Works of Thomas Jefferson.

  160 I have been obliged”: AE to James Wilkinson, April 13, 1800, Papers.

  162 From the wide-ranging literature on the Burr conspiracy, the most useful for this study has been Jonathan Daniels’s Ordeal of Ambition: Jefferson, Hamilton, Burr (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Co., 1970). But Daniel Clark Jr.’s Proofs of the Corruption of General James Wilkinson is indispensable.

  163 “[I] always shall be designated by the number 13”: William R. Shepard, “Wilkinson and the Beginnings of the Spanish Conspiracy,” American Historical Review 9 (1903–4). But even by 1808, his secret was sufficiently well-known for Clark to allude to him as “Number Thirteen” in the Proofs.

  163 The betrayal of Lewis and Clark came in the “Reflections,” offered by Wilkinson to Folch, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 1 (July 1913).

  165 “I fear you will meet with an attack”: Jackson to Claiborne, November 12, 1806, cited in “James Wilkinson: a defense by his grandson” by James Wilkinson, Louisiana Historical Quarterly vol. 1, no. 2, 1918.

  167 For the response to the Louisiana Purchase, see Kukla, Wilderness So Immense.

  168 Louisiana Purchase as a gigantic reservation: Thomas Jefferson explored the idea in various forms but most clearly in a letter of August 12, 1803, to John Breckinridge: “The best use we can make of the country for some time, will be to give establishments in it to the Indians on the East side of the Missipi [sic], in exchange for their present country.”

  169 The growth of the Public Land Survey, Putnam’s failings, and Mansfield’s strengths are covered in my Measuring America.

  170 Lincoln’s reasons for the family’s move to Illinois were given to John L. Scripps of the Chicago Press and Tribune.

  171 almost 80 percent of the population occupied just 4 percent: Wilma A. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” in Appalachia in the Making:The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, Mary B. Pudup, et al., eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

  172 The results of AE’s astronomy were consistently reported in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society from 1804 through 1809.

  173 AE’s contributions to the Wilkinson trial are taken from Papers; his letters are also included in Clark’s Proofs.

  176 The reception for James Monroe in 1817 is explored in “‘Look on This Picture… And on This!’ Nationalism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820” by Andrew W. Robertson, American Historical Review 106.4 (October 2001).

  177 Andrew Jackson and the law: The background comes from David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  177 “treated property offenders much more harshly”: Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  178 The paid sheriff was introduced by Jackson’s ordinance proclaimed in Pensacola on July 21, 1821.

  CHAPTER 9

  180 John Quincy Adams’s fifty-one volumes of diaries, kept at the Massachusetts Historical Society and now online, are the prime source for his life. See http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/.

  180 The problems of the eastern portion of the Canadian frontier were well documented in an exhibition, “John Mitchell’s Map: An Irony of Empire,” on April 21, 1997, at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. See http://www.usm.maine.edu/~maps/mitchell/.

  181 AE’s demarcation of the Georgia–North Carolina border, and his days at West Point are covered in AE Life and Papers.

  184 The Monroe Doctrine and Adams’s subsequent congressional career are best explained in Samuel Flagg Bemis’s two volumes, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (New York: Knopf, 1949) and John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York: Knopf, 1956).

  186 Adams’s version of manifest destiny is quoted in Walter A. McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).


  187 “If the Union must be dissolved”: Adams’s diary, 1819.

  187 AE’s reaction to western preachers: May 17, 1785, AE Life.

  188 For Dow’s preaching style, see “ ‘Liquid Fire Within Me’: Language, Self and Society in Transcendentalism and Early Evangelicalism, 1820–1860” by Ian Frederick Fin-seth (master’s thesis in English, University of Virginia, August 1995).

  189 The legend of the turtle-snapping Davy Crockett began with Matthew St. Clair Clarke’s Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (Cincinnati, 1833).

  189 John Melish’s comment on the Public Land System appears in my Measuring America. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s reaction was more influential than Melish’s, because his writing spread the idea throughout the British empire that the distribution of land could radically influence the type of society that grew up subsequently.

  191 Among the many authorities on the influence of slavery on U.S. history, one dominant theme came from David Brion Davis’s broad view of it as a cultural rather than purely economic phenomenon in Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). It was counterbalanced by James L. Houston’s overtly economic and property-based views in Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

  194 “We cultivate certain great staples”: John C. Calhoun’s “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” December 19, 1828.

  197 Unequivocally if repellently, any doubts about the profitability of slavery were removed by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (reissue edition, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995).

  198 Timothy Flint’s comments came in his Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of Mississippi (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Company, 1826).

  198 Ashbel Smith’s remark, made in a letter December 28, 1843, was quoted in Harriet Smither’s “English Abolitionism and the Annexation of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 32 (1929).

  199 Henry Adams’s remark comes in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918).

  201 The attitude of some New Yorkers appears in Samuel J. May’s Some Recollections of Antislavery Conflict (Boston, 1869).

  201 Harriet Martineau’s comment was made in her Autobiography of Harriet Martineau(reprint, London: Virago, 1983).

  202 Grant expressed his characteristically blunt opinion that the purpose of the Mexican War was to increase the number of slave states in his autobiography, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885–86).

  202 Calhoun’s reasons for opposing the Mexican War were put forward in a Senate speech on January 4, 1848.

  203 The despair in Adams’s reference to the “Utopian daydream,” in “Address of John Quincy Adams to his Constituents,” September 17, 1842, colored much of his public utterance in old age.

  CHAPTER 10

  205 Woodrow Wilson’s remarks on the random creation of states in the nineteenth century appeared in “The Making of the Nation,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1897.

