Measuring America

Almost at once, his talent for finding practical solutions to complex problems found an outlet. Following the outbreak of hostilities, an American force of 11,500 men under George Washington surrounded a British army under General Thomas Gage in Boston. With little faith in his untrained men against six thousand British regulars, Washington needed to pen Gage in, but lacked anyone with the knowledge to construct the necessary siegeworks. In the same uncomplicated way that he had taught himself to be a surveyor, Rufus read up a book on military engineering, then laid out a system of trenches and defensive posts that kept the British cooped up until the spring of 1776, when the threat of artillery bombardment forced them to sail away. Washington rewarded his bristly subordinate by appointing him chief engineer to the army, and to the end of his days Rufus remained Washington’s man, body and soul. In peacetime, all political questions were solved by doing whatever Washington required, and if that was not clear, Rufus would write to ask. Anyone who opposed his general and later his president was an enemy – and one particularly prominent opponent, whose name Rufus could never bring himself to mention, was an ‘Arch Enemy’.

That individual was Thomas Jefferson. The time for him to reveal himself as Rufus Putnam’s Arch Enemy did not come until after the war, but even in 1776 it was evident that he marched to the beat of a different drum. Indeed, if there was any one person immune to the general lust for land beyond the Appalachians, it was this Virginian planter, who in his wording of the Americans’ Declaration of Independence changed their fundamental assertion of rights from ‘life, liberty and property’ to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

It is one of the greatest paradoxes in the paradoxical character of Thomas Jefferson that he – who was to acquire more western land on behalf of the United States than any speculator could have dreamed of possessing, who laid the foundations for the nation’s further territorial expansion to the Pacific by sending Lewis and Clark to find a route to the coast in 1803, who believed passionately in the virtues of owning land, and adored his own plantations and garden at Monticello – was so tepid in acquiring it for himself. From his father, Peter, he inherited about seven thousand acres in the Virginian piedmont including Monticello and its farms, and his marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772 added to his holding. He even joined several schemes for acquiring land beyond the mountains, but then neglected them, and all eventually failed.

By birth and upbringing, Jefferson belonged to the Virginian plantation aristocracy – the family had been there since the late seventeenth century – and generations of Jeffersons had followed the frontier west; to them land acquisition was second nature. In other matters he had many of the characteristics of the planter class, especially their extravagance: living constantly in debt, but insisting on the best in wine, furniture, carriages and harness, he died a bankrupt in all but name. As a child, Jefferson was clearly destined for that aristocratic role. The model before him was that of his large, raw-boned father, Peter, who had not only run the Fairfax line with Lewis through the swamps and ravines of the Blue Ridge, but later extended William Byrd’s boundary between Virginia and Carolina almost into Kentucky, and only returned home to build a plantation mansion on the frontier and lay plans with his neighbours to acquire still more land through the Loyal Land Company. Before his death in 1757, when Thomas was fourteen, Peter appointed various friends and relatives as guardians to his children, and all but two of these were trustees of the Loyal Company.

Thomas’s first years were spent roaming free in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Recognition of his place as an insider came with his election in 1769 as a twenty-six-year-old lawyer to the Virginia legislature’s House of Burgesses, which represented plantation owners’ interests. When he began to question the basis of the royal claim to exercise feudal power over the land beyond the mountains, his conclusion was what his class would have expected – that George III had no right to restrict their desire to acquire property.

In Saxon England, before William the Conqueror had imposed his regime, Jefferson argued, feudalism was unknown. ‘Our Saxon ancestors held their lands, as they did their personal property, in absolute dominion,’ he declared in a fiery pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774. It was William and his Norman invaders who had invented ‘the fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king’, and the fiction had been maintained by his successors. Since America had been occupied and won without help from the Crown, George III had no grounds for claiming power over the disposal of its land. Only a democratically elected legislature had that power, Jefferson concluded, and, in a phrase that would have been music to any settler’s ears, wrote that if it failed to do so ‘each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title’. It was this sweeping attack, cutting at the very foundation of royal power over America, that led to Jefferson’s appointment by the Continental Congress in 1776 to the three-man committee responsible for drafting the Declaration of Independence.

Yet Jefferson was never a truly typical member of his class. He thought about land in a way that no speculator would. To the end of his life he retained an idealised vision of pre-feudal Saxon society, with its local court and administration based on the ‘hundred’ or parish, and its values derived from the stout-hearted, independent-minded yeomen farmers who worked the soil. Consequently all the political systems he devised, for counties as for nations, shared one fundamental quality: the widest possible distribution of land.

