The Fabric of America (35 page)

That same mood gave force to the glorious assertion of individual liberty in
Leaves of Grass
, published July 4, 1855:

I am for those that have never been master'd,

For men and women whose tempers have never been master'd,

For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.

Twenty years after Calhoun's southern manifesto had declared, “The country is divided and organized into two great parties, the one sovereign and the other subject,” Thoreau demanded of the north, “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

In the end everyone opposed to slavery had to make a similar appeal to a sense of individual integrity and moral principle more powerful than the laws and conventions that supported slavery. Such opposition required a double defiance from women and free blacks, because both were assumed to be subservient to the white males who made the law. Thus a woman brave enough
to join the Female Anti-Slavery Sociey not only had to face the real danger of riots and the sort of mob violence that led to the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in 1837, but to find a personal justification for her behavior. “Whatever is
morally
right for a man to do, it is
morally
right for a woman to do,” the South Carolina abolitionist Angelina Grimke asserted in 1837. “I recognize no rights but
human
rights—I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female.”

When the free African-American David Walker published his fiery
Appeal
in 1829, a pamphlet that was circulating among southern slaves within months of its apperance, he too turned to a higher authority than the law that protected property. “Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone?” he demanded. “What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself?… Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our
blood and tears
.” The National Black Conventions, which began in the 1830s, and the African churches that started to flourish at the same time, pictured themselves at the other end of the scale, nearer the restrained, middle-class respectability of the black Yankee, but like Walker the identity they envisioned was above all American, and the freedom they looked to lay beyond government.

In the 1850s, abolitionists and the Free-Soilers in the north and west still understood freedom differently. The concept of individual liberty, as expressed by Emerson and practiced by women, free blacks, and abolitionists, was a product of the cities, a rebellion against the stultifying conformity induced by slavery and its supporters. By contrast, the general freedom experienced by pioneers out on the mythical frontier arose from an absence of any restraint, except the need to secure property, and a belief that such freedom was confined to whites.

To fuse these ideas of liberty required the crucible pressure of a civil war and the oratorical grace, political pliability, and unbending morality that constituted Abraham Lincoln's unique genius. Once Lincoln began to interpret the Constitution in the context of the Declaration of Independence, it became evident that individual rights extended to everyone. The critical change began in 1855 when resentment against the tide of Catholic Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine gave rise to the nativist Know-Nothing party, for a time the most popular party in the Union.

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote despairingly to a friend. “As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.' We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes,
and foreigners, and Catholics
.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia for instance where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.'”

Consequently, the idea of freedom that Lincoln developed in the war possessed one profound difference from what had existed before. It was no longer exclusive. That was the import of the words he delivered on the battleground of Gettysburg, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Every frontier, whether federal or state, had eventually to be marked out on the ground. Without the reality of a physical boundary, disputes over jurisdiction could never be solved. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the frontier between Mexico and the United States was to follow the Rio Grande for some twelve hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso, Texas, then cross about seven hundred miles of baking desert and jagged hills to San Diego. The line that border patrols and illegal immigrants now risk lives and fortunes to defend and cross was first demarcated between 1850 and 1855 by Captain William Emory, U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, and José Salazar Ylarregui of Mexico's Colegio de Minería.

The Topographical Engineers were in large part Andrew Ellicott's legacy. Despite his fond hopes of becoming the principal figure at West Point when he was appointed professor of mathematics, he had quickly discovered that the academy remained the personal fiefdom of its autocratic senior officer, Captain Alden Partridge, whose other avian characteristics, according to a contemporary account, included “the body of a penguin and the head of hawk.” In winter he would capriciously decide that ballistics should be taught not in the classroom but by firing cannonballs down the frozen track of the Hudson, and summer semesters were repeatedly cut short in favor of adventure camps in the forest.

“Some of the men cannot read and write,” Ellicott wrote angrily to Monroe in 1815, “much less do they understand English Grammar, Arithmetic &c.” He was joined in his protest by the academy's other newly arrived intellectual star, Jared Mansfield, who had returned from setting the Public Land Survey in order. Together they undertook a campaign for reform that lasted for two years. For a time both were put under arrest by an increasingly eccentric Partridge, but their reward was the appointment in 1817 of the great reforming superintendent, Major Sylvanus Thayer, whose rigorous curriculum and discipline were to win him fame as “the Father of West Point.”

Undisturbed by these upheavals, Ellicott continued to teach his specialty, celestial navigation, and to the few cadets with sufficient ability, he introduced the different methods of calculating longitude—using the moon's location, the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites, eclipses of the sun, and the occultation of stars by the moon—together with the fiendish math that went with them. The influence of his teaching permeated the discipline of topography (the art of detailed mapping) that began to emerge from West Point in those years.

The need to have accurate records of territory available at short notice persuaded the army to create in 1818 the prototype of what was to become the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Soon afterward, its officers began to be allocated the task of demarcating on the ground the lines of the new Territories that Douglas's committee had selected. Here, Ellicott's legacy could be seen. Many of the earliest topographical engineers had worked under him, such as Isaac Roberdeau and Stephen Long, his assistant at West Point, or came from the generation of cadets he taught, among them James Graham, a founding officer of the corps, who managed to run both the Canadian frontier in the 1840s and the initital stages of the Mexican border in the 1850s. Thus a direct chain of expertise connected Ellicott's Pennsylvania boundaries to the meridians and parallels drawn by his nineteenth-century successors, as well as to the international frontier run by Emory and Salazar.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. team on the Mexican border also used Ellicott's methods of celestial and especially lunar observation to check the line, together with random and true lines for the section of it that followed a parallel. Although the Mexicans relied more on triangulation, they agreed to accept the Americans' figures on the land-based part of the frontier. This
was a misjudgment on Salazar's part because he failed to challenge Emory's faulty measurements near Nogales, resulting in the American acquisition of three hundred square miles of Mexican territory.

