The Fabric of America

Foresight

Map

Chapter 1  The First Frontier

Chapter 2  The Boundaries of Power

Chapter 3  The State as Nation

Chapter 4  The Bullying States

Chapter 5  Capital Speculations

Chapter 6  Mirrors of the Mississippi

Chapter 7  Evidence of Treachery

Chapter 8  The Reach of Government

Chapter 9  American Tragedy

Chapter 10  The Values of Government

Chapter 11  The Limits of Freedom

Chapter 12  The American Frontier

Chapter 13  Crossing the Frontier

Chapter 14  The End of Frontiers?

Envoi

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

By the Same Author

The forests and desarts of America are without land-marks … It is almost as easy to divide the Atlantic Ocean by a line, as clearly to ascertain the limits of those uncultivated, uninhabitable, unmeasured regions.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON,
The Literary Magazine,
1756

Trapped in six lanes of traffic, most drivers look impatient or bored as they inch toward the San Ysidro crossing point between the United States and Mexico. A few faces appear anxious. Not one expression conveys surprise. Yet the changes that have happened here in the last few years should be cause for astonishment. A border, once not much more than a line of glass-fronted booths, has become a frontier. Everywhere there is extra security. Black-lensed cameras track the lines of vehicles. Uniformed patrols check registration numbers against computer records. Unsmiling immigration officers inspect faces and documents suspiciously.

Out in the desert, the signs are more dramatic still: fences, watchtowers, heat sensors, armed vigilantes, border guards, even detachments of the National Guard. Never before in peacetime has the United States devoted so much effort and money to the defense of its national frontier. For most of the last century, the line that demarcates the limits of the nation has hardly entered public consciousness. As drivers wait in the simmering heat for the detailed examination of the car ahead to be completed, the paradox suddenly becomes glaringly obvious. What now rates as the most urgent priority on the political agenda is the zone that history forgot.

The moment that the U.S. frontier disappeared from the radar screen can be placed almost exactly. On November 4, 1892, the
Aegis
, a student newspaper published by the University of Wisconsin, carried an article entitled “Problems in American History.” Its brash young author suggested that too much attention had been directed by historians to the formal boundaries that divided and delineated the United States. The epitome of the historian he had in mind was Professor Hermann von Holst, who earlier that year had published the seventh and final volume of his monumental work,
The Constitutional and Political History of the United States
.

In his history, Holst concentrated upon the powers contained within state and national frontiers, arguing that the unique character of the United States emerged from the bitter fight for constitutional dominance between state and federal governments. It was this perspective on American history that the article in the
Aegis
attacked. It condemned “the attention paid to State boundaries and to the sectional lines of North and South” and asserted that the United States owed its unique character to the influence of another, less formal frontier, the line of settlement that
“stretched along the western border like a cord of union.”
Seven months later, on July 12, 1893, the writer, Frederick Jackson Turner, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, presented his thesis to a wider audience, the American Historical Association in Chicago, under a title that was to become famous: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

The San Ysidro crossing represents everything that Turner set out to bury. “The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations,” he insisted. “The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”

It was here that the American character was formed, Turner argued. Whatever their national origin, the settlers became infected with the frontier spirit—“that restless nervous energy, that dominant individualism working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom”—and thereby acquired a common identity. In short, it was in “the crucible of the frontier [that] the immigrants were Americanized.”

For more than a century Turner's thesis has loomed over the history of the western United States like a battle-scarred colossus. It has been repeatedly
assaulted by professional historians for the way that it airbrushes the Native American experience out of the records, leaves unexamined the contributions of women and frontier communities like the Germans and Mormons, and fails to explain why similar experiences on other nineteenth-century frontiers in Siberia, Australia, southern Africa, Argentina, and Canada conspicuously failed to Americanize those pioneers. But however much it is battered, Turner's argument has refused to fall down, if only because the opening up of the west did profoundly affect the rest of the country and did call forth a specifically American response.

In popular consciousness, therefore, Turner's frontier has until now remained unchallenged. The term continues to be automatically attached to such boundless areas as outer space, the Internet, or intellectual property, implying that here are fresh and unlimited opportunities particularly suited to exploitation by American enterprise and adaptability. The spirit it engendered remains the default explanation for what makes America different from the rest of the world.

In the era of terrorism and mass immigration, however, a seismic shift is clearly taking place. It is the older meaning of
frontier
that draws public attention, the line that delineates an area of sovereignty. The history of that frontier began with the first generation of Americans. They had fought to win sovereignty from the British—the right to establish for themselves democratic government and individual liberty. To mark out the scope of that sovereignty, lines had to be drawn in the ground. Among the many consequences of independence, therefore, few were more significant than the curious ritual that took place in the summer of 1784 on top of Mount Welcome, a commanding height in the Allegheny Mountains in what is now West Virginia.