In a memorable passage in Notes on the State of Virginia, the book written from 1780 to 1782 which expresses some of Jefferson’s deepest beliefs, he explained, ‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.’ Other trades had to depend ‘on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.’ But ‘[c]orruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example’.

It is hard to think of any other Virginian who might have entertained such a far-fetched idea. Not William Byrd, who observed of his fellow-planters, ‘Our land produces all the fine things of Paradise, except innocence.’ Not Washington, cheated by a farming acquaintance, William Clifton, into paying an extra £100 (about $470) in 1760 for an estate neighbouring on Mount Vernon. Not Jefferson’s friend Fielding Lewis, who remarked of the land deals in the piedmont that ‘every man now trys to ruen his neighbour’. For them land was a source of wealth, not the basis of God-given virtue.

There was, however, more wisdom in the world than the planters knew of.

In 1760, at the age of sixteen, Thomas Jefferson had been sent to William and Mary College in Williamsburg, where he had fallen under the influence of a remarkable teacher named William Small, and the experience marked him for life. In his autobiography, written in his seventies, Jefferson paid Small this tribute: ‘It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life that Dr. Wm. Small of Scotland was then professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, & an enlarged & liberal mind.’ Jefferson was famously guarded in his emotions – this prompted Joseph P. Ellis, an especially perceptive observer, to call his biography of Jefferson American Sphinx – but where Small was concerned he became almost fulsome. ‘Dr. Small was … to me as a father,’ Jefferson confided to a friend. ‘To his enlightened and affectionate guidance of my studies while at college, I am indebted for everything.’ The brief reference in his autobiography to his real father, the great surveyor, is stark by comparison: ‘My father’s education had been quite neglected; but being of a strong mind, sound judgment and eager after information, he read much and improved himself.’

In 1760 Willliam Small was just twenty-four, a product of those Scots universities which bred in the likes of David Hume and Adam Smith a restless desire to find a rational key to understanding human nature and human society, and to sixteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson he must have seemed like an ideal elder brother. ‘He, most happily for me, became soon attached to me & made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school,’ Jefferson remembered gratefully, ‘and from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.’

The most obvious consequence of Small’s company was that all his life Jefferson preferred to think of himself as a scientist rather than a politician. ‘Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight,’ he wrote soon after his retirement from the presidency, ‘but the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to take a part in resisting them and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passion.’ Politics, even sometimes the United States itself, he would refer to as ‘an experiment’. In his house he hung portraits of Francis Bacon, modern science’s founding father, and Isaac Newton, its greatest luminary. He studied botany, the most highly developed science of the day, and prided himself on his membership of the American Philosophical Society, the country’s leading scientific body. In old age, he boasted to his friend and enemy John Adams, ‘I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much happier.’

It was Isaac Newton above all who had expanded science and shown how the system of things was made. The consequences of Newton’s laws of motion were fundamental to the development of physics and astronomy in general. In Newtonian physics there were theoretical explanations for every event, from the movement of the planets to the swing of a pendulum, and two brilliant analyses from his monumental Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), published in 1687, provided what would prove to be the real starting-point for modern measurement. Newton deduced that instead of being a perfect sphere, the earth bulged at the equator and flattened at the poles; consequently, gravity would be stronger at the poles, because they were closer to the centre of the earth. Once the shape of the earth was known, the possibility of estimating its size offered eighteenth-century scientists a foundation for the first new way of measuring things to be devised in ten thousand years.

But Newton’s laws also taught a lesson that went beyond physics. In the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, the belief was encouraged that just as it was possible to discover through rational enquiry the fundamental principles that governed the natural world, so reason made it possible to understand the principles governing human nature. This, the essential outlook of the movement known as the Enlightenment, was what William Small passed on, and what Jefferson meant by understanding ‘the system of things in which we are placed’.

‘Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion,’ he would later advise his young nephew, in an echo of Small’s teaching. ‘Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.’ Once rational enquiry had uncovered the principles of human nature, it would be possible to establish the conditions under which individuals could be allowed as much liberty as they desired, and yet a rational, self-regulating society would emerge.

Owning land, for example, would give society’s members an interest in building a law-abiding, democratically based community, and education would teach them how best to use their freedom. The ideal, therefore, was to distribute land and schools as widely as possible. By the same criterion, the accumulation of too much land by one person had to be opposed, because it prevented others acquiring it. Nothing illustrates better the difference between Peter and Thomas Jefferson than the father’s restless search for more acres, and the son’s unrelenting opposition to land speculators whose profits depended on driving up the price of empty land. ‘Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor,’ Thomas wrote soon after independence had been won, ‘it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.’

