Measuring America

This was the time when the uncontrollable surge of German immigrants, most of them Mennonites and Moravians, followed by the Scotch-Irish, began to move into the area, upsetting Penn’s surveyed plan. Pennsylvania alone had an estimated one hundred thousand squatters by 1726, and two-thirds of the colony settled in the 1730s was occupied illegally. Further south in the Virginian piedmont, William Byrd watched crowds of Scotch-Irish squatters taking whatever land suited them, and was reminded of ‘the Goths and Vandals of old’. In Massachusetts, settlers moved out into the hilly Berkshires, and in New York up the Mohawk valley, constrained only by fear of French attack. In an attempt to retain control, the Massachusetts government established a string of new townships like Litchfield and Great Barrington in the Berkshires during the 1720s. Elsewhere, proprietors in Maryland and Pennsylvania, great landowners in New York and northern Virginia, either offered leases to squatters on their land, or tried to drive them out. Royal governors in Virginia and the Carolinas invented schemes to make the squatters legal by offering free land in new townships created on the frontier following the New England model.

None of it worked. The lure of so much property was irresistible. In Virginia, Governor Spottswood himself succumbed to the land rush and claimed eighty-five thousand acres of the newly opened uplands for himself, and in the Carolinas the system of land allocation was overwhelmed by the demand for surveys. Amateur surveyors were hired to help. Wildly unrealistic plats were registered. No one minded. Within two years, warrants were issued for about 600,000 acres, and nineteen thousand of them went to the Governor, while the Assembly Members voted themselves six thousand acres apiece. Between 1731 and 1738 approximately one million acres were registered in Carolina, and when the Surveyor-General, Benjamin Whitaker, complained in 1732 that ‘the law enables any common surveyor to perpetuate frauds for his employers through not having to turn his survey into any office’, the outraged Assembly sent him to prison for contempt. By then the proprietors had lost all control, and in despair turned the colony over to the Crown.

Georgia’s proprietors, particularly the idealistic James Oglethorpe, also intended to survey the colony’s territory before distributing it in order to create a slave-free society of smallholders and farmers. In the beautifully proportioned squares and gardens of the capital, Savannah, can be seen all that remains of the plan, for here too the temptation of so much potential property could not be resisted. South Carolinian planters moved across the border, and both they and the Georgians claimed vast estates beyond the Savannah river, outside the squares surveyed by Georgia’s founders. In 1751, these proprietors also gave up and returned the colony to royal control.

By that year the population of the Atlantic colonies had risen to over one million, far outstripping that of New France and outnumbering the Spanish-descended inhabitants of New Spain, who had been there for more than two hundred years. Families were larger than in the Old World because farms were bigger and more hands were needed to work them, but there was also the lure of unclaimed acres that drew the dispossessed from the far side of the Atlantic. If they could not pay their own passage, they came as indentured servants, willing to act as near-slaves for a number of years for the chance of eventually acquiring property.

Even in Elizabeth I’s reign, the enclosures in England deprived so many villeins and labourers of the common land and common grazing on which they depended to keep their families alive that they were forced to beg in the towns, giving rise to a series of ferocious laws against ‘sturdy rogues and vagabonds’ and ‘wandering beggars’. They were joined in the seventeenth century by the Diggers, radical Puritans who had fought for Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War and who, having defeated the King, tried to reclaim common land by digging and cultivating it – hence their name. ‘True religion and undefiled is to let everyone quietly have erth to manure [cultivate],’ wrote their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, ‘that they may live in freedom by their labours.’ But Cromwell and his generals were property-owners to a man, and promptly turned them out. When enclosure reached Scotland in the eighteenth century, and improving landlords in the Lowlands and clan chiefs in the Highlands took as their own the land that their tenants and clansmen once held in common, the newly dispossessed provided more raw material for the colonies.

There was a certain irony that these newcomers should now be amongst the hungriest of all America’s property-owners, relying on the surveys and chains that had driven them off their homeland. But in 1628 the landed gentry in Parliament had forced King Charles I to accept the Petition of Right which guaranteed the right of the property-owner not ‘to be put out of his land or tenements … without being brought to answer by the due process of law’; and none knew better than the dispossessed how powerful was the lure of owning a farm which could not be taken away.

It was from England that the idea of land as property had originally come, and it was no coincidence that with it had arrived Gunter’s chain – twenty-two precisely calibrated yards, each exactly thirty-six inches long (plus that miserly 0.015 of an inch extra that would not be discovered for almost two centuries) – and the practice of showing an estate’s exact extent on a surveyor’s plat drawn to scale. From England came too the philosophical underpinning developed by John Locke that the individual earned a right to property by ‘mixing his labour’ with what had once been held in common. Every landowner who had ever enclosed, manured and improved a field understood this proposition perfectly, but by 1750 the American idea of property had evolved further.

