The Fabric of America (12 page)

Behaving as they had in the Revolution, Captain Job Shattuck of Groton, Massachusetts, and other veterans set up committees to become part of a network of resistance. But the name they adopted, the Regulators, and their demands for easier taxation, a more responsive legislature, and reform of the system of fee-taking county officials—“Deputy Sheriffs [be] totally set aside, as a useless set of officers in the community”—harked back to a still older struggle. “We fought for liberty but despots took it, whose little finger is thicker than George's loins,” declared Ely Samuel in northern Massachusetts. “O that George held the claim still! For, before the war, it was better with us than now.”

When Captain Daniel Shays, a much decorated war veteran, took command and marched on the federal arms depot in Springfield in the winter of 1786, there seemed a real possibility of a popular uprising. But the Regulators, as their name implied, were never revolutionaries. They wanted government to be reformed, not overthrown, and when a force of militia, paid for by Boston's moneyed elite, confronted Shays's force at Springfield, they scattered.

1787 Massachusetts broadside proclamation following Shays's Rebellion

Nevertheless, they got what they wanted. On a small scale, the shock of their revolt was the main reason that Bowdoin was replaced as governor by popular John Hancock, who promptly reduced the tax—a decision made possible by money raised from the sale of state property—but what they could never have imagined was the large-scale impact on state government.

From New England, General Henry Knox, secretary of war, wrote in alarm to George Washington in November 1786 that up to fifteen thousand men were ready to rebel, and “they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws [sympathetic to farmers], which are easily effected by means of un-funded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases whatever… This dreadful situation has alarmed every man of principle and property in New England. They start as from a dream, and ask what has been the cause of our—delusion? what is to afford us security
against the violence of lawless men?” Knox's answer was unequivocal. “Our government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives and property.”

The effect of this letter on Washington was electrifying. Always aware that the British regarded the Revolutionary War as only a temporary setback, he took Knox's news as evidence that the United States was “fulfilling the prediction of our transatlantic foe! ‘leave them to themselves, and their government will soon dissolve.'” Days after receiving the letter, he wrote in turn to James Madison: “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion… Thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the foederal head will soon bring ruin on the whole; whereas a liberal, and energetic Constitution, well guarded and closely watched, to prevent incroachments, might restore us to that degree of respectability and consequence, to which we had a fair claim, and the brightest prospect of attaining.”

Thus perversely, the states' very efficiency in administering their territories and paying their debts succeeded in producing an impression of chaos. The 1787 convention at Philadelphia, originally intended only to reform the Articles of Confederation, now suggested itself to a determined number of delegates as the scene for a wholesale reform of government. And alarmed by the narrow escape from anarchy, the savior of the Revolution, General George Washington himself, proposed to lend his authority to their efforts.

The rule of law is always rule over a defined territory. Morality may be without borders, but law's rule begins only with the imagination of jurisdiction.

PAUL KAHN,
The Cultural Study of Law,
1999

In the extraordinary summer of 1787 when fifty-five delegates from twelve states met in Philadelphia to hammer out a new constitution for the United States of America, Andrew Ellicott was running the last half of
Pennsylvania
's northern border. At the heart of the deliberations in the city lay a question that bore directly on Ellicott's work in the northern fringe of the Allegheny Mountains—how much independence did a state retain within its borders?

Eventually the delegates preferred to leave the matter unresolved, thus setting up what would be the defining struggle of the nineteenth century between individual states and the federal government. But even as the matter was being discussed, the urgent need for an answer was underlined when a band of Seneca warriors surprised Ellicott and his boundary commissioners on the banks of the Allegheny River.

The Senecas had evidently watched their activities with growing suspicion—the astronomers peering through their telescopes, the surveyors with compases in hand directing the clearing of a path through the woods, and the chainmen measuring out the ground. By the 1780s Native Americans east of the Mississippi knew that this sort of activity could only signal one thing. As the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder testified, they
had learned that the arrival of surveyors “
with chain and compass in their hands, taking surveys of the tracts of good land
” led inevitably to an invasion of settlers, and “when they had ceded lands to the white people, and boundary lines had been established—‘firmly established!'—beyond which no whites were to settle, scarcely was the treaty signed, when intruders again were settling and hunting on their lands!”

Taking Ellicott's men for unauthorized surveyors marking out potential property, the Senecas' initial move, blocking access to the canoes, was aggressive. Nevertheless, as one of the nations in the Six Nations federation, they were accustomed to following the ritualized deliberations required by their federal constitution before any important decision was taken. During the formal exchanges, the leaders of the group warned Ellicott of the dangers of continuing his survey. Their hot-tempered young men were angry at the surveyors' intrusion and might turn to violence if the work did not immediately cease.

