The Fabric of America (20 page)

The flood of migrants traveling into the newly opened lands in the west would in time provide the next generation to rebel against the exclusive eastern elite who had always monopolized government in northern America. To that elite, however, the trains of wagons creaking through the Wilderness Road in the Alleghenies and the convoys of flatboats floating
down the Ohio River presented the same problem that had earlier faced the states, and before them the colonial proprietors: how could the government retain control of the settlers and banditti moving west beyond their jurisdiction? The solution turned out to be no different from before—like its predecessors, the United States needed to establish a clear-cut boundary marking the area within which its laws held sway. Almost inevitably, it would be run by Andrew Ellicott.

The Treaty of San Lorenzo signed in 1795 with Spain gave the United States its first practical opportunity to demarcate the extent of its power. It provided a salutary reminder of the disparity in power between the young republic and the hemisphere's superpower.

When the American Revolution dismembered Britain's North American empire, Spain was the other great beneficiary. Between 1781 and 1783, it took advantage of the war in the north to seize the provinces of East and West Florida—modern-day Florida and the coastal areas of Alabama and Mississippi—that it had lost to Britain in 1763 after the French and Indian War. In the absence of any opposition, it also gained undisputed control of the entire Mississippi River. With those additions, the grandeur of Spanish America reached its apogee. Its total length stretched from Cape Horn to Canada, and in North America alone, the Floridas with the vast expanses of Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California gave it territory three times that of the United States.

The borders of this gigantic empire were rarely clear. Not until 1771, more than 250 years after it first laid claim to the New World, did Spain find it necessary to try to define its boundaries with Portugal's possessions in South America. Its limits in North America were equally fuzzy. According to the Americans, the Mississippi River served as the unmistakable frontier between the empire and the United States, but Spanish galleys patrolled the waters and its forts commanded strategic points from New Madrid (near Cairo, Illinois) to Natchez. In 1782, John Jay reported that Count d'Arada, the Spanish ambassador to France, had designated the border, as Spain saw it, from a lake “east of the Flint River to the confluence of the Kanawa with the Ohio, thence round the western shores of Lakes Erie and Huron and
thence round Lake Michigan.” This included most of Kentucky and Tennessee, and although Jay did not take the claim seriously, there was no doubt that Spain's influence reached far to the east of the Mississippi.

How far was suggested by a letter sent in 1788 by John Sevier, Revolutionary hero and pioneer settler in Tennessee, to Diego de Gardoqui, the Spanish envoy to the United States. “The people of this region,” Sevier wrote, “have come to realize truly upon what part of the world and upon which nation their future happiness and security depend and they immediately infer that their interest and prosperity depend entirely upon the protection and liberality of your government.”

The liberality that western settlers sought was permission to ship their goods down the Mississippi to the great port of New Orleans. Unless the United States could secure freedom of navigation on the river for its citizens, the transfer of loyalties to Spain seemed an obvious step to take. “There is nothing which binds one country or one State to another but interest,” Washington had predicted in 1783. “Without this cement the Western inhabitants can have no predilection for us.”

Infuriated by the indifference of the eastern states to their needs, Kentucky's attorney general, Harry Innes, predicted in 1787, “
This country will in a few years Revolt from the Union and endeavor to erect an Independent Government.
” That same year, when the territory's constitutional convention met, a powerful group lobbied for Kentucky to secede from the Union and set itself up as an independent ally of Spain serving as “a permanent barrier against Great Britain and the United States.”

To preserve the Union, it was therefore essential to secure for the western settlers the right of free navigation down the Mississippi to the great port of New Orleans. Fuzzy zones of influence had to be replaced by a border that reached to the middle of the river. All the United States had to offer its powerful neighbor in return was a guarantee to demarcate an unmistakable frontier between the Spanish Floridas and its own land-hungry citizens.

