The Fabric of America (6 page)

Newly married to Sarah Brown, invariably known as Sally, the dark-haired daughter of a Bucks County farmer, Ellicott joined the clan reluctantly. “
[Pennsylvania] is my native country
,” he used to insist, “and I love it above any other.” His time on the Patapsco was cut short by his decision to serve in the Maryland militia. This evidently caused such a painful rift in the family that in 1779 Ellicott chose to move away with his wife to live in Baltimore. In the end he was not called upon to fight, but his father died before they could be reconciled, and by the time peace came, Ellicott had made a reputation in a quite different field from milling.

In October 1780 the
Maryland Journal
announced the publication of a pamphlet with the compendious title of
The Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North-Carolina Almanack, And Ephemeris, For the Year of our
Lord, 1781
. Below this came a cover line stating, “The Astronomical Part of this Almanack was calculated by the ingenious Andrew Ellicott, Esq; of Baltimore-Town.”

Almost from their first appearance in 1639,
almanacs
were, in the words of a critic, “
the most despised, most prolific, most indispensable of books, which every man uses, and no man praises
.” Their popularity came from telling people what they needed to know. Weather forecasts, the times that the sun rose and set, and the dates of the full moon were mixed in with the sort of useful wisdom about romance and good manners that would once have been passed on by word of mouth. Old folk sayings such as “Where there's Marriage without Love, there will be Love without Marriage” and “Fish & Visitors stink in three days” were retailed, as though new minted, in Benjamin Franklin's
Poor Richard's Almanac
, earning him a name for sagacity, not to mention sales of ten thousand copies a year.

The
Maryland Almanack
followed the usual pattern, but Ellicott's ephemeris, literally a calendar showing the predicted movements of the stars, planets, and moon through the year, was exceptional in the detail it offered. The times of sunrise and sunset were exact enough to set an unreliable clock by, and those who wanted to travel by the light of a full moon, like those who believed the weather turned at the new moon, could find the information they needed. But there was more esoteric information, the positions of all the known planets at different times of the year, eclipses of Jupiter's moons, and the longitude of Baltimore.

The following year Ellicott felt confident enough to produce on his own
The United States Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1782
, which, coupling science with patriotism, he explained was also
the Second after Leap-Year and the Sixth Year of American Independence
. Letting rip with the astronomy, he not only offered the usual “motions of the sun and moon, the true places and aspects of the eight planets, the rising and setting of the sun, and the rising, setting, southing and age of the moon,” but a forthcoming transit of Mercury across the face of the sun and, what could only have been of interest to the most expert navigators, “lunations, conjunctions, [and] eclipses.” Many of these figures were based on calculations in Maskelyne's
Nautical Almanac
, but checking the sightings and adjusting the values for Baltimore required the exact observation and meticulous mathematics of a genuine astronomer. Apart from Patterson's initial instruction, his expertise was self-taught.

Readers of the
United States Almanack
were also given a recipe for pickling ham, a forecast of “hard thunder” on June 13, an indispensable money-changing table for converting the different currencies of Pennsylvania, New-Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, and a prophecy that “[Britain] will be forced to acknowledge this year, in the fullest manner, the Independence of these United States, which will be recognised by all the powers of Europe.” This was a shrewd prediction, but it was the accuracy of the astronomical predictions that gave the Ellicott almanac its authority. It was sold in cities across the middle states, and by the time that peace came, its compiler's reputation had spread beyond Maryland, to Philadelphia and to Richmond, Virginia.

The invitation from James Madison to become one of Virginia's boundary commissioners reflected the rarity of astronomers in the state. Although Ellicott was also a surveyor—he earned the bulk of his income from the practice—it was his ability to calculate his exact position from the stars that made him indispensable on the frontier in 1784.

Always careful to the point of anxiety about the accuracy of his work, he had loaded his mules with tents, a chest of clothes, a
Nautical Almanac
, and his instruments—a Dollond telescope, a Hadley's sextant, and several Ellicott chronometers—everything that he deemed necessary for the job of running the border. But compared with what a real Virginian would have taken, he was traveling light.

The boundary commissioners' column that crossed the Monongahela River in July to set up an observatory on the highest mountain in the area might have served a small army. Led by a score of axmen to hack a path through the forest, the four commissioners were accompanied by four surveyors, an indeterminate number of laborers, servants and slaves including a dairymaid, and a line of horses and mules carrying beds, tables, chairs, chinaware, tea, wine, and rum, and some of the finest scientific instruments in the United States wrapped in feather-down quilts, as well as a small herd of cows. This last item was recommended as a prophylactic against scurvy by the medical expert William Buchan, who wrote that “milk alone will frequently do more in that disease than any medicine.” He said nothing about whipping up wine with the milk to make a frothy syllabub, and since the
plain-living Pennsylvanians would hardly have entertained such an idea, it must have been another Virginian extravagance.

Differences of temperament triggered tensions between the restrained Ewing, a stern Presbyterian minister renowned for preaching the virtues of prudence and economy, and the exuberant Madison, soon to be an Episcopalian bishop and notorious for his eagerness to embrace whatever was new in science, economics, and politics. He won plaudits for teaching the first course in political economics in the United States based upon Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations
. But respectable folk like Ewing felt Madison went too far when he celebrated escape from King George's rule by amending the second sentence of the Lord's Prayer to read “Thy republic come, thy will be done” and by preaching not about the kingdom of heaven but about “that great republic where there is no distinction of rank and where all men are free and equal.”