That was the wisdom that Jefferson derived from William Small and his circle of friends. It appealed profoundly to a young man who, as Joseph Ellis observed, craved for ‘a world in which all behavior was voluntary and therefore coercion was unnecessary, where independence and equality never collided, where the sources of all authority were invisible because they had already been internalised’.

In 1764, Small returned to Britain, but Jefferson never ceased to feel gratitude to the man who, he acknowledged, ‘filled up the measure of his goodness to me, by procuring for me, from his most intimate friend G[eorge] Wythe, a reception as a student of law under his direction, and introduced me to the acquaintance and familiar table of Governor Fauquier, the ablest man who had ever filled that office. With him, and at his table, Dr. Small & Mr. Wythe … & myself, formed a partie quarrée, & to the habitual conversations on these occasions I owed much instruction.’

After independence was declared in July 1776, Jefferson returned to Virginia, where his reputation as the Declaration’s prime author led to his appointment to a committee revising the state’s laws so that they reflected republican rather than royalist values. It is a telling fact that at this, his first opportunity to put theory into practice, he put forward what might be called the full Small programme.

The best-known of his proposals is the ‘Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom’, a landmark in legislative tolerance; but no less significant were otherwise banal bills to change inheritance law so that a landed estate could be left equally to all the children rather than to the eldest son alone, and to prohibit clauses in a will preventing later generations dividing up land among several heirs. At the same time, Jefferson introduced a bill to give seventy-five acres to any Virginian who did not already have any land, and to offer a ‘head-right’ grant of fifty acres to every landless immigrant who arrived in the state from overseas. Together with Virginia’s generous promise of land to soldiers enlisting in its regiments – ranging from a hundred acres for enlisted men up to fifteen thousand acres for a major-general – Jefferson’s land grant proposals would have created a network of small farms guaranteeing the future health of democracy in the state.

To complete the Saxon ideal, Jefferson came up with a plan for wholesale administrative and educational reform – or as he put it, ‘I drew a bill for our legislature, which proposed to lay off every county into hundreds or townships of 5. or 6. miles square, in the centre of each of which was to be a free English school.’

As any of his fellow Virginians could have warned him, Virginia politics did not work like that. When the state came to dispose of its unoccupied land in 1783, the Act that finally emerged from horse-trading in the Assembly was designed to sell the territory with as little restriction as possible, and the process turned into a swill-bucket for speculators. Surveyors were bribed into setting aside the best plots, land warrants were acquired cheaply from army veterans, and wads of the state’s devalued paper currency, which carried the right to claim unoccupied land, were bought up for a quarter of their value.

One speculator, Robert Morris, acquired one and a half million acres of western Virginia, while another, Alexander Walcott, secured a million acres. On top of these claims, the Virginia legislature allowed speculators to benefit from any inaccuracies in the survey up to 5 per cent of the total – thereby adding a free bonus of seventy-five thousand acres to Morris’s allocation – and then generously added a clause permitting purchasers to keep anything more than that which might inadvertently have been included as a result of the ‘ignorance, negligence or fraud of the surveyors’.

As a dry run for Jefferson’s far more spectacular experiment involving the territory west of the Appalachians, this was a humiliating failure. Yet it was less wounding than a weakness of temperament that was exposed by the War of Independence – in moments of crisis, it became clear, emotion was liable to overcome Jefferson. In 1779 he was elected Governor of Virginia, but when the British army moved into the state in 1780, instead of calling out the militia he evidently froze, leaving the decision to be taken by others and allowing the state capital, Richmond, to be overrun. The inquiry launched into Jefferson’s conduct he described as ‘a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave’. But evidence that this was not a freak reaction came soon afterwards in a second, more personal crisis.

In the autumn of 1782, Jefferson’s wife Martha died at the age of thirty-three after giving birth to their sixth child. They had been married for less than eleven years, and in that time Martha had been almost constantly pregnant, with six live children born, although only two survived beyond infancy, and three other pregnancies which ended in miscarriages. At her death, Jefferson was prostrated by a grief so consuming that for a month he could not face anyone and stayed secluded in a room where, his daughter recalled, he wept and groaned, emerging at last only to go for long, solitary horseback rides in the mountains. There may have been an element of guilt in this – the risk of repeated pregnancies to the health of delicate women was well understood – but whatever the source of his emotions it was obvious that the force of them made it impossible for Jefferson to function. In retreat from the pain of grief, he threw himself into work which absorbed all his energies and attention.

