Measuring America

It was a joke tailored to a particular audience. Without measure, music was noise, poetry babble, and the land wilderness, and none knew it better than the enclosing, acquisitive gentry, the generation whose parents and grandparents first bought their land from Henry VIII, who stamped the Elizabethan age with their energy and imagination, and for whose benefit the legislation on measures was passed.

John Winthrop was just such a man. His family had acquired their five-hundred-acre estate of Groton Manor in East Anglia from Henry VIII, and he himself was a vigorous encloser and improver of the land. It was as much the downturn in rents and farm prices as his Puritan ideals that persuaded Winthrop in 1630 to volunteer to take charge of the colony that the Massachusetts Bay Company proposed to create in Boston. Authoritarian, clear-sighted and charismatic, he was the colony’s first governor and imbued it not only with his ideals of communal responsibility and individual conscience, but with his attitude to property.

Although the royal patent gave the colonists the right to settle in New England, there were those, notably Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, who felt that the land rightly belonged to the native inhabitants and should first be bought from them. Winthrop summarily disposed of that view with an argument grounded in his own upbringing. ‘As for the Natiues in new England,’ he wrote, ‘they inclose no Land, neither haue any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to proue the Land by.’

Since the native Americans had nothing to show that they owned the land, the new Americans could take it freely, and New England, like the Old, would belong to those who could measure it and enclose it. Thus the answer to the question, who owned America? was another question: who would measure America?

THREE A Hunger for Land

FROM THE ROYAL PALACE at Whitehall, the answer was simple: the king or the king’s representatives would measure the new-found land. The limits of British America were defined by map references given in the king’s charters, and the boundaries of its colonies were drawn in the soil by surveyors appointed by the proprietors and companies to whom the king had granted the land.

Accordingly, King James I’s 1609 charter to the two companies who had put up the money for the Virginia plantation specified that the London company was to plant its colony ‘in some fit and convenient Place, between four and thirty and one and forty Degrees of the said Latitude’, and the west of England company based on Plymouth was allocated ‘some fit and convenient Place, between eight and thirty Degrees and five and forty Degrees’. The four-degree overlap was reduced in 1620 when a new charter gave the Plymouth company all the land, to be known as New England, ‘from Fourty Degrees of Northerly Latitude, from the Equnoctiall Line, to Fourty-eight Degrees of the said Northerly Latitude’. Similar charters delineated the geographical limits of all the Atlantic colonies from Nova Scotia to Georgia, often with a final phrase extending their width ‘to the South Sea’, in other words to the Pacific Ocean. A few, like Maryland and Pennsylvania, had western boundaries fixed in lines or meridians of longitude.

It was the responsibility of the proprietors, until their charters were revoked, to have those degrees of latitude, so easily described in the Privy Chamber in Whitehall, marked out on the ground. The task provoked a sustained wail of complaint from the surveyors who ran the boundaries between the colonies. It was one thing to follow the lie of the land, as the settlers did, zigzagging up from the coast, following rivers and valleys into the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains or the Alleghenies; it was quite another to run a straight line up the hills, through the swamps and into the unending forest until it emerged into the savannahs of the piedmont. Nevertheless, if the companies and later the royal and aristocratic proprietors named in the charters were to establish their rights of ownership, the boundaries of their colonies and plantations had to be marked westward from the coast.

The most formidable obstacle was the Great Dismal Swamp, a nine-hundred-square-mile expanse of stagnant water, dense bamboo groves and crowded, vine-choked trees lying on the border between Virginia and Carolina. In his account of marking out that border in 1728, The History of the Dividing Line, William Byrd II, one of the boundary commissioners, described the surveyors’ approach to the swamp: ‘The Reeds which grew about 12 feet high, were so thick, & so interlaced with Bamboe-Briars, that our Pioneers were forc’t to open a Passage. The Ground, if I may properly call it so, was so Spungy, that the Prints of our Feet were instantly fill’d with Water. But the greatest Grievance was from large Cypresses, which the Wind had blown down and heap’d upon one another. On the Limbs of most of them grew Sharp Snags, Pointing every way like so many Pikes, that requir’d much Pains and Caution to avoid.’

