The Fabric of America Read Free Page A

legally bought and sold, their boundaries had to be surveyed, and a description with a plat or outline map needed to be registered with the colony’s government.
    So important was this final stage that the ability to survey a parcel of ground became an essential part of every settler’s education. Rufus Putnam, Washington’s chief engineer at the siege of Boston in 1775, who asserted that “ I never Saw the inside of a School house except about three weeks,” learned how to survey, as did the immaculately educated Charles Carroll of Maryland, America’s richest colonist, who attended the best schools on both sides of the Atlantic. The value of a reliable surveyor was such that even as an apprentice, George Washington could boast of his ability to earn more than $100 a week. “ A doubloon [approximately $15] is my constant gain every day that will permit my going out” he told a friend, “and sometimes six pistoles [approxmately $22.50].”
    Boundaries of all kinds—imperial frontiers, colonial borders, property limits— were inseparable from the development of colonial America. When the people of the independent states declared their intention to assume “a separate and equal station” among the powers of the earth, the need for clear-cut boundaries was as obvious to them as the right to life and liberty.
    By far the longest clause in the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union drawn up by the states in 1777 dealt not with representation of the people or defense or finance, but with border disputes between one state and another, and the methods of solving them. With the exception of Rhode Island,every state from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south had a quarrel with its neighbors over its borders. In addition, four states, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, were confronted by breakaway movements engaged in sometimes violent struggles to draw new boundaries that would end in the creation of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. And until 1781 Maryland refused even to sign the Articles of Confederation in protest against Virginia’s claims to include huge territories beyond the Appalachians within her limits.
    So deep did the tensions run that violence always threatened to break out. The danger was made clear by one major conflict that occurred in the middle of the Revolution. In December 1775, when they might have been fighting the British, seven hundred Pennsylvanians instead fought a pitched battle with three hundred Connecticut settlers in a boundary quarrel known as the Yankee-Pennamite War. Without a stronger central government to resolve territorial disputes peacefully, Alexander Hamilton argued in the
Federalist Papers
, the states would inevitably turn against each other, and the sword would become “the arbiter of their differences.” Thus the most immediate purpose of the boundary-makers on Mount Welcome was to keep the peace, hence its importance. But there were other, longer-lasting consequences that were inseparable from the act of establishing a frontier.
    More than a century before the American colonists declared their independence, the long, bloody conflict of the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic nations, which had torn Europe apart, ended in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In a series of treaties, the European powers recognized that within their own realms, rulers had the exclusive right to exercise jurisdiction over their citizens regardless of the claims to interfere asserted by outside agents, such as the pope or Holy Roman emperor. Constitutional philosophers like the seventeenth-century Dutch authority Hugo Grotius had long argued that a nation consisted primarily of people joined by similar race and culture under the jurisdiction of one ruler, and only secondarily of territory. But the Westphalian agreement changed the emphasis. In future, the extent of the nation and the jurisdiction