  205 The House of Representatives set up its Committee on Territories in 1825, followed by the Senate in 1844. The latter became Stephen Douglas’s power base.

  206 The Beloit College archives published online at http://www.beloit.edu/~libhome/ Archives/papers/beloitbegin.html contain Horace White’s memoir of the settlement’s foundation.

  209 Memories of harboring slaves and of the start of the Free Soil movement in Beloit are recorded in William Fiske Brown’s “In Lincoln’s Time: Our College Loyalty to Union and Freedom,” Round Table, February 10, 1911.

  211 Douglas’s speaking style: Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, vol 11, ed. Charles F. Adams (12 vols; Philadelphia, 1874–77).

  211 The Senate Committee on Territories, founded in the year that Douglas entered the Senate, was dominated by him. Although the House committee was longer established, its acquiescence in his intricate deal-making indicates that during Douglas’s chairmanship the Senate committee took the lead, although poor record-keeping fails to show how this was achieved.

  212 Douglas’s expansionist vision: Stephen Douglas:A study in American Politics by Allen Johnson (New York: Macmillan Company, 1908).

  213 The dealings of the Committee on Territories are detailed in Johnson’s Stephen Douglas.

  215 Douglas’s comment about the burning effigies is recorded in F. H. Hodder, “Stephen A. Douglas,” Chautauquan 29 (August 1899).

  215 The story of Sherman Booth is recorded in “Rescue of Joshua Glover, a Runaway Slave,” in Leading Events of Wisconsin History by Henry E. Legler (Milwaukee: Sentinel Company, 1898).

  216 Thoreau’s call for resistance came in a speech, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” delivered at Framingham, Massachusetts, July 4, 1854. “The less government” is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Politics, published in 1844. Walt Whitman’s comment was sent to Mikhail Bakunin. Thoreau’s disowning of American government was made in his 1849 essay “On Civil Disobedience.”

  217 Angelina Grimke’s reference to “human rights” comes in “Letter XII Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,” addressed to Catherine E. Beecher, October 2, 1837.

  217 David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, September 1829, http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html.

  218 Lincoln’s attack on the Know-Nothings was made in a letter to Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953).

  219 AE’s fight to reform West Point Military Academy is contained in the collection of Ellicott papers held at the academy’s library. They include correspondence with James Monroe, General Joseph Swift, Sylvanus Thayer, and Jared Mansfield.

  219 The history of the Corps of Topographical Engineers and its predecessor, the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, is told by Henry P. Beers in the “History of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, 1818–1863,” Military Engineer 34 (June 1942).

  220 Stephen Douglas as the promoter of railroads is the topic of Hodder’s “Stephen A. Douglas.”

  221 The outrage created in the north by the Kansas-Nebraska Act was expressed by the Ohio senators and representatives who signed the “Address to the People,” dated January 19, 1854.

  221 The bloodthirsty threats by pro- and antislavers in the rush for Kansas are quoted in William G. Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: Andreas, 1883).

  222 The birth of Lawrence, Kansas, is detailed in the Reverend Richard Cordley’s A History of Lawrence, Kansas (Lawrence: Lawrence Journal Press, 1895).

  223 The Lincoln-Douglas debates: See In the Name of the People: Speeches and Writings of Lincoln and Douglas in the Ohio Campaign of 1859, ed. Harry V. Jaffa and Robert Johannsen (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959).

  227 Henry Adams’s description of Washington, D.C., appears in The Education of Henry Adams.

  CHAPTER 11

  230 Chase’s ruling was delivered in the case of State of Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700, December 1868.

  232 In his speech of December 18, 1865, when Stevens put this argument that the secessionist states were outside the Union, he also referred to them as “dead carcasses.”

  233 The title of Ralph Korngold’s biography Thaddeus Stevens:A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955) says much about his character. What set Stevens apart was not his shrewd legal brain or his relentless political maneuvering, but his capacity for what Allan Nevins in The War for the Union:War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960) called “a frenzy of anger.” His furious passion for equality, honed by a background of poverty, found its cause in the fight for the abolition of slavery and its target in the hierarchical south.

  234 “Admit the right of the seced
ing states”: What They Fought For, 1861–1865 by James M. McPherson (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

  234 “everywhere a rigid spirit of caste”: “Three Months among the Reconstructionists,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1866.

  235 Edward Thomas’s comments were made in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Southerner (Savannah, 1912), http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/thomas/thomas.html.

  236 The material achievements of Reconstruction are contained in Eric Foner’s admirable Reconstruction:America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

  237 Hiram C. Whitley’s dubious adventures are recounted in A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans by William E. Connelley (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 1918).

  238 Senator William Fulbright’s remarks were expressed in The Arrogance of Power(New York: Random House, 1966).

  238 The spread of Jim Crow laws is described in Foner’s Reconstruction.

  238 John Marshall Harlan’s dissenting opinion was expressed in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

  239 Henry Adams’s portrait of William H. Seward appeared in The Education of Henry Adams.

  239 “I look off on Prince Rupert’s Land and Canada”: The Life of William H. Seward by Frederic Bancroft (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900).

  239 Seward’s speech at Sitka, made on August 12, 1869, is online at the Library of Congress’s page “Meeting of Frontiers.”

  241 The most vivid account of Sumner’s attempt to lever Canada inside the U.S. frontier is Henry Adams’s in his Education of Henry Adams.

  242 Prime Minister Macdonald’s desire to leave the west a wilderness was expressed in a letter dated March 27, 1865, to Sir Edward W. Watkin, now held in the National Archives of Canada.

  243 “every drop of the blood”: Congressman Wise’s comments are recorded in Niles’ National Register, February 5, 1842.