The Fabric of America (22 page)

The suggestion that slavery might be abolished was by itself enough to turn the members of a slave-owning society against the United States and its Quaker commissioner. And Natchez's plantation owners were right to suspect Ellicott of hostility. Before leaving on the expedition, he had paid a visit to his mother in the family-owned mills in slave-owning Maryland, and the sight of the empty, poorly tended fields across the state line jolted him into an expression of his own opinions of slavery.

“
That domestic slavery is wrong in a moral point of view is evident from the ordinary principles of justice,
” he commented in his journal. “And that it is politically wrong may be deduced from the following facts.
First
that a tract of country cultivated by slaves is neither so well improved, rich or populous as it would be if cultivated by the owners of the soil and by freemen.
Secondly
slaves cannot be calculated upon as adding to the strength of the community, but frequently the contrary for reasons too obvious to detail.”

He wrote as a Pennsylvanian. The state's border with Maryland and Virginia, first established by Mason and Dixon and extended by Ellicott and the other commissioners, was already defining a difference not just in territory, but in values. On one side, some people were treated almost entirely as property, on the other such people were entitled to most of humanity's rights of freedom and independence. The choice that now faced Ellicott was to repudiate his own values or to alienate the loyalties of the Natchez planters. They made their sentiments apparent in October by electing Hutchins to act as their spokesman to Congress.

By the fall of 1797 Ellicott found that his most vicious critics were Americans orchestrated by a British officer, while his warmest ally was the Spanish governor of Natchez. This was no longer Gayoso. In July he had been elevated to the post of governor-general of Louisiana and West Florida, and his place taken by Esteban Minor, who had been promoted from captain. That he was now Major Minor symbolized the absurdist, upside-down atmosphere in Natchez.

Suddenly wearied by the seeming impossibility of ever running the boundary, Ellicott asked Pickering in October whether he should come home. “
I feel a consciousness of having done my duty to the utmost of my power and ability,
” he wrote plaintively. “I have frequented no places of amusement nor entertainment—I have endeavoured to live like a republican and philosopher. No idle time have I spent in this country—when I have not been engaged in the various correspondence in which I find myself unexpectedly involved, my mind has been occupied by scientific pursuits.”

Pickering ignored the special pleading and simply assured him, “The President has judged it expedient that you should remain at the Natchez.” Left without support, Ellicott's final decision on slavery was clearly influenced by the friends he had made in Natchez.

In the wealthy Scotsman William Dunbar he found someone with an enthusiasm for astronomy as great as his own. As soon as Ellicott arrived in Natchez, Dunbar had expressed the hope that “you will permit me to look up to you as a Master in Astronomy” and followed his advice by purchasing from a London instrument-maker both a specialized telescope known as an astronomical circle and a new chronometer. In return, Dunbar offered Ellicott a home in a house he had newly built in Natchez, which also served as the headquarters of the Natchez council. Both Dunbar and two close friends on the council, Bryan Bruin and Daniel Clark, counseled Ellicott to ignore Hutchins. In the florid language favored by the planter class, Clark condemned “the Terrorists and Anarchists of Natchez” and urged him to treat with contempt “the machinations of the anarchist, Hutchins.” Shrewdly, Bruin pointed to Ellicott's greatest weakness: “You have too much sensibility for your own happiness and suffer the latter to be too much dependent on the opinion of others.”

All three men owned large plantations worked by slaves. They could not have failed to make their opinions on the matter known.

That October, Ellicott issued a proclamation dealing with Hutchins's claims that he was engaged in speculation and wanted Natchez to be administered in the same way as the Northwestern Territory: “I now in the most unequivocal manner declare the above reports to be without the least foundation. I have recommended [to the U.S. Congress] that the vacant land be disposed of in such manner as to accommodate settlers of all descriptions,
and that the system of slavery be continued upon the same footing that it is in the southern states.”