Undeterred, the lead surveyor, William Mayo, pushed through the reeds and disappeared from sight. On the far side of the swamp, Byrd and the other commissioners waited anxiously. After a week, they started to fire off muskets to guide the surveyors, but with no success until on the ninth day the mud-stained party at last emerged, having run the boundary through fifteen miles of swamp.

In his acerbic memoir, Byrd pictures the surveyors as either clowns or heroes. ‘Neither the unexpected Distance, nor the Danger of being doubly Starved by Hunger and excessive Cold, could in the least discourage them from going thro’ with their Work,’ he remarked of the leaders of the survey party, ‘tho’ at one time they were almost reduced to the hard necessity of cutting up the most useless Person among them, Mr. Savage, in order to Support and save the lives of the rest. But Providence prevented that dreadfull Blow by an unexpected Supply another way, and so the Blind Surveyor escapt.’

The equivalents of Mr Savage were hired to run the line between North and South Carolina in the 1730s after the state split apart. Carolina surveyors, according to John Love, eighteenth-century author of Geodaesia, were either corrupt or inept, and the challenge of marking out the boundary, which was to extend from the coast thirty miles south of the Cape Fear river up to the thirty-fifth parallel and then due west along the parallel, defeated the first two parties within a few miles of the coast. Complaining of the ‘Extraordinary fatigue [of] Running the said Line most of that time thro’ Desart and uninhabited woods’, and over rivers and marshland which were breeding grounds for snakes and clouds of vicious mosquitoes, the surveyors refused to return even at the royal salary of £5 a day, five times as much as Mayo was paid for going through the Great Dismal Swamp. Thirty years later, James Cook from North Carolina took on the task but, distracted by ‘the rains, the hot weather and the insects’ – or so he claimed – ran the boundary eleven miles south of the thirty-fifth parallel and thus took 660 square miles from South Carolina for the benefit of his own state.

Nevertheless, whatever hardships the wilderness threw up, the line had to be run if ownership were to be established. In 1746, Lord Fairfax employed Thomas Lewis and Peter Jefferson to mark off the boundary of his five-million-acre property, virtually a state within a state, that stretched to the Blue Ridge mountains. On 5 October, Lewis wrote of their descent of a mountain in the dark: ‘Setting off, we fell into a place that had precipices on either [side], very narrow, full of ledges and brush, and exceedingly rocky. A very great descent. We all like to been killed with repeated falls, and our horses were in a miserable condition. The loose rocks were so [dangerous] as to prove fatal. We at length got to the bottom, not much better, there being a large water course with banks extremely steep that obliged us to cross at places almost [vertical]. After great despair, we at length got to camp about 10 o’clock, hardly anyone without broken [bones] or other misfortune.’

Ten days later the line cut across a swamp: ‘Wednesday, October 15th … The swamp is full of rocks and cavities covered over with a kind of moss [to] considerable depth. The laurel and ivy are so woven together that without cutting it is impossible to force through. In what danger must we be, all places being obscured by a cloak of moss! Such thickets of laurel to struggle through, whose branches are composed of iron! Our horses and ourselves fell into clefts and cavities without seeing the danger before we [fell].’

When they finally got out of the swamp, Lewis wrote in heartfelt relief, ‘Never was any poor creatures in such a condition as we! Nor ever was a criminal more glad of having escaped from prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Laurels! From the Beginning of Time, when we entered this swamp, I did not see a [dry] place big enough for a man to lie nor a horse to stand.’

