The Fabric of America Read Free Page B

of the ruler was increasingly defined not by its people but by its territory. And in the words of Emmerich de Vattel’s
Law of Nations
, it was now important that “to prevent every subject of discord, every occasion of quarrel, the limits of territories ought to be marked out with clearness and precision.”
    Until 1776, Britain’s colonies fell within the jurisdiction of the home country, and so, when Americans first asserted their independence, European powers like France and the Netherlands, accustomed to the obligations of the Treaty of Westphalia, refused to offer military aid or financial loans. They required evidence that the former colonists now constituted a separate entity. Consequently, when the Continental Congress tasked Thomas Jefferson’s committee with producing the document that would become known as the Declaration of Independence, it did so not simply out of patriotism but because, as Jefferson explained in his autobiography, “a Declaration of Independence alone could render it consistent with European delicacy to treat with us, or even to receive an Ambassador.”
    However, neither the Declaration nor the Articles of Confederation made clear whether one nation or thirteen had been created. Each state retained “its sovereignty, freedom and independence” but also delegated some of its jurisdiction to “the United States in Congress assembled.” What the founding documents left ambiguous, the founding geography began to make clear.
    Pennsylvania and Virginia already possessed the rights to issue their own currencies, set their own tariffs, and negotiate their own treaties with Native American nations. The line that Ellicott and his fellow commissioners ran through the mountains with such painstaking attention to accuracy created a frontier that defined the extent of the states’ jurisdictions as understood by the Treaty of Westphalia. The states, in short, were acquiring most of the characteristics of nationhood.
    Since Andrew Ellicott’s career was spent in that unmapped territory that Turner would later describe as “the frontier,” they present two views of the way the land was settled that are in direct conflict. “The frontier is productive of individualism,” wrote Turner. “The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.” But wherever the boundary-makers’ lines ran, they introduced government, law, and taxes to areas where little or none had existed before. They also paved the way for the operation of land speculators who might, and often did, buy up the farms worked by the pioneers without ever setting eyes on them. A century before Turner pictured the romantic freedom of the frontier, the work of Ellicott and the other boundary-makers had introduced a reality that undermined his central thesis.
    At the heart of Ellicott’s character lay a contradiction, between his deep-seated desire for regularity and a tendency to emotional extravagance. A career devoted to mapping the unmapped expanse of the wilderness often seems to have been the only way that he could satisfactorily reconcile two conflicting impulses.
    As the eldest child in a Pennsylvania Quaker family, he came from a background firmly grounded in order and method. His father was a clock-maker, his uncles designed and constructed technologically advanced water mills, and having learned at his father’s side the meticulous skills needed to build accurate timepieces, Ellicott became a surveyor of the utmost reliability before devoting his life to astronomy.
    Yet as he demonstrated in a remarkable series of letters written to his wife, Sally, he was also a man convulsed by passionate desire and agonies of remorse. Throughout thirty-five years of marriage, he invariably addressed her by such endearments as “Dearest of all Earthly