The Fabric of America (27 page)

Although this draconian power might be limited in practice by local interests, Ellicott's experience in Natchez left no doubt that the federal government possessed the authority to decide the crucial issues of distribution of land and the legitimacy of slavery in a territory. In 1802, when Georgia at last ceded to the United States its claims to western territory, the Natchez demonstration was repeated, this time as the state's gigantic Bourbon County was incorporated under federal law into a larger Mississippi Territory. And what happened on a small scale in Mississippi would occur on a gigantic scale in the Louisiana Purchase.

It was ironic that Jefferson should have arranged the purchase that made this increase in federal power possible. In 1798 he had established the case for states' rights in response to John Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts with their catchall description of sedition as “writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States.”

To resist this threat to freedom of self-expression, Jefferson argued in the Kentucky Resolves that individual states need not be bound by federal law because the Union was a “compact” made by “sovereign and independent” states, and they retained all “the powers not delegated to the central government.” Consequently the states, not the Supreme Court, had the ultimate right to decide whether federal laws, such as the Sedition Acts, were constitutional or “unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

Although these principles, together with the Virginia Resolves inspired by James Madison, are usually portrayed today as the last-ditch defiance of embattled states in the face of a mighty federal government, the balance of power in the late eighteenth century was the other way round. Adams's administration was only able to enact the sedition laws because they had the approval of the other states. When Kentucky and Virginia appealed for endorsement of their position, they received no support. Four New England
states replied that the Supreme Court was the ultimate authority in interpreting the Constitution, three middle states were in favor of the Sedition Acts, with Delaware declaring that the Resolves amounted to “unjustifiable interference with the General Government.” The remaining southern states, which should have been the most sympathetic, offered no response at all. Once arrests of critics of the government began, and the dominant states turned against the laws, their opposition quickly rendered Adams's assertion of federal power almost inoperable even before electoral defeat put an end to his administration.

So small was the federal authority that to contemporaries the chief danger presented by the Louisiana Purchase seemed to be that its sheer size might break the frail Union apart. A population dispersed over such a large area was thought to be ungovernable. Alexander Hamilton expressed the common opinion that the political instability would “hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our country, or a dissolution of the Government.” The New England separatist movement that flourished during the Continental Congress instantly revived, fearful that the chief effect of the purchase would be to produce more slave states. “We must form different empires,” New Hampshire senator William Plumer told his Senate colleagues in October 1803. “Admit this western world into the union, and you destroy with a single operation the whole weight and importance of the eastern states.”

That the chief beneficiary of the new territory would be the puny federal government does not appear to have occurred to anyone, least of all Jefferson. What he expected was the creation of more powerful states, and he appeared ready to accept that their proliferation might lead to a split in the Union and the disappearance of its government. “Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies,” Jefferson told the eminent English chemist Dr. Joseph Priestley, in 1804, “I believe not very important to the happiness of either part … It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.”

Yet the reality of the new frontier required decisions that could only be taken at the federal level. By the rules that Jefferson himself had recommended in 1784, every step in the creation of landed property, from the purchase of territory from the Native American owners, through its measurement by federal surveyors, and eventual sale to citizens, could only be
undertaken by the U.S. government. As a result, federal intervention at each stage of the process was far more aggressive under Jefferson than under Washington and Adams, the supposed champions of central government, simply because the area of federal territory was so much greater.

In acquiring the land owned by Native Americans, for example, Jefferson was prepared to use the Louisiana Purchase as a gigantic reservation, to be given “to the Indians of the east side of the Mississippi in exchange for their present country.” As he implicitly admitted in a letter to Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, this would have required federal control of both Americans and Indians on a scale that King George III and the colonial proprietors might have envied. While the Native Americans were moved west of the Mississippi, the settlers would need to be restricted to the east. “When we shall be full on the [east] side,” Jefferson explained, “we can lay off a range of states on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply.”

Although such detailed intervention was beyond the scope of the United States in his day, Jefferson's administration was relentless in pressing the original inhabitants to sell their land wherever settlers wished to move. From the Kaskaskias in the north, who sold because they were “reduced by the wars and wants of savage life to a few individuals unable to defend themselves against the neighboring tribes,” to the Choctaws in the south, who took the money because they were “indebted to their merchants beyond what could be discharged by the ordinary proceeds of their hunting,” Jefferson's administration succeeded in acquiring title to much of the land east of the Mississippi.

But it was at the next stage, through the mechanism of the U.S. Public Land Survey, that the federal government intervened most pervasively in frontier life. Inseparable from Jefferson's achievement in securing the Louisiana Purchase were the steps he took to increase the survey's efficiency in converting the huge territory into property. To the amazement, and envy, of foreign observers, the survey succeeded in chaneling the settlers' insatiable hunger for land into a unifying force strong enough to hold the nation together through six decades of wild expansion.

Since 1785 when Thomas Hutchins had taken two hesitant years to measure out the first thirty-six square-mile townships in the Ohio Valley, the
Public Land Survey had expanded to cover most of the Ohio Territory. Although federal land was measured out in squares formed by lines running north to south and east to west, much of the Ohio Territory had been divided up among nineteen different owners, including states, colleges, churches, companies, and veterans' organizations, each of which used its own methods to survey the ground. Armed only with magnetic compasses, few of the surveyors contracted to do the work at $2 a mile had the time or expertise to work out true north. As a result few squares were actually right-angled, and mistakes in measuring distances with their twenty-two-yard Gunter's chains produced skewed and wavering lines. Explaining his men's shortcomings, especially in the thick woodland, Surveyor General Rufus Putnam observed defensively, “In a covered Country, altho great pains is taken, we must be very fortunate if we don't fall into many errors.”