By brilliant diplomacy, emphasizing the threat of making an alternative alliance with Britain against Spain, Thomas Pinckney, the American envoy in Madrid, persuaded Spain's chief minister, Manuel Godoy, to accept this lopsided bargain. In exchange for granting American citizens freedom of navigation on the Mississippi, a clear-cut frontier between Spain and the
United States would be established along the old colonial border between Georgia and the Floridas. As laid down by the British in 1763, this would follow the thirty-first parallel for most of its length. So clearly were the terms of the Treaty of San Lorenzo in the United States' favor that even the president doubted Spain's intention to carry them out.

As the nation's expert on running parallels, Ellicott was Washington's personal choice in 1796 to be the U.S. commissioner responsible for demarcating the southern boundary. At a secret briefing, he warned Ellicott to resist any Spanish attempt to delay putting the treaty into effect. He was also to be wary of influential Americans known to be working for the Spanish government who were trying to detach Kentucky from the Union. “[The president] thought it a business of much importance, both to the honour and safety of the country,” Ellicott noted, “and directed me to pay a strict attention to that subject.”

The new commissioner moved in a small world. His boss, the secretary of state, was the Teutonic disciplinarian Timothy Pickering, who had made his fortune speculating in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, while Thomas Freeman, the surveyor appointed to carry out the actual legwork on the frontier, had previously been James Dermott's assistant in Washington. Earlier acquaintance colored Ellicott's judgments. Pickering remained “the excellent Colonel Pickering” who had brought peace to the frontier, while Freeman, an enterprising, hotheaded adventurer, was regarded with dark suspicion. A personal escort of thirty-five soldiers accompanied the commissioner, as well as a small military detachment under the independent command of Lieutenant Percy Pope. The only members of the expedition that Ellicott had personally selected were the assistants required to look after his instruments and records, his son Andy, and two young surveyors, David Gillespie and Peter Walker.

In the absence of her husband and eldest son, Sally Ellicott became the head of a family in which the next five children were all daughters. The girls' lively correspondence showed that they grew up to be opinionated, challenging, and independent, characteristics that must have been fostered by Sally. And since she herself had just become a mother for the eleventh time at the age of forty-five, it is possible that sadness at Ellicott's departure was tinged slightly with relief. Neither could have guessed, however, that it would be almost four years before they met again.

. . .

Although no one could run a parallel like Ellicott, there must have been doubts whether someone so touchy could handle the diplomatic problems that would be involved. In the event, his character rather than his science turned out to be the vital quality on which implementation of the treaty depended. It was clear from the moment the party of surveyors and soldiers assembled in Pittsburgh in the fall of 1796 that he would allow nothing to delay his progress.

In October, falling water levels stopped river traffic on the Ohio, but rather than wait till the spring Ellicott insisted that his team haul their heavy boats over the half-submerged rocks. Below Louisville they came to the infamous Ohio Falls, which normally appeared as a smooth slide of water, but were now reduced to a welter of white horsetails cascading between black rocks. After a brief examination, he “concluded to risk the boats rather than be detained.” So his three vessels were steered straight for the lip of the falls, “and a little after noon all the boats were over but not without being considerably damaged, the one that I was in had nine of her timbers broken.”

Nowhere in this headlong dash did he forget to note the daily temperature, the flattening of the Alleghenies and gradual appearance of the prairies, the composition of the soil, the salt springs, and the lives of the pioneer farmers. “The people who reside on the Ohio are brave, enterprising and warlike” ran an entry in his journal that offers an early account of the frontier character, “which will generally be found the strongest characteristical marks of the inhabitants of all our new settlements. It arises from their situation: being constantly in danger from the Indians, they are habituated to alarms, and acts of bravery become a duty they owe to themselves and their friends.”