As the days dragged on, and the expense rose, the heads of the two delegations began to quarrel about money—“
The old Gentleman had always too much the Idea of a
good Bargain
about him
,” the outgoing Madison complained of Ewing's Pennsylvanian stinginess. But nothing could be done until Ellicott and Thomas Hutchins had made a sufficient number of observations synchronized with timed eclipses of Jupiter's moons. They required two months to make about forty usable sightings. By late September, no amount of wine and syllabub could keep the warring academics out on the cold mountain any longer, and both abruptly left for the warmth of their college fires.

The bad weather put the whole expensive project at risk. All through the gray summer and foggy fall, the second team of boundary commissioners on the Delaware River had been engaged in the same work as those on the mountain. To establish the five degrees of distance between them precisely, the observations of both teams had to be made at exactly the same moment, hence the need to time them not simply by chronometers, but in relation to the regular eclipses of Jupiter's moons that were visible on the river and on the mountain. The second team enjoyed two advantages: down by the river the weather was clearer and warmer, and their observations were supervised by Pennsylvania's David Rittenhouse, the outstanding astronomer in the United States, whose genius, according to Thomas Jefferson, was comparable to that of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. “We have supposed Mr Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living,” he wrote in
Notes on the State of Virginia,
“and that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught.”

The critical test of Ellicott and Hutchins's work came in September 1784, when Rittenhouse and the Virginia mathematician Robert Andrews came west from the Delaware River to compare results. The Delaware team had managed to make almost sixty observations timed against Jupiter's moons, nearly twice as many as those made on cloudy Mount Welcome, and there must have been some anxious moments as they checked their figures. Fortunately a sufficiently large number of observations were found to be synchronized exactly for the scientists to calculate their relative positions.

The results showed that the Mount Welcome observatory
was plotted a few hundred yards too far west. Having made adjustments for the error and for the exact distance that Rittenhouse's observatory had been from the Delaware River, the commissioners put down a temporary marker. Then the cavalcade of axmen, laborers, wagons, and cows descended from the mountains to begin marking out the line westward from where Mason and Dixon had left off in 1767.

They used the same laborious method of determining the line as their predecessors, following a Great Circle and tracking back along the parallel. But barely two months later, on November 12, having labored half the summer and all the fall, Ellicott, Rittenhouse, and the others arrived at the summit of yet another mountain “of a most stupendous height” and allowed themselves a look back at the long, straight line they had cut through the trees. “The Prospect is noble and romantick,” Ellicott confessed to his journal. “From this mountain we could Trace our Parallel of Latitude for 40 Miles, which to a Mathematician is a prospect the most pleasing of any other.”

Just four days later this was followed by another triumphant entry. “Today we fixed the South West Corner of Pennsylvania which is a Squared White Oak Post,” he wrote, as though the state had until then been something loose and liable to blow away. “The Completion of this Business has given me the greatest Satisfaction possible, not merely on account of the Accuracy, but the prospect of a speedy return to my Affectionate Wife and Family who are continually on my mind.”

Today a global positioning system can work out almost instantly what took Ellicott and his fellow commissioners close to five months, but he had good reason for satisfaction. Rather than relying on binary oscillations within a silicon wafer to mark the passage of time, he had built his own pendulum clocks and checked their accuracy against the sun at midday and the eclipses of Jupiter's moons at night. Instead of electronic signals bounced off artificial satellites, he had deduced his position by observing the eccentric passage of the moon in relation to the stars, then checking its position against the established locations contained in complex astronomical tables. The result was a neat line roller-coastering through the valleys and mountains of the Alleghenies that left no doubt where Pennsylvania ended and Virginia began. Proof of its accuracy comes from modern GPS observations indicating that the square post was hammered in just twenty-three feet too far to the west.

The stone demarcating the southwest corner of Pennsylvania from the northwest corner of Virginia (now West Virginia), laid by Thomas Hutchins in 1785

So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community.

WILLIAM BLACKSTONE,
Commentaries on the Laws of England,
1765–69

In the early summer of 1785, Ellicott and Rittenhouse returned to the frontier to define the western boundary between Pennsylvania and what is now West Virginia. Ewing and Madison had decided not to repeat their uncomfortable experience on the frontier, leaving the two astronomers as the senior commissioners for Virginia and Pennsylvania. Since they agreed totally on the supreme importance of exactness, there was little chance that the fractious atmosphere surrounding the southern boundary would be repeated. But for a technical reason, the 1785 expedition turned out to be one of the happiest in Ellicott's experience.

The new line began at the squared post hammered into the ground in November 1784 and ran due north to the Ohio River. Running a meridian, or north-south line, posed none of the complications of a parallel. Because meridians pass through both north and south poles making a circumference of the earth, they are automatically Great Circles. Thus a straight line heading due north on the globe will also be the shortest distance between two points. The astronomy and calculations that went with establishing due north were equally straightforward.

The critical observation was the moment that the Pole Star and the star
Alioth in the constellation of the Great Bear were directly aligned one above the other. In the course of a given interval of time, worked out again by the
Nautical Almanac
, the Pole Star would then move to exactly true north. To craftsmen such as Rittenhouse and Ellicott, achieving exactness in this operation was simply a pleasure. Their celestial observations and calculations were repeated every few miles so that the compasses used by the surveyors responsible for cutting the path of the boundary through the forest were constantly corrected for the most minute local deviations.