Each township was subdivided into thirty-six sections measuring one square mile, or 640 acres, but in 1800 Congress reduced the minimum parcel of land that could be bought to a half section (320 acres), then cut that again in 1804 to a quarter section (160 acres) with a down payment of only a quarter of the total price, the rest being paid over the next three years. As the demand for land increased, so did the confusion caused by Putnam's rough-and-ready methods. According to a modern surveyor, in the grid of squares measured out under Putnam's supervision, “scarcely two sections could be found of the same shape or of equal contents.” With the creation of the Mississippi Territory and then the gigantic addition of Louisiana, it was evident that the system had to be improved.

Jefferson's first choice to replace Putnam was Andrew Ellicott. Unfortunately the offer of the job was made not by the president, but by Jefferson's strongest supporter in the military, James Wilkinson. The post carried a $2,000 salary, almost equal to that of a state governor, together with a clerkship worth $500 a year for his son Andy, but poverty-stricken though he was, Ellicott turned it down. Two years later in 1803, the president appointed Jared Mansfield, a former professor of mathematics at West Point military academy, who was to leave a mark on the land and the society that remains to this day.

The grid of squares between the West Coast and the Appalachians that can be seen from an aircraft window today is Mansfield's work. Its checkerboard regularity grew outward from the crossing points of meticulously surveyed north-south lines, the Principal Meridians, and east-west lines crossing
them exactly at right angles, the Principal Baselines. Mansfield himself personally surveyed the Second Principal Meridian running through Indiana, the First being the state line between Ohio and Indiana (see appendix). Others were run as far west as the Willamette Meridian in Oregon, as new areas of land were obtained from the Native Americans and put on the market. In an era when land was the prime source of wealth, and rising land prices made it an irresistible market for speculation, the U.S. Survey allowed anyone to become a settler or a speculator.

Although Ohio was only the test bed for the U.S. Survey's development, it provided an early indication of its effectiveness in putting land into people's hands. In the year 1800, the Ohio land offices sold almost four hundred thousand acres, but by 1820 the figure had reached nearly nine million acres annually, raising more than $17 million for the federal Treasury. From 45,000 inhabitants in 1800, the population surged to 230,760 ten years later, and by 1818 when Andrew Miller wrote his guide
The New States and Territories,
it had passed 400,000, with only 3,000 of its original Native American owners remaining.

This made a striking contrast with the situation on the other side of the Ohio River where Kentucky land titles were thrown into doubt by corruption dating from Robert Morris's day, and by the confusion that resulted from demarcating properties by “metes and bounds”—that is by natural features such as streams and blazed trees. The irregular shapes that this produced were hard to measure accurately, and the complex registration procedure was prone to error and illegal alteration. By 1829, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story surmised that Kentucky's system of land distribution had virtually broken down, forcing settlers to take land wherever they could, “without any previous survey under public authority, and without any such boundaries as were precise, permanent, and unquestionable.” The result was that poor Kentucky farmers such as Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham, could rarely be sure of actually owning their property. When the family moved to Indiana, it was, as Abraham Lincoln explained, “partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky.”

By 1830, Kentucky's population was only three quarters that of Ohio, and land was selling for 12.5 cents an acre compared with $5 in Ohio. In Tennessee, the chaos was almost as bad, with more than half the households
having no title to the land they occupied. Throughout the southern Appalachians, land became a commodity for the wealthy while the poor either squatted illegally or migrated to the thin land in the mountains that no one else wanted. A modern estimate suggests that almost 80 percent of the population occupied just 4 percent of the southern Appalachians, the majority of them being white tenants or sharecroppers, with a scattering of free African-Americans.

Determined to prevent southern land patterns from taking over in the newly organized Mississippi Territory, Jefferson and his clever treasury secretary, Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, appointed the reliable Isaac Briggs in 1803 to be responsible for the Public Land Survey in the south. But even paying surveyors a double rate of $4 a mile, Briggs found it hard to produce a regular grid of squares. Faced with heavily wooded terrain and a complex of existing properties bought through the Yazoo land companies, or by private arrangement with Spain, or by illegal land deals with Cherokee and Choctaw owners, his men turned in plats that looked more like a metes-and-bounds survey than a checkerboard.

Yet the U.S. Survey's difficulties served to show how intensely the federal administration under Jefferson worked to impose a government framework on the wilderness. Impatiently Gallatin urged Briggs to take more vigorous action: “It is true that you will not be able to complete your work in that scientifick manner which was desirable,” he wrote in 1805, “[but] it is of primary importance that the land should be surveyed and divided, as well as it can be done.” And when Briggs gave up in despair, the same pressure was applied to his successor, Thomas Freeman.

The unexpected consequence of this sustained federal intervention was to give those living on the frontier a compelling interest in the direction of the U.S. government. On the Atlantic coast, by contrast, the states continued to be the focus of citizens' interests and loyalties.

Ellicott had refused to take the job of surveyor general for fear of Wilkinson's influence. To his dismay, the general had written from Washington offering the post to Ellicott in April 1801 shortly after Congress had decided Jefferson's election. Alarmed by this evidence of Wilkinson's intimacy with
the president, Ellicott replied by sending Jefferson in June a detailed account of all that he knew about the general's treachery, and in particular of Captain Portell's confirmation that the $9,640 paid to Wilkinson by the Spanish government was for his services as their agent.