It was a fateful decision. Ellicott still maintained his abhorrence of slavery on every sort of ground, moral, social, and, not least, his knowledge of Banneker's abilities. “
I would not by this be understood to advocate the cause of slavery
,” he explained to Clark, “I am an enemy to it. I am for the abolition of slavery, but I would do it gradually as is now practised by law in the states of Pennsylvania and New York.” He had every political reason for his decision—both plantation owners and the floating constituency of small farmers made clear that any proposal for abolition would simply drive them across the Mississippi to the Spanish side or to transfer their loyalties to whatever flag Hutchins cared to fly. Yet the compromise had immeasurable long-term consequences for the entire region.

It gave to landowners such as Dunbar and Clark those particular guarantees of personal liberty and security of property that were embodied in the U.S. Constitution. But by the same token it took from their slaves the protection offered by the Spanish legal code known as the Siete Partidas, which incorporated maxims about the limitations of rights over human beings and the unnaturalness of slavery. Nothing could mitigate the brutality of the institution, and on the plantation a master's or overseer's will was effectively the law, but Spain's colonies allowed slaves certain rights that they could, and sometimes did, enforce through the courts.

These included the right to own property, to be baptized and to marry, and most importantly
coartación,
the right to purchase their freedom. By contrast, American slaves needed their owner's permission to buy their liberty, and in many states, Mississippi among them, the conditions attached made it almost impossible to obtain. In defense of their rights, Spanish slaves could appear in court and give independent testimony, an impossibility within the United States.

Paradoxically, the iron guarantee that the U.S. Constitution gave to property was what denied slaves any legal rights. In a case quoted by the standard textbook, Wheeler's
Laws of Slavery
, a judge declared, “The power of the master must be absolute… upon the ground that
this dominion is essential to the value of slaves as property, to the security of the master and the public tranquillity
.” As property, the slaves' humanity became an anomaly, and so
in the 1820s, once Mississippi had become a state with control over its internal affairs, it would become illegal to teach slaves to read, or to allow them to be married or baptized. They could not own property. Their only right was not to be murdered.

The status of women would also change when Natchez fell inside the U.S. frontier. Most obviously, they lost their right to own property independently. A striking example was offered by Gayoso's young American wife, Margaret Watts, who had expected to inherit a plantation left to her by her husband. Under Spanish law this would have been an automatic right, because in principle property was regarded as shared by husband and wife. When Gayoso died unexpectedly from yellow fever in 1799, Margaret sold her land, but, after her own death, the sale was challenged by her own son because under U.S. law property belonged first to the husband and then to the son. The widow had use of it, not outright ownership, and that only until the son became an adult.

What happened in Natchez district, in Mississippi, and in the rest of the young United States was that the law guaranteed to an unprecedented degree the fundamental rights of ownership, self-expression, democratic government, and freedom from arbitrary arrest, but it limited them to a minority of the population. A central theme of U.S. history would be the struggle to spread the same rights to every American.

To the vast majority of male landowners in Natchez in the fall of 1797, the assurances given by Andrew Ellicott regarding the ownership of land and of slaves removed all their doubts about becoming American. In practice he was just a frustrated boundary commissioner with no more authority than the reputation created by his thin-skinned, upright character, but it was enough to deal Hutchins's campaign a mortal blow. Once Ellicott had explained that his proposal to allocate land “to accommodate settlers of all descriptions” meant confirming all existing occupancy of land, and measuring out the remainder of the vacant land “in tracts not exceeding 400 acres each,” Hutchins's supporters began to ebb away, publicly declaring that he had deceived them.

The members of Natchez's administrative council thanked Ellicott for promoting “the interest and happiness of this country” and condemned “the
restless and intriguing disposition of a designing Individual” who had attempted “to injure you in the Public mind and to prejudice you not only in this District but also with the Executive of the U.S.”