By comparison Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had only the occasional attack by hostile Indians to fear when they were hired in 1763 by the proprietors of Pennsylvania and Maryland to sort out the disputed boundary between the two provinces. There were grades of expertise in surveying, and the equipment provided the best guide. Everyone carried a 16½-foot rod, or Edmund Gunter’s invaluable chain, but for professionals a circumferentor, which by the eighteenth century had developed into a theodolite or transit with cross-hairs in the lens of the telescope, and built-in compass and plumb-line, was also necessary. The experts brought along a quadrant or sextant as well for making sun-sights to check their position; in addition to all that, Mason and Dixon had with them a zenith sector built by John Bird, London’s foremost instrument-maker. This was a telescope almost six feet long, exactly calibrated and pointing vertically, beneath which they lay flat on their backs to take sightings on particular stars as they passed precisely overhead. Star-charts showing the positions of those stars at different dates and latitudes then enabled them to calculate their latitude with great precision. At the crude end of surveying, anyone able to see straight and multiply and divide could do it, but those at the top end had the scientific exactness and mathematical talent of astronomers.

Taking star-sights with the zenith sector, and sun-sights with the quadrant, cutting a long swathe or ‘visto’ through the forest for back-sights and fore-sights with the theodolite, and measuring each yard with brass-tipped rods carried in special boxes and calibrated to a five-yard brass standard constructed by the Royal Society of London, Mason and Dixon spent five years on surveying 244 miles at a cost of £3500. To the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania, it was worth paying that massive bill to have the extent of their property established beyond doubt. They would have been gratified to learn that the far cheaper line between North and South Carolina was not agreed for another eighty years.

Establishing the exact boundaries of a colony or plantation could be deferred until the population had grown large enough to reach the borders, but from the start every proprietor needed to decide how land inside those boundaries should be measured and settled. There were two models to choose from. In Virginia, the thousand-acre tobacco plantations, and the fifty-or hundred-acre farms granted to each colonist who had paid his own passage, had to be surveyed and registered, but the actual choice of land and of its shape – usually the bottom land along a navigable river with some nearby woodland to provide building material – was left to the landowner.

The early planters developed a crude way of gauging their acreage. Each property was reckoned to run back for a mile from the riverbank. Using the old English measurement of a rod, they simply measured out a length of twenty-five rods along the riverbank, making a straight line which ignored the river’s bends. This produced a seemingly awkward distance of 137 yards, one foot and six inches – but multiplied by the 1760-yard depth of the farm, it gave a total of 242,000 square yards, or precisely fifty acres. A hundred-acre farm was fifty rods broad, while a shareholder entitled to five hundred or a thousand acres measured out 250 or five hundred rods. This was frontier maths, and it became second nature to anyone who wanted to own land.

These first farms and plantations were more or less square, but later arrivals fitted in around them, producing crazy patterns of settlement. To define the boundaries of their property they blazed trees or scratched boulders or raised mounds, and described their holdings in terms of these markers. This was the old English practice of using ‘metes and bounds’ to define the extent of an estate. Thus a surveyor’s notes might describe a line as running from the river, ‘thence S[outh] 36 [degrees] E[ast] 132 rods to a white oak blazed, thence S 40 W 11 poles to two barren oaks’. Because trees were often destroyed by fire and boulders washed away by floods, boundary disputes filled the courts. It was easier to move on and occupy fresh land far from other claims. ‘People live so far apart,’ the German immigrant Gottlieb Mittelberger complained in 1756, ‘that many have to walk a quarter or a half-hour just to reach their nearest neighbour.’

A different method of surveying evolved in New England, because the climate and soil were harder, and the first colonists arrived as religious groups. It placed the emphasis on communal rather than individual exploitation, and the land was usually granted in rectangular blocks, six or ten miles square, to an association or church which then allocated it to individuals. On 14 May 1636, for example, William Pynchon, Jeheu Burr and half a dozen others were given permission to create a new settlement at Agawam just west of the Connecticut river. The land was to be divided between forty and fifty families, each of which was to have enough property for a house together with some farmland, and parts of a ‘hassocky marsh’ and nearby woodland. The precise width of each house lot was laid down: ‘Northward lys the lott of Thomas Woodford beinge twelve [rods] broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Woodford lys the lott of Thomas Ufford beinge fourteene rod broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Ufford lyes the lott of Henry Smith beinge twenty rod in bredth and all the marish before it, and to run up in the upland on the other side to make up his upland lott ten acres.’