Nevertheless, the most serious disputes resulted from the constant movement of the Rio Grande. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its repeated meanderings, notably a major alteration at El Chamizal near El Paso in 1864, created disputes that took decades of diplomacy to solve. In 1970, both nations agreed on the unecological solution of channeling the most mobile sections through immobile concrete watercourses. Elsewhere the river remains free, making this the only wandering frontier of the United States.

While Emory and Salazar's teams were still at work on the frontier, its line was abruptly altered. In 1853 the financier James Gadsden made a deal with the seemingly immortal Santa Anna, dictator of Mexico for the third time, to purchase for $10 million almost thirty thousand square miles of territory, the southern strip of today's New Mexico and Arizona, including Tucson, and the most porous stretch of the border with Mexico. Gadsden was planning a railroad to connect the Pacific with Texas, and the flattest route, later followed by the Southern Pacific railroad, lay through country south of the Guadalupe Hidalgo frontier. This new acquisition of territory led directly to Douglas's final disastrous deal that created the states of Kansas and Nebraska.

Even without Gadsden's railroad project, Douglas would eventually have attempted to create a government for the vast tract of land between Missouri and the Rockies stretching north from the slave frontier of 36 degrees 30 minutes to Canada. Although designated part of the Indian Territory to which Native Americans from farther east had been relocated, its dry, short-grass prairies were already being invaded by white ranchers and farmers, who wanted their properties recognized and protected by the federal government. What prompted Douglas to immediate action, however, was his ambition to make Chicago the hub of the nation's railroad system.

He had created the Illinois Central railroad in 1850 by legislating to allow the state to finance it with grants of public land. “If ever a man passed a bill, I did that one,” he crowed afterward. “I did the whole work and was devoted to it for two entire years.” Links to eastern railroads were easily arranged, but
no track existed westward through the dry prairies, and until the region could be organized as a Territory, no federal funds and lands would be available to survey a route to the Pacific.

Four previous attempts to create a Territory in the area had been blocked by the south. Since it lay north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, any Territory would have to be free under the Missouri Compromise, thus tilting the balance even more heavily against slavery. But in a typical deal to buy southern support, Douglas proposed to slice off the southern third of Nebraska to create the Territory of Kansas, reaching west to the Rockies, and to abolish the Missouri Compromise in order to open each Territory for settlement as a slave or free state according to the wishes of the inhabitants. His southern backers accepted on the assumption that Kansas would be a slave state.

It is a testament to Douglas's lack of moral awareness that he never understood how offensive the deal would be to antislavers. While the legislation was still before Congress, Ohio's senators and representatives described it as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge; a criminal betrayal of precious rights … an atrocious plot” and promised that the struggle would go on even after the proposal became law: “We shall go home to our constituents, erect anew the standard of Freedom, and call on the People to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of Slavery.” In Beloit, college students joined thousands of other northern communities in protesting against the Kansas-Nebraska bill that would allow, as they put it, “the land pledged for freedom [by the Missouri Compromise] to be made into slave states.”

The sense of outrage brought together the different interests of Free-Soilers, antislavery Democrats, abolitionists, and Free Labor businesses and became the catalyst that formed them into the new Republican Party. But what really showed how disaffected the north had become was the extra-constitutional reaction.

In New England the Emigrants Aid Society was set up by Eli Thayer and funded by wealthy Amos A. Lawrence to help antislavery settlers find land in Kansas before it was overrun by the “border ruffians” swarming across the border from the slave state of Missouri. When the first settlers left in September, they took with them dozens of Sharps rifles contributed by the congregation of Henry Ward Beecher.

Their warlike preparations produced an equally violent reaction. “Shall we allow such cut-throats and murderers, as the people of Massachusetts are,
to settle in the territory adjoining our own State?” demanded the pro-slavery paper
Liberty Platform
of Missouri in June 1854. “No! If popular opinion will not keep them back, we should see what virtue there is in the force of arms.” And in the same vein, the
Platte Argus
urged its Missouri readers, “Stake out your claims, and woe be to the abolitionist who shall intrude upon it, or come within reach of your long and true rifles, or within
point blank shot of your revolvers
.”

Yet even as tension grew between the two sets of frontier societies, each obeyed with astonishing formality the rituals of claiming property in land. At Salt Creek, close to the center of Kansas Territory, the first immigrants from Missouri carefully formed themselves into a Squatters Association with a set of twelve rules to “secure safety and fairness in the location and preservation of claims.” Common to all squatters clubs was the third rule: “Every person of lawful age who may be at the head of a family, who shall mark out his claim so that it may be apparent how the same lies, and proceed with reasonable diligence to erect thereon a cabin or tent, shall be deemed to have made a proper claim.” What made Salt Creek different was rule nine: “That we will afford protection to no Abolitionists as settlers in Kansas Territory.”