The Fabric of America (46 page)

27
“The greatest Estates we have
”: Washington to John Posey, June 24, 1767. George Washington Papers.

28
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon
: The complications of Mason and Dixon's methods are lucidly explained and illustrated in
Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America
by Edwin Danson (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001).
Mason & Dixon
by Thomas Pynchon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). A. H. Mason, ed.,
Journal of Charles Mason (1728
–
1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733
–
1779
), Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 76 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1969).

31
“You were in your young days
”: AE to Robert Patterson, March 23, 1800.

31
“[Pennsylvania] is my native country
”: Note in personal journal, December 6, 1785,
AE Life.

32
Almanacs
: “The Maryland Press, 1777–1790” by Joseph Towne Wheeler (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1938). “The Archives of Maryland,” vol. 0438, p. 0103.

32
“the most despised
”:
A History of American Literature
by Moses Coit Tyler (New York: Putnam & Sons, 1881).

34
“The old Gentleman had always too much
”:
David Rittenhouse
by Brooke Hindle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

35
The results showed that the Mount Welcome observatory
: Ibid.

38
David Rittenhouse
: Hindle,
Rittenhouse.

40
“Conceive a Country
”: AE to SE, June 20, 1785,
AE Life
.

40
Running Pennsylvania
's western border and the conditions encountered come from AE's journal and letters in
AE Life.

41
Modern
Pennsylvania measures just over forty-five thousand square miles. Of this, the northerly wedge claimed by Connecticut and New York between the Delaware River and Lake Erie accounted for almost five thousand square miles. The western slice claimed by Virginia would have removed close to one thousand square miles south of the Ohio River, and almost twice as many more to the north of it would have gone to the United States. Many different reasons are advanced for Pennsylvania's nickname, the Keystone State: the fixing of its boundaries along with those of six of the original states—New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—seems the most plausible contender.

42
Pennsylvania's economy
: Only Germany after the First World War compares with the economic roller coaster that took the United States from hyperinflation to hypodeflation
between 1775 and 1785. Within that general picture, the shortage of cash from the early 1780s in the northern states exacerbated the problem there. From Charles A. Beard's
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
(New York: Macmillan, 1935) by way of Forrest Macdonald's
We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) to David B. Robertson's
The Constitution and America's Destiny
(St Louis: University of Missouri, 2005), the literature on the economic effect upon constitutional reform is intense and combative. That the deliberations in Philadelphia generated an inspired dynamic is undeniable, but they did so against a background created by the economic power and ruthlessness of the states.

42
“Very few in this Town
”: “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania” by Terry Bouton,
Journal of American History
87, no. 3 (December 2000).

42
“these cursed hungry caterpillars
”: “A Serious Address to the Inhabitants of Granville County, containing an Account of our deplorable Situation we suffer… and some necessary Hints with Respect to a Reformation” by George Sims, June 6, 1765, quoted in Henderson,
Conquest of Old Southwest.

42
The Regulators
: “The North Carolina Regulation, 1766–1776: A Class Conflict” by Marvin L. Kay, in
The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism
, ed. Alfred F. Young (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976).

42
“How long will ye”
:
An Impartial Relation of the First Causes of the Recent Differences in Public Affairs Etc
by Herman Husband (New Bern, 1770),
http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6233/
.

44
“New Jersey is
our
country”
: “Obstacles to the Constitution” by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Supreme Court Historical Society 1987 Yearbook.

45
Thomas Jefferson's
emotional devastation at Martha's death was widely noted. Patsy's account and Randolph's are cited in
Understanding Thomas Jefferson
by E. M. Halliday (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). I incline to the view of his biographer Joseph P. Ellis that in his grief Jefferson learned “he would rather be lonely than be vulnerable.”
American Sphinx
by Joseph P. Ellis (New York: Knopf, 1997).

46
“Nature intended me”
: Jefferson to P. S. Dupont de Nemours, Washington, March 2, 1809,
The Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743
–
1826
,
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/ writings/brf/jeflxx.htm
.

47
“proposed to lay off every county”
:
Autobiography
by Thomas Jefferson, in
Thomas Jefferson:Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters
(1984).

48
“if we can obtain an indisputed title”
: Thomas McKean to Samuel Adams, August 6, 1782,
Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774—1789,
ed. Paul H. Smith et al. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000).

49
by his estimate it could be run: “Report on the Reduction of the Civil List
,” March 4, 1784,
The Works of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Paul L. Ford (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904–5).

50
“leave it to [the other delegations] to come forward
”: Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Harrison, governor of Virginia, March 3, 1784, ibid.

50
“the democratic principle is contained”
:
Origins of the American rectangular land survey system, 1784
–
1800
by W. D. Pattison (University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Paper 50, 1957).

53
Although the
1790 census recorded the population of the city of Philadelphia as only 28,522, the number more than doubled with the addition of the rest of Philadelphia County. According to the census, Baltimore contained 13,503 inhabitants. Benjamin Franklin was responsible for such prewar innovations in Philadelphia as the fire service, municipal cleaning, public library, etc., and postwar Philadelphia was home not only to the American Philosophical Society, but to painters such as Gilbert Stuart, Benjamin West, and Charles W. Peale.