What surveyors like George Washington, Peter Jefferson and Daniel Boone were doing was speculating on the future value of land. However much they could earn from surveying fees, it was dwarfed by the profits to be made from buying good land cheap. ‘The greatest Estates we have in this Colony,’ the young George Washington acknowledged after a summer spent surveying the vast Fairfax estates, ‘were made … by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.’ In 1752, at the age of twenty, Washington purchased 1459 acres in Frederick County, in the Virginian piedmont, the first step in a career of land-dealing that eventually made him owner of over fifty-two thousand acres spread across six different states. He usually ‘improved’ his holdings by clearing them of trees, but for most speculators their property rights did not depend on any idea of ‘mixing their labour’ with the soil. Their sole claim to ownership lay in the survey and the map that came from it.

In 1751 Benjamin Franklin stated openly what was apparent to authorities on either side of the Atlantic, that the population of the colonies was growing at such speed it would double to 2.6 million by 1775. It would not be long, he predicted provocatively, before ‘the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water’. To some Americans, that prospect raised constitutional questions about being controlled from across the Atlantic; but to the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas, and to financiers in New York and Philadelphia, it also indicated that the purchase of American land was a wise investment. Nowhere was it cheaper than west of the range of mountains known generally as the Appalachians, but divided from south to north into the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks.

In 1756, a South Carolina surveyor, John William de Brahm, was sent to build a fort at Loudon on the Little Tennessee river on the other side of the mountains, in country that still belonged to the Cherokee Indians. ‘Their vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out,’ he reported back in admiration. ‘Should this country once come into the hands of the Europeans, they may with propriety call it the American Canaan, for it will fully answer their industry and all methods of European culture, and do as well for European produce … This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.’

Control of all this desirable territory as far west as the Mississippi still remained with the French but in 1763 they were forced to cede it to the British following their defeat in the French and Indian War. Soon other surveyors took the chance to follow de Brahm. Their findings were brought together in a famous map by Thomas Hutchins, not published until 1778, but whose attractions were known a decade earlier.

On the map’s crackling parchment, the Appalachians appear as a black, impenetrable mass of cross-hatching running from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right-hand corner; but west of them are broad rivers and rolling hills denoted by lines which curl gently towards the Mississippi and are interspersed with Hutchins’ own observations in neat italic writing: ‘A rich and level country’, ‘Very large natural meadows; innumerable herds of Buffaloe, Elk, Deer, etc feed here’, and along the Wabash river, ‘Here the country is level, rich and well timber’d and abounds in very extensive meadows and savannahs; and innumerable herds of Buffaloe, Elk, Deer, etc. It yields Rye, Hemp, Pea Vine, Wild Indigo, Red & White clover etc.’

Not even the promise of dancing-girls could have inflamed the colonial appetite more than the prospect of such fertility. That the land belonged to the Cherokee, Shawnee and Six Nations was a detail that could be overcome by personal negotiation, as Judge Richard Henderson and surveyor Boone did, or by killing and terror, as numerous others did. To the planters it was obvious that, with the French claims removed, the entire area between the mountains and the river now lay open for occupation.

But ownership of land is never simple. It includes rights not just to the soil, but to the metals below, the vegetation above, the sunlight and the air; to its use, development, access and enjoyment; and to much more that, for a fee, a lawyer will reveal. Since any or all of these may be rented, leased, loaned or distributed in different ways, landed property is usually described as a bundle of legal rights which can be split up and dealt with separately. Although no one can now claim all of them outright – environmental laws and national needs limit the owner’s rights – under feudal tenure they all belonged to the King. Thus, much of the 1629 charter creating the Massachusetts Bay Company is made up of lists of different types of land, forms of ownership and the way they are to be transferred. King Charles I promises to ‘give, graunt, bargaine, sell, alien, enfeoffe, allot, assigne and confirme’ to the Company all the ‘Landes and Groundes, Place and Places, Soyles, Woods and Wood Groundes, Havens, Portes, Rivers, Waters, Mynes, Mineralls, Jurisdiccons, Rightes, Royalties, Liberties, Freedomes, Immunities, Priviledges, Franchises, Preheminences, Hereditaments, and Comodities’. Nevertheless, ultimately the land still remained the King’s, to be held by the Company ‘in free and common soccage’ – which meant that having given, granted and all the rest, the Crown retained an overriding, feudal competence over that part of America.

It was because they were part of that feudal structure that the original proprietors had charged a quit-rent in place of feudal dues. But most of the proprietors had gone now, defeated by the settlers’ uncontrollable desire for land, and the colonial legislatures, such as Virginia’s House of Burgesses, were effectively forums for the colonists’ interests. It was easy for settlers, squatters and speculators looking longingly towards the land beyond the Appalachians to forget the King’s feudal power.

