The Fabric of America (2 page)

To establish a frontier was to create an area of separate jurisdiction. Within it, a specific framework of laws, of government, and eventually of values would be formed. How separate and distinct was the jurisdiction that grew up behind a state's borders posed a question that would give rise to eighty years of constitutional friction and the bloodiest of civil wars. It would also produce the most sophisticated guarantees of individual freedom and democratic government that human society has yet seen. To a degree unknown in previous nations, the United States was the product of the formal divisions that the boundary-makers marked in the wilderness.

The need for such boundaries, between states, properties, and individuals, was inseparable from American history. As the editors of the authoritative western history
Under an Open Sky
put it, “Boundary setting is so inclusive a frontier and regional process that it encompasses all the others; all social life is in some sense a struggle to define the difference between ours and theirs, mine and yours, self and other.” The process began with the arrival of the first colonists.

From the other side of the Atlantic, eighteenth-century commentators like Dr. Samuel Johnson habitually referred to colonial America as a desert or an ocean where no clearly defined boundaries existed. Its “unmeasured regions” made a contrast with Europe, whose national frontiers had evolved over generations through warfare, the growth of population, and the influence of religion. Except in time of war, these boundaries were generally recognized and respected. Even when some major adjustment of them took place, such as the partition of Poland in 1772 between the neighboring powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the rivers that constituted the new borders were well-known and clearly mapped.

The New World lacked this essential feature of European politics. Skirmishing between the colonial powers was endemic because, as a governor of Nova Scotia put it, “there hath never as yet (properly Speaking) been any
Adjustment of Limits.” The royal charters creating British colonies attempted to specify their borders, but the vagueness of the wording betrayed their authors' ignorance. The 1665 charter issued for the new colony of Carolina, for example, stated baldly that it would extend from “thirty six and thirty Minutes, Northern latitude, and so West in a direct line as far as the South Seas [meaning the Pacific Ocean]; and South and Westward as far as the degrees of twenty nine, inclusive, northern latitude; and so West in a direct line as far as the South Seas.”

On the basis of this phrase, an independent North Carolina would claim all of what is now Tennessee. Connecticut used similar wording in its charter to justify occupying parts of Pennsylvania, while Virginia's various charters allowed the state to argue that it should possess everything west of the Appalachians between the Great Lakes and the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

The need to mark out on the ground exactly what the charters were attempting to describe became of such importance that blood was shed, fortunes were lost and centuries-long lawsuits were conducted to establish a line of latitude or the position of a river. The reason was simple. Unlike the Portuguese, who came in search of spices, and the Spaniards, who were seduced by gold, and the French, who traded in furs, the constant preoccupation of the English was how to own the soil before them.

“Many good religious devout men have made it a great question, as a matter in conscience, by what warrant they might go and possess those countries which are none of theirs but the poor savages,” wrote John Smith in his
Advertisements for the Inexperienced Planters of New England
, published in 1631, and offered several reassuring answers. Most were the stock ones of seventeenth-century colonizers—that the land belonged to England because she had discovered it, that settlement was justified by the need to spread Christianity among the heathen, that disease had already cleared the original inhabitants from much of New England, and that from Florida to Canada there was enough space for everyone, natives and newcomers alike. But then he added another that specifically answered any would-be colonist's doubts about title to his American land. “If this be not a sufficient reason for such tender consciences,” he wrote offhandedly, “for a copper knife and a few toys as beads and hatchets, [the Indians] will sell you a whole country; and for a small matter their houses and the ground they dwell upon.”

On the Southampton dockside, as John Winthrop's company of settlers were about to depart for Massachusetts Bay in 1630, the Puritan preacher John Cotton preached an entire sermon on their divine right to the land, assuring them, “Where there is a vacant place, there is liberty for the sons of Adam or Noah to come and inhabit, though they neither buy it nor ask their leaves.” And Winthrop himself reinforced the message by pointing out that the few indigenous inhabitants had no real claim to the land, at least by the standards of English owners, whose property was exactly surveyed, neatly hedged in, and well grazed. “As for the Natives in new England,” he argued, “they inclose no Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to prove [their title to] the Land by … and Soe if we leave them sufficient for their use, wee may lawfully take the rest.”

There was, however, a more violent method of acquiring land. In Jamestown, the colonists had originally been guided by John Smith into buying the land from the Powhatan confederation, but relations deteriorated as the colony became better established. In March 1622 the confederation turned on the colonists in outlying villages and massacred more than 350 of them, almost a third of the colony's population. The Virginians' reaction, after the first horrifed shock had passed, was unexpected—a desire not just for revenge, but for something more.

“Our hands which before were tied with gentleness and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Sauvages,” wrote one colonist in a pamphlet entitled
The Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in Time of Peace and League, treacherously executed by the native infidels upon the English
, “So that we … may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, invade the country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us, whereby we shall enjoy their cultivated places, turning the laborious mattacke into the victorious sword … and possessing the fruits of others' labours.”

The principle that conquest in a just war gave a country legitimate possession of enemy territory was universally accepted, and for almost a century afterward force became the principal means in New England and the South for acquiring fresh territory. By the early 1700s, the Powhatan confederation and other Algonquian-language nations around the Chesapeake Bay had been almost obliterated by a combination of outright violence and disease. Then the Piedmont territory occupied by the Tuscarora and Yamasee was cleared as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains after a series of campaigns that
lasted from 1711 through 1716. In New England, the 1637 Pequot War and the greater destruction of King Philip's War from 1675 to 1676 achieved the same end.

Dispossessing the original inhabitants was not enough. English law also required the land to be within the area specified by the royal charters. “No colony hath any right to dispose of any lands conquered from the natives,” ran a royal decree in the 1660s, “unless both the cause of the conquest be just and the land lye within the bound which the king by his charter hath given it.” Thus the vague phrases so confidently used in London had to be given an exact reality in America soil. But even then one more step was required by English common law. To convert the newly acquired territory into individual parcels of lawful property that had a value and could be 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 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.