One year earlier, in October 1781, Lord Cornwallis and his British army, hemmed in by Washington on land and by the French fleet at sea, had surrendered, and American negotiators were now in Paris deciding the terms of the peace. At home the Continental Congress, which represented the nearest thing to a central government that the thirteen states could agree on, was attempting to work out the new nation’s future government and how to pay off the mountain of debt accumulated in paying for Washington’s continental army. Its single asset, if the negotiators could prise it from Britain’s grasp and the states were prepared to give up their own claims to it, was the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.

‘There are at present many great objects before Congress,’ wrote the Rhode Island delegate, David Howell, early in 1784, ‘but none of more importance or which engage my attention more than that of the Western Country.’

It might be sold to pay the country’s debts, it might be divided up to create new states, it might be administered on a new model, it might be made over to the pre-revolutionary land companies. The course decided upon would help to determine the relationship of the central government to the states.

In June 1783 Jefferson was elected a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress, and immersed himself in the many great objects before it, above all in the question of the western lands. Preserved in the Library of Congress are pages of his comments on proposed legislation, and draft bills whose margins are filled with his detailed annotations. In the space of less than a year, from June 1783 to May 1784, this escape into mental work produced numerous contributions to United States law, and three measures so substantial that they were to permeate every aspect of American life: the invention of the dollar, the procedure for creating new states from the Western Territory, and the means of surveying that territory. Had Jefferson had his way, there would have been a fourth: the invention of a new set of weights and measures. It indicates the cohesion of his thinking that all four formed part of a single logical structure.

FIVE Simple Arithmetic

GENERAL RUFUS PUTNAM had had a good war in every sense. His rank was a reward for the sterling service he had rendered Washington both at the siege of Boston and during the fighting in New York. When the continental army’s strategic retreat in 1776 pulled the focus of the war further south, Rufus had returned home to command the 5th Massachusetts Regiment in defence of his own state. There he had found time to father three more children, two in the dark days of defeat, and a third to celebrate the approach of victory – not for nothing were there rampant boars on the Putnam coat of arms – and to acquire the fine estate of Rutland that formerly belonged to a wealthy loyalist. But he was not content to rest on his laurels. With the return of peace, he was impatient to stretch his surveyor’s chain across the wide-open spaces beyond the Ohio river.

In April 1783, Timothy Pickering, a delegate to the Continental Congress, reported that ‘there is a plan for the forming of a new State Westward of the Ohio. Some of the principal officers of the Army are heartily engaged in it. The propositions respecting it are in the hands of General Huntington and General Putnam, the total exclusion of slavery from the State to form an essential and irrevocable part of the Constitution.’

Rufus was not a speculator – his stand against slavery, effectively ruling out land sales to Southern planters, was evidence of that – but he was proposing to acquire as much land as any of the pre-revolutionary companies, almost eighteen million acres from the Ohio to Lake Erie. Nevertheless, he wanted to divide this land up into ‘756 townships of six miles square’, because, as he told his former commander George Washington, ‘I am much opposed to the monopoly of lands and wish to guard against large patents being granted to individuals … it throws too much power in the hands of a few.’ Instead, he hoped to see the entire area settled by veterans of the continental army who could acquire land either by using the warrants issued on completion of service or by paying a fixed, small price. This would have the double benefit of settling a part of the United States vulnerable to British invasion from Canada with reliable soldiers, and of reviving the value of the military warrants, whose worth was ‘no more than 3/6 & 4/- on the pound [i.e. less than 20 per cent of the face value] [but] which in all probability might double if not more, the moment it was known that Government would receive them for lands in the Ohio Country’. Rufus petitioned Congress to grant him the land, and when it did not respond he wrote again to George Washington in April 1784 to ask, as was his habit, what should be done.

‘The Settlement of the Ohio Country, Sir, ingrosses many of my thoughts and much of my time since I left Camp,’ he wrote, and the delay was making the veterans impatient. ‘Many of them are unable to lie long on their oars waiting the decition [sic] of Congress on our petition.’

Washington, who had retired from command of his victorious troops and returned to his estates, was no less impatient for Congress to reach some decision about the land beyond the mountains. Throughout the war a stream of settlers had moved into Tennessee and Kentucky, and the increase in their numbers after the fighting was over prompted Washington to warn the Congress that without some policy, ‘the settling, or rather overspreading of the Western Country will take place by a parcel of Banditti who will bid defiance to all Authority’. The thorny pre-revolutionary conflict between settlers and squatters, proprietors and Goths, had not gone away.