On the minus side, they lacked education, science, and the self-restraint required to prevent bravery from degenerating into ferocity, and economically they were in a mess. The Ohio Valley could produce everything people needed for survival—corn, cattle, hogs, apples, whiskey—and any surplus, including the coal that some were mining, could be sent downriver for sale in New Orleans. Anything they couldn't produce themselves, from rifles to saucepans, had to be imported, and “so long as they depend upon the Atlantic states for their supplies of European manufactures, the balance of
trade will constantly be against them, and draw off that money which should be applied to the improvement of the country, and the payment of their taxes.” As always, he felt that he was carrying civilization with him. Once the treaty was implemented, the Mississippi would be opened, imports would become cheaper, the country would improve, and taxes would be paid.

His goal was Natchez, where Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, governor of the district and the Spanish boundary commissioner, was waiting for him. On the Mississippi, however, Spanish garrison commanders repeatedly tried to prevent them from proceeding, but Ellicott pressed on, claiming diplomatic immunity. In the face of a message from Gayoso demanding that the U.S. party wait for a specific invitation before proceeding farther, Lieutenant Pope decided to remain at Walnut Hills, modern Vicksburg, Mississippi, with the military detachment, but Ellicott was not deterred. An American adventurer named Philip Nolan, whose contract to sell wild mustangs to the Spanish army gave him high-level military contacts, had secretly warned him that Gayoso was under instructions from Madrid to use any means to prevent the treaty from taking effect. Leaving Pope behind, Ellicott hurried on downriver with his assistants and axmen and on February 23, 1797, arrived at Natchez.

The settlement existed on two levels. The older part, a cluster of dwellings and warehouses, stood round the landing stage at the foot of a tall bluff that jutted into the brown, swirling river, but the new city of Natchez itself and its fort were built high up on the hill so that the Spanish cannon could control navigation on the Mississippi. To Gayoso's fury, Ellicott's party ignored all protocol and, having landed without asking permission, simply pitched camp on a level with the fort. The first message from the Spanish was a request that the flag they had hoisted be taken down. “This met with a positive refusal,” Ellicott noted, “and the flag wore out upon its staff.”

By rights it should not have had time to get even slightly threadbare. According to the celestial observations Ellicott made over the next few nights, the thirty-first parallel, the frontier agreed by Pinckney's treaty, ran thirty-nine miles south of Natchez, and the Spanish therefore had no legal right to remain. But when the two men met, Gayoso offered a plausible reason for not evacuating the fort. Spanish troops had to stay, he explained, to protect the five thousand inhabitants in the area around Natchez from attack by
Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians, and from invasion by Loyalists and British and American freebooters coming south from Canada. The fort could not be evacuated until these dangers passed, and U.S. forces could not take over the fort until it had been evacuated. It was a standoff.

Strategically Natchez commanded both the river upstream and all the hinterland of what is now Mississippi and Alabama down to the Gulf. The city was at the heart of a new Spanish policy toward American immigrants, adopted in 1788 by the then chief minister, José Moñino, Count of Floridablanca. Instead of keeping Americans out of West Florida and Louisiana, Spain would try “to attract to our side the inhabitants of the Ohio and Mississippi.” They were to be offered free land, freedom to follow their own religion, and no less enticingly freedom to transport their goods down the Mississippi. Gayoso himself had been chosen to proclaim the new regime, and he had selected the location of the city of Natchez and laid out its streets. Its rapid growth, doubling in population every two years, was testament to the policy's success. Every month of delay brought more immigrants, consolidating the Spanish hold not just on the area round the city but on the vast territory east of the Mississippi that the treaty recognized as part of the United States.

As Bernard Lintot, originally a New Englander, now a Spaniard, and one of Natchez's most respected planters, cynically observed to Ellicott, “I have resided many years [in this district], and have ever found the Spanish Government giving the most liberal encouragement to American and English settlers, and could not perceive that the passing from a land of liberty to a despotic government occasioned any difficulty in the business.” Even Daniel Boone, the epitome of American patriotism, would join the throng in 1799, crossing the Mississippi into Spanish Louisiana, where he took an oath of loyalty to the king of Spain.