54
AE's state of mind emerges both in his letters to SE, and in a personal journal kept during this period.
AE Life.

55
“If you are not in fashion”
: Chesterfield's
Letters to His Son
went through twenty-nine full editions between 1775 and 1800. Its popularity in the United States led to the publication of nine exclusively American editions during the same period. More than a hundred abridgments and adaptations also appeared, many in the United States, occasionally bound in with Benjamin Franklin's homelier precepts. Chesterfield's advice heavily influenced numerous manners books, such as John Gregory's popular
A Father's Legacy to His Daughters
, that were published in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See “Authorship, Print and Public in Chesterfield's Letters to His Son” by Ann C. Dean,
Studies in English Literature, 1500
–
1900
45, no. 3 (2005).

56
The Wyoming Valley
dispute is well described in Alfred Van Dusen's
Connecticut
(New York: Random House, 1961), and in the folksy
History of Luzerne County,
ed. H. C. Bradley (Pennsylvania: SB Nelson & Co., 1893).

58
AE's new method of running a guideline is described in
AE Life
, and in greater depth in AE's “A Letter… to Robert Patterson,”
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
4 (1799): 32–51.

59
“My dear, In consequence of your distresses”
: AE to SE, June 12, 1786, Papers.

61
“This circumstance must be
”: AE to SE, May 29, 1787,
AE Life.
For Wyoming Valley, see Bradley, ed.,
History of Luzerne County
.

62
The distorting effects of paper money on the political and economic society of the United States appear in John Ferling's excellent
A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Earlier and opposite perspectives come from Beard and the nineteenth-century commentator Alexander del Mar in
History of Money in America from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Constitution
(Hawthorne, CA: Omni, 1966 reprint of 1899 edition). The most authoritative
modern source on taxation is Woody Holton's “ ‘From the Labours of Others': The War Bonds Controversy and the Origins of the Constitution in New England,”
William & Mary Quarterly
61, no. 2 (April 2004).

62
Index of wholesale prices
:
Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1780–1861
by Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, and Miriam Hussey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936).

62
“I lent the old Congress”
: Benjamin Franklin, February 1788, quoted in the preface to 1935 edition of
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
by Charles A. Beard (New York: Macmillan Company, 1962).

63
There is no modern work on boundaries and land sales, but contemporary references indicate that the connection between establishing secure borders and selling land to raise revenue and soak up paper money was taken for granted. The citizens of the “town of Glocester,” for example, petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1786 “to hit upon some mode to cause the back Lands to be Settled in such a manner: as it can be done: as will Discharge the Public Debt.”

64
“These lands might enable us to pay off ”
: North Carolina delegates Hugh Williamson and William Blount to Alexander Martin, October 22, 1782,
Letters of Delegates to Congress: Volume 19, August 1, 1782–March 11, 1783
by Paul Smith et al., eds.

64
The most complete account of early land sales in
Pennsylvania
is to be found in the Pennsylvania State Archives, Land Records,
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/dam/landrec.htm
. The essential guide is Donna Munger's
Pennsylvania Land Records: A History and Guide for Research
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1991). Donation Lands were intended for the redemption of paper money paid to officers and soldiers in lieu of cash. Depreciation Lands were intended to compensate for the falling value of paper money. The 1780 Depreciation Act set the face value of its certificates as equal to gold and silver. The falling value of paper was reflected in subsequent acts that increased the ratio of paper to cash from 3:1 up to 75:1 in 1781—at which level a cash-rich buyer could make a killing.

64
“All I am now worth”
: Beard,
An Economic Interpretation.

65
Distress in western Pennsylvania is the subject of Terry Bouton's moving “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,”
Journal of American History
87, no. 3 (December 2000).

65
figures issued by Alexander Hamilton
: Alexander Hamilton, “A General Statement of the Domestic Debt, according to the Returns Made to the Treasury by the Several Commissioners Authorized to Issue Certificates of the Public Debt,”
American State Papers: Finance
(Washington, DC, 1832), 1:239.

66
In 1786, Pennsylvania simply ignored
: Burger, “Obstacles to the Constitution.”

66
The fiscal weakness of the
Continental Congress
is underlined by Holton's “ ‘From the Labours of Others.'”

67
“almost the whole of the Specie”
: Board of Treasury Report,
Journal of the Continental Congress
, September 29, 1786.

67
The definitive history of
the U.S. Public Land Survey
is C. Albert White's
A History of the Rectangular Survey System
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982). See also W. D. Pattison,
The Beginning of the American Rectangular Land Survey System
(Ohio Historical Society, 1970), and
Dividing the Land: Early American beginnings of our private property mosaic
by Edward T. Price (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995). Andro Linklater's
Measuring America
(New York: Walker Books, 2002) presents the survey as the hidden infrastructure of western expansion.