No gaps were left between one individual holding and the next, and one township and the next. The northern settlers might not be able to choose the precise parcel they wanted, but they enjoyed one advantage over the southern planters. In the south, the last remnant of feudalism required landowners to pay the proprietor or colonial government an annual ‘quit-rent’ of up to two shillings (about fifty cents) an acre, to be quit of the obligations and services they would otherwise owe as vassals. Failure to comply would result in a notice ordering the owner ‘to pay your arrears of Quit-Rents and Reliefs and to make your Oath of Fealty’ or be fined. In New England, the complication of levying the quit-rent through the church or town soon led to it being abandoned, which meant that freeholders in a New England town effectively owned their farms in fee simple – free of all feudal dues and obligations. They had other social duties – to pay the minister’s salary, and attend the church or meeting-house – but their land was undeniably property.

Looking at the two ways of measuring out the land, later proprietors automatically opted for the New England model. The square township, which in New England was known simply as a town, seemed to the aristocratic Carolina proprietors to be ‘the chiefe thing that has given New England soe much advantage [in size of population] over Virginia’. They also believed, mistakenly, that this system would give them more control over the colonists. Accordingly their 1665 constitution decreed that all the lowland area, the Tidewater, should be pre-surveyed by a surveyor-general and divided into squares and rectangles ‘by lines running East and West, North and South’. From these blocks they proposed to build an American aristocracy, with ordinary immigrants receiving a headright of one hundred acres, and paying quit-rent on them, and above them proprietors, lords of the manor and lesser nobles whose rank depended on the size of their landholding. To ensure compliance, the proprietors instituted a complex system which required the settler to obtain a land warrant from the governor, followed by a survey from the surveyor-general, before the land could be allocated and the claim registered.

Had the colonial proprietors and councils succeeded in maintaining control, the history of North America might have remained colonial. But the idea of property that the colonists carried with them created its own revolutionary current.

The first years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth in the bitter winter of 1620 indicated the direction that history would take. Under the terms of their agreement with their financial backers, they were to work the land in common, sharing the proceeds with the investors in England. The goal of communal land ownership should have been particularly attractive, for they arrived with a close sense of unity arising from the shared desire for religious freedom. Yet in the first years, when they attempted to pool their resources and farm collectively, with young men assigned to work for those who had families, the fields were neglected and they almost starved. In desperation, Governor William Bradford responded to demands that the land be divided up. ‘And so,’ he noted in his history of the Plymouth colony, ‘assigned to every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number … This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious.’

The dramatic increase in yields soon assured the colony’s food supplies; but the change came at a cost. ‘And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all,’ Bradford observed sadly, ‘all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scatered all over the bay quickly and the towne in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne.’ Religious freedom might have been the settlers’ prime reason for sailing to America, but once they were there, the desire to own land came a close second. Or as Richard Winslow put it in his 1624 pamphlet Good Newes from New England, ‘Religion and profit jump together.’

In 1691 the thinly populated colony was absorbed into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay colony. But it too had changed since John Winthrop had founded it as the shining light of Puritanism, ‘the city upon a hill’. By then the Puritan preacher Increase Mather was lamenting that the grandchildren of the original settlers had grown insatiable for land. ‘How many men have since coveted after the earth,’ he thundered, ‘that many hundreds nay thousands of acres have been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians have forsaken churches and ordinance, and for land and elbow-room enough in the world?’