In July of that year, a company of frontiersmen led by a university professor, a geographer, an Episcopalian minister, and an almanac-maker constructed a log cabin on the mountain's peak. To the broad-shouldered axmen and laborers who had hewn the trees and shaped the logs, it must have seemed like a foolish enough enterprise. Part of the cabin's roof was designed to be easily lifted away, and instead of sheltering people armed with rifles, hatchets, and the usual tools of frontier life, it contained nothing but an array of
clocks, telescopes, compasses, and sextants. Most days and nights the four leaders spent long hours inside, and their work could only have appeared idle and unproductive, consisting as it did of not much more than peering at the sky through the telescopes and sextants, and jotting down notes of what they saw.

The youngest of the quartet was the almanac-maker, a thirty-year-old, snub-nosed Quaker named Andrew Ellicott. He had left his young wife, Sally, in Baltimore, and was missing her. On July 30, he wrote to tell her about the routine he had to follow.

“We are now living very comfortably on the Top of the highest Mount in this part of the World,” he informed her. “Our Observatory is in good order, and Well Stored with Instruments; my Companions are very agreeable Men, and I think we enjoy all the Happiness that people in our Situation could expect.”

Ellicott's agreeable companions included the Reverend James Madison, principal of William & Mary College in Virginia and a cousin of the future president; Dr. John Ewing, provost of the University of Pennsylvania; and Thomas Hutchins, geographer-general of the United States and the outstanding mapmaker of his day. Probably no more academically distinguished company had ever before taken out their skills to work on the frontier.

The expertise that Ellicott brought was of a different kind. He had little formal education, and his reputation, such as it was, came from the astronomical observations published in his almanacs. Enthusiasts thought them remarkably accurate. But he was also an instrument-maker of the highest quality—Ellicott's clocks were, and among today's collectors remain, highly prized—and in such high-flown company, it was probably his skill with his hands that seemed most valuable. He himself appeared somewhat in awe of the people around him and astonished by their habits of working.

“The following is a True Picture of Our living,” he assured his wife. “We brakefast [
sic
] between 6 and 7

“Observe the Sun's Altitude between 7 and 10

“Dine between 12 and 1 after which we always drink our two Bottles before we leave the Table

“Then Observe the Sun's Corresponding Altitude

“At 6 we have a large Bowl of Wine Sillybub [a frothy mixture of wine and milk]—

“This rule we never break—We have each of us a Cow—

“We drink our Tea about 7—

“And sometimes
observe the Heavens
the greatest part of the Night.”

Apart from the amount of wine required for the astronomy and the caliber of those taking part, the most striking aspect of their work was the cost. Their wages—$6 a day per person—were roughly equivalent to what the governor of Virginia was paid, and the final bill for their work would come to more than $4,000. The purpose of all their endeavors, however, was simply to establish the boundary between the states of Virginia and Pennsylvania.

After seven years of war, both states were burdened by mountainous debts, and in the effort to keep their creditors at bay, they had trimmed every item of unnecessary expenditure from their budgets. Yet on the frontier no expense was spared in the quest to run an accurate line through the uninhabited wilderness. Evidently the seemingly mundane business of determining where one state ended and the other began possessed an importance that may not be immediately obvious today.

The only precedent for what Ellicott and his friends were doing on Mount Welcome had been provided by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their epic struggle between 1763 and 1767 to establish the frontier between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The way the two enterprises used the heavens to locate a precise point upon earth was very similar, but Mason and Dixon could claim the distinction of being pioneers. Never before had the newly systematized knowledge of the movement of stars, sun, and moon been combined with the developing technology of telescope construction to establish an artificial boundary. Mason and Dixon, however, were simply dividing the property of William Penn's descendants from that of the Calvert family. The result of all their meticulous work merely increased the financial value of Pennsylvania and Maryland to their colonial owners.

The boundary run by Andrew Ellicott and his fellow scientists on top of Mount Welcome had a wider purpose: to define the limits of two states. Its consequences would inevitably shape the economic and political growth of Pennsylvania and Virginia, creating a sense of sovereignty that grew with the power of the states. These two states were not alone. In the years after independence, every other state took steps to demarcate the extent of its
territory, both by natural features like rivers and mountaintops, and by lines of latitude and longitude. On a map, the result of the boundary-makers' work might appear to be nothing more substantial than a carefully inked line, but it carried a political and constitutional weight that has reverberated through the history of the United States.