Then, on 7 October 1763, came a harsh reminder of the legal reality behind American property. By royal proclamation, George III declared it ‘to be our Royal Will and Pleasure … that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our Colonies or Plantations in America do presume for the present, and until our further Pleasure be Known, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West’. In effect, a line had been drawn along the watershed of the Appalachians beyond which land could not be measured and owned, and everyone who had already settled west of it was commanded ‘forthwith [to] remove themselves from such settlements’.

The King had the right to order this, because legally all the land in British America was his; but it planted feudal authority full in the path of the property-seekers.

FOUR Life, Liberty and What?

THERE WERE MANY STRANDS leading to the moment when the colonists felt driven to weave their anger together into a single declaration of opposition to rule from London. The decision of the British Parliament to close the port of Boston in 1774 as punishment for the destruction of a valuable cargo of tea brought to the surface the resentment of northern merchants already burdened by duties on their goods, a general fury at the earlier killing of civilian rioters by British troops, and a pervasive fear that colonial assemblies were powerless against the King’s ministers. But that autumn, when delegates of the discontented colonists convened in Philadelphia as members of the First Continental Congress in order to articulate their grievances, it was not by chance that the first resolution they agreed was ‘That they are entitled to life, liberty, & property …’.

Here property meant more than land alone, but for Virginians especially it was land as property that they had in mind, and in particular land beyond the Appalachians. Hence the declaration of the first paragraph of the Virginia constitution, drawn up in June 1776 by George Mason, ‘That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights … namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.’ Entitlement to this sort of property was a subject on which the humblest Conestoga mule-driver was at one with the grandest planter.

Barely ten years earlier, the reaction of Colonel George Washington to the royal veto on the acquisition of land beyond the mountains could have served as a warning of what was to come. There had been no more loyal and energetic commander in the French and Indian War, but the Colonel was also a Virginian planter and land speculator, and his views were widely shared.

‘I can never look upon the Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,’ Washington wrote in 1767 to his colleague and fellow-surveyor Colonel William Crawford. ‘It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying those lands. Any person who neglects hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it.’

George Washington was not a man to be deflected even by his sovereign’s express command, although as a serving officer he deemed it best to be discreet. ‘If you will be at the trouble of seeking out the lands,’ he continued to Crawford, ‘I will take upon me the part of securing them, as soon as there is a possibility of doing it and will, moreover, be at all the cost and charges of surveying and patenting the same … By this time it will be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land. You will consequently come in for a handsome quantity.’

Alas, poor Crawford never did. The King’s veto was still nominally in force when he was taken prisoner by a Cherokee band while leading a column of troops in territory beyond the Appalachians. On 3 August 1782 the Virginia Gazette carried a report of his ordeal by a Dr Knight, who had been captured along with Washington’s colleague: ‘… the unfortunate Colonel was led by a long rope to a stake, to which he was tied, and a quantity of red-hot coals laid around, on which he was obliged to walk bare-footed, the Indians at the same time torturing him with squibs of powder and burning sticks for two hours, when he begged of Simon Gurry (a white renegade who was present) to shoot him. [Gurry’s] reply was, “Don’t you see I have no gun.” [Crawford] was soon after scalped and struck several times on the bare skull with sticks, till being exhausted, he laid down on the burning embers, when the squaws put shovel-fuls of coals on his body, which made him move and creep till he expired. The Doctor was obliged to stand by and see this cruelty performed; they struck him in the face with the Colonel’s scalp, saying “This is your great Captain’s scalp, tomorrow we will serve you so.” ’

Gruesome stories such as these were used to justify acts of equal cruelty on the other side. John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary living with the Tuscarawas Indians, told in 1773 of the Indian-hunters ‘who maintained that to kill an Indian was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo and would fire on Indians that came across them by the way – nay more, would decoy such as lived across the river to come over for the purpose of joining them in hilarity; and when these complied they fell on them and murdered them’.

These atrocities were evidence of the mounting conflict between land-hungry colonists and native inhabitants. Consequently when George III banned land purchases beyond the mountains, it was, as the proclamation worded it, so that ‘the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed’. But even Americans who might have sympathised with this strategy could not accept the King’s feudal right to impose the ban.

The power that the land beyond the mountains exerted on people’s minds can be deduced from the attempts to circumvent the veto. Two land companies had been created to speculate in the west before the ban was in place – the Ohio Company, which proposed to purchase 500,000 acres beyond the Ohio river, and the Loyal Land Company, organised by Peter Jefferson with investment coming mostly from his neighbours in Goochland County, Virginia, which aimed publicly at buying 800,000 acres of Kentucky, but privately had ambitions of exploring and acquiring millions more as far west as the Pacific Ocean. In the fifteen years after George III’s proclamation, a whole succession of similar speculative ventures came into being.