In Virginia, the first Jamestown colonists never had that religious sense of cohesion. They only saved themselves from starvation by raiding the farms of Powhatan Indians, and in 1624, eighteen years after the first settlers arrived, it was estimated that massacre and disease had killed six thousand out of 7300 migrants from England. The colony’s only source of income came from the sale of tobacco, and that was not enough to prevent the Virginia company from going bankrupt. But what kept the colony alive was a decision in 1618 by one of its shareholders, Sir Edwin Sandys, to attract immigrants by offering a ‘headright’ of fifty acres of good Virginia soil to anyone who crossed the ocean at his own expense, and as much again for every adult he brought with him. The lure of free land brought a stream of would-be settlers, most of whom died, but by the 1630s the flow of migrants outstripped the death rate from fever, and soon land was being bought and sold at five shillings (about $1.25) for fifty acres.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, in New England and Virginia, land was passing into private hands to be held virtually freehold, except for the quit-rent in the south. So widespread was the process that no one thought it strange, yet for another century this restless hunger to own land made the British colonies unique in North America.

In Mexico and up the Pacific coast, the Spanish acquired land as part of a general pattern of royally sponsored exploration and settlement by the king’s representatives. A Spanish civilisation was created in Mexico, with a university, a bishop and a capital housing over fifteen thousand Spaniards, before the first English colonist landed in Massachusetts. The Law of the Indies, enacted in 1573, specified in detail how the colonial government was to lay out towns and settlements. The sites were to be surveyed, religious missions were created to convert the natives, military presidios to defend the colonies, and civilian pueblos where colonists and colonised could live. It was an empire created from above, belonging to the king and administered as a royal dominion, and even in its final years, during the half-century that Spain ruled California from 1769 to 1821, fewer than thirty individuals were permitted to acquire their own ranchos or estates.

For over 150 years, from 1608 when Samuel Champlain established an armed post at Quebec, New France was ruled almost as rigidly. A string of trading ports was established along the Saint Lawrence river, as far as the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities like Montreal and New Orleans were founded, and farms were cultivated in Canada and in the Mississippi delta. Nevertheless, French America was administered feudally. The Crown owned the land and chose who could settle there – Protestants, for example, were banned. It created monopolies to exploit the fur and timber. The habitant who actually worked the soil never had clear rights to it. What he owned was the use of the land and the improvements he made to it, but he held the land from a seigneur in return for dues and rents, and the seigneur held the land from the Crown. French traders and trappers knew the country intimately – they supplied British mapmakers with much of their geographical information – yet by the middle of the eighteenth century barely forty thousand had acquired land outside the main cities.

The land-hunger of the British colonists seemed most bizarre when set alongside the attitude of the native Americans. From the farming Powhatan in Virginia to the Iroquois in New York and the Six Nations in the Appalachians who were primarily hunters, they shared a pervasive understanding that a particular place belonged to a particular people only to the extent that the people belonged to the place. Rights over land were gained only by occupation, long usage or family burial, and these rights were communal, not individual. ‘What is this you call property?’ Massasoit, a leader of the Wampanaog, asked the Plymouth colonists whom he had befriended in the 1620s. ‘It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?’

Yet the British colonists bought and sold land as though they owned it outright – in fee simple, to use the legal term. Compared to the opportunities offered by New Spain and New France, the Atlantic colonies seemed irresistibly attractive. Little more than a century after the first permanent settlement was established in Virginia, over one and a quarter million settlers were scattered across the wide, empty spaces between the coast and the mountains.

The shape of British America was long and thin, stretching from thirty-one to forty-nine degrees north, a distance of over two thousand miles, but, so far as measured, settled land was concerned, rarely more than two hundred miles deep, a sort of northern Chile. It was in the first years of the eighteenth century that siren voices from beyond the swamps and pine barrens began to tell of the irresistibly fertile ground to be had in the piedmont. ‘The best, richest, and most healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited,’ wrote Francis Makemie in Plain and Friendly Persuasion in 1705, ‘above the falls of every River, to the Mountains.’