A critical test of the council's authority occurred soon afterward, when the Spanish government in Madrid announced its intention to replace Major Minor as governor. In response, the Natchez council declared that it would arrest his replacement should he ever appear in the area. Adding to the tension, Hutchins promised a bodyguard of two hundred men to support the new governor. In New Orleans, Gayoso weighed up his options and decided to overrule Madrid, leaving Minor in his post. Even Wilkinson could not mistake the changed reality of the situation. The need to maintain his influence forced his hand, and, as winter approached, he at last sent the long-promised reinforcements.

The arrival of U.S. troops confirmed that the Spanish policy of delay could no longer be sustained. On January 10, 1798, Gayoso sent Ellicott a short message: “
By a packet just arrived
, I have received orders from court, by which I am authorised and ordered to evacuate the forts of Natchez and [Walnut Hills].”

Early in February, Spanish galleys appeared carrying artillery downriver from Walnut Hills. “
My Love,
” Ellicott scribbled on a scrap of paper to his wife, “I embrace a few minutes at midnight (as the boat is just going off and the night taken up in making out my despatches for the Secretary of State) to assure you that myself and all the party [are] in a good state of health, and that we shall in a few days proceed to business—I have at length worried the Spaniards out.”

Some men are sordid, some vain, some ambitious. To detect the predominant passion, to lay hold of it, is the profound part of political science.

GENERAL JAMES WILKINSON to Don Diego de Gardoqui, 1783

Even today, the point at which the thirty-first parallel cuts across the east bank of the Mississippi River presents an uninviting prospect. The place where Andrew Ellicott began the U.S. frontier has become the border between Louisiana and Mississippi. To the south, on Louisiana's side, squeezed between a bend in the river and the state line, stand the walls and watch towers of the Angola maximum-security penitentiary, once infamous for its brutality and still chilling in its gigantic, eighteen-thousand-acre scope. Upriver on Mississippi's side, dense woodland and scrubby undergrowth growing above the muddy shore appear almost equally impenetrable. Yet these are puny obstacles compared with the matted barrier of cane more than thirty feet high, attached by a blanket of vines to the branches of an ooze-rooted forest, that confronted the boundary commissioner in April 1798.

That same month, Congress at last created a government for the Mississippi Territory, the immense tract of land that Ellicott had secured for it. Although Georgia only gave up its claim to the northern portion in 1802, it covered an area comprising all of the modern states of Mississippi and Alabama north of the thirty-first parallel. Winthrop Sargent, secretary of the Northwestern Territory, was appointed governor, and as Pickering brusquely
informed Ellicott, “The plan [for its administration] is the same as that for the Northwestern Territory with the exception respecting Slaves—that is the inhabitants may keep slaves.”

For weeks, Ellicott and the citizens' council had administered the quarrelsome society, solving disputes, and maintaining order between Spaniards and Americans. Worn down by his role as stand-in U.S. representative, Ellicott decided not to wait for Sargent. Fourteen months after his arrival in Natchez, he loaded his men and his baggage on three boats and floated down the Mississippi to begin running the frontier. He landed close to where he thought the line should begin and, with the eagerness of a man returning to what he loves best, recorded in his journal that “on the 11th I set up the clock and small zenith sector, and proceeded to take the zenith distance of [the star] Pollux for five evenings successively, the first three with the plane of the sector to the east, and others with the plane west.” No matter that mosquitoes swarmed up from the swamp or that damp clouded his lenses, he reveled in the exactitude of his labors, the intrinsic reliability of his figures, the public usefulness of his calculation, and the absolute indifference of the stars to the shifting, vicious selfishness of people.

Having established that he was still too far north, his team of some forty surveyors, soldiers, and laborers loaded the flatboats again and drifted round the long bend that now houses the Angola penitentiary to Willings Bayou— “eight and a half miles distance but fifty miles on the Mississippi,” Ellicott exaggerated. From there everything was transported by hand, boat, and horse through ten miles of swamps and forest to the top of the Tunica Hills, standing almost fourteen hundred feet above the surrounding woodland.