The Mississippi Company was created in 1768 to settle land along the river with George Washington as one of its founders, followed by the Illinois and Wabash in which Patrick Henry had an interest, and the Watauga Association which settled eastern Tennessee and later tried to establish the independent state of Franklin. In 1775 Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina sent Daniel Boone, a brave scout but an incompetent surveyor, to find territory in southern Kentucky, where he signed a treaty with the Cherokee Indians giving Henderson’s Transylvania Company several million acres – Boone’s surveying lapses made it unclear exactly how much land was involved. The most ambitious of them all, the Vandalia Company, which aimed to acquire sixty-three million acres in what is now Illinois and Indiana, employed Benjamin Franklin as its London agent and even counted among its members such influential figures in the British government as the future Prime Minister, Lord North, and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden. ‘One half of England is now land mad,’ remarked one of its promoters, ‘and everybody there has their eyes fixed on this country.’

These powerful interests created some loopholes in the prohibition, but it was still in place in 1773 when a young surveyor named Rufus Putnam sailed up the Mississippi to Natchez. There he began surveying over a million acres on the banks of the river so that it could be sold to New England veterans of the French and Indian War. He was a rarity among the mostly southern land speculators, because he came from Massachusetts. His career is instructive because it illustrates how widely the effects of the ban were felt. In character he more or less resembled the coat of arms he later adopted which showed three bristly wild boars below a roaring lion surrounded by thistles and the motto in spiky Gothic lettering, ‘By the name of Putnam’, and almost everything he achieved he owed to his ferocious determination.

In 1745, when Rufus was barely seven years old, his father died, leaving the family destitute. His mother’s second marriage was to an illiterate drunkard named Sadler. ‘During the six years I lived with Capt Sadler,’ Rufus wrote bitterly, ‘I never Saw the inside of a School house except about three weeks.’ At the age of fifteen he apprenticed himself to a man who built watermills, and sucked up knowledge where he could; but as he confessed in his autobiography, ‘having no guid I knew not where to begin nor what corse to pursue – hence neglected Spelling and gramer when young [and] have Suffered much through life on that account’.

Rufus’s prospects were transformed by the French and Indian War. In 1757 he joined the Royal American Regiment, where he became an engineer, a trade that taught him how to carry out every kind of measurement. When peace came in 1763 the orphan used his new skill first to build mills, and later to survey land. The demand for surveyors in British America was such that a good practitioner could command an income that matched a lawyer’s. Even at the age of seventeen, George Washington was able to boast of his earnings to a friend. ‘A doubloon is my constant gain every day that will permit my going out,’ he wrote, ‘and sometimes six pistoles.’ Since a doubloon was worth about £15, and six pistoles around $22.50, a good week might bring in around $100; even as President he hardly earned much more.

Soon Rufus felt secure enough to marry the wealthy Persis Rice, daughter of Zebulon, who in the first six years of their marriage bore four daughters and a son. What he wanted, he wanted immediately. Neither in private nor public life did he ever show any guile, and rarely much patience. With five children to feed, and the expectation of more on the way, he turned to land speculation, surveying and acquiring land in the West Indies and what is now Alabama for New England veterans. The Natchez venture was on a far larger scale, and like George Washington, who was trying to secure land on the Ohio river for Virginia veterans of the same war, Rufus Putnam proposed to keep some of the best sites for himself.

It was Richard Henderson who put into words the dream that drew Rufus and thousands more into the western territory beyond the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. ‘The country might invite a prince from his palace merely for the pleasure of contemplating its beauty and excellence,’ he wrote in praise of his company’s Kentucky acres, ‘but only add the rapturous idea of property and what allurements can the world offer for the loss of so glorious a prospect?

When that rapturous idea was snatched away by the proclamation of a feudal monarch three thousand miles away, it was small wonder that the colonists should have felt the need to state not simply their inalienable right to life and liberty, but also to the acquisition of property. Typically, when Rufus too fell victim to the royal prohibition, he preferred action to words. He had spent eight months laying out the ground for future settlements at Natchez when the Board of Trade in London issued an order specifically forbidding any further surveys on the Mississippi. Returning home to Massachusetts, he found his personal frustration echoed in the accumulating anger of the colonists.

Persis had kept the family going during Rufus’s long absence, and nine months after his return to the marriage bed, another son was born; but by then he was soldiering again. This time he was fighting the King, one of the first men to be commissioned into the Massachusetts Regiment following the first ringing shots at Lexington in April 1775.