Patience was not one of Ellicott's virtues, and the hardship of running Pennsylvania's northern border exacerbated his irritation. Having left the Wyoming Valley in June, he and his fellow Pennsylvania commissioner, Andrew Porter, together with their New York counterparts, had been forced by falling river levels to abandon the heavy canoes and deck boats carrying their instruments and transfer their cargo to already laden packhorses. Climbing through steep hillsides covered in pine and oak forests, past gigantic slabs of fallen rock, they had run their lines, random and true, due west straight across every obstacle. Every twenty miles they had carried the tent serving as an observatory to the top of the highest summit together with the zenith sector, the clocks, and the compasses so that sun- and star-sights could be made.

In the summer heat, men and animals had suffered terribly. The overloaded horses began to founder, but were driven on until in the bleak words of Ellicott's official report to the Pennsylvania assembly, the harsh treatment “killed and rendered useless two thirds [of them].” At last the team passed the watershed from where the rivers began to flow westward, and with their few remaining animals almost at a standstill, they had come across a branch of the Allegheny River.

“We immediately set about making canoes,” Ellicott reported, “and by the spirited exertions of our men, with no other implements than three falling
axes, two or three Tomahawks and a Chisel, we compleated in six days for the use of our Pennsylvania party 5 excellent Canoes, two of which are between 40 and 50 feet in length.” They had dragged these hollowed-out logs down to the stream and bumped them half-floating over the rocks for ten miles until they reached the main Allegheny River.

At that point the Senecas stopped them, and Ellicott's anger showed in his response to the threat of violence from their young men. “You talk of danger,” he exclaimed, “but remember we are now doing the business of the whole state and not the business of a few people, and the least injury done to our men will be considered as done to all the people of Pennsylvania.” The purpose of their line was to show that “all the land to the north of it belongs to the
Indians
, and the land on the south from the river Delaware to the Lake Erie belongs to the People of Pennsylvania.” And it was land, he added with irritation, for which they had always paid the Indians generously.

In Ellicott's tirade lay the grounds of the struggle between the states and the United States, on which the fate of the Six Nations would depend. It arose from the fact that three sovereignties were in play. From colonial times, the Native Americans had been regarded as nations as much under the Crown's protection as the colonies, a relationship made plain in 1763 when King George III prohibited settlement beyond the Appalachians so that “the several Tribes or Nations of Indians who live under our Protection… should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories… as are reserved to them.” Only the Crown and its representatives in North America, the colonial governments, were permitted to buy land from them.

In similar fashion, under the Articles of Confederation the United States alone was deemed to have the right of “regulating the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This was exercised as early as 1784 at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, when the Six Nations federation was forced to accept punishment for the support that four of their nations gave the British during the Revolution. The treaty confined them to the east of a line that ran from modern Buffalo “to the north boundary of the state of Pennsylvania,” and in the words of its critical clause, “the Six Nations shall and do yield to the United States, all claims to the country west of the said [line].” Thus the parallel that Ellicott was attempting to run with so much difficulty was certainly carving out what belonged to Pennsylvania, but north of the line the land could legally be claimed by the Six Nations, New York, and the United States.

Detail of 1771 map showing northwest Pennsylvania, Lakes Ontario and Erie, the Six Nations homeland, and Presqu'isle

The fertility of the Six Nations homeland below Lakes Ontario and Erie was legendary. Except for the winter months when the water froze over, the climate was benign, warm enough to grow grapes, peaches, and apples, with grazing rich enough for cattle to give gallons of creamy milk. Gently terraced hills sloped up from the shoreline, and along the wide valley bottoms lay a fine alluvial soil, easily worked and productive of corn, apples, pumpkins, and squashes. The higher land stretching as far south as the Ohio Valley was managed as a hunting ground, but that was less attractive to speculators than the farmland.

In 1786, with only the first part of the New York–Pennsylvania boundary in place, Governor George Clinton of New York forced the three eastern nations in the federation into treaties yielding up their lands to the state for
sale to land speculators. Once the line was run all the way to Lake Erie, the remainder of this bountiful land, occupied primarily by the Senecas, would also fall within New York's boundaries. Clinton did not have long to wait.

Having bribed the Seneca band with two of his surviving horses, Ellicott and his teams of surveyors and axmen were allowed leave, floating downstream in their dugout canoes into lush flatlands, where at once their work became easier. The instruments were canoed to the observation points, guidelines were cut and measured with speed, and in place of the carved rocks that served as milestones, they hammered posts into the rich soil surrounded by mounds of earth.

On October 12, 1787, a triumphant letter was dispatched to Philadelphia datelined “Lake Erie.” It announced that the guideline had been run to the lake, and that the final observations were being made in order to calculate the true line. “Considering the unexpected difficulties we had to encounter for want of a competent knowledge of the Geography of the Country, the death of our Horses, time taken up in making Canoes and treating with the Indians, our business has gone on beyond our most sanguine expectations.” Both the Andrews, Ellicott and Porter, put their names to this, but the author was certainly the former. Only he would have explained their working methods with typically Ellicott exactness about the number of astronomical observations made—no fewer than 336—immediately followed by a typically Ellicott defense against the unspoken accusation that he could have done more. “Neither attention nor exertions have been wanting on our parts,” he insisted, “towards Scientific and permanent completion of the business entrusted to us.”