The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  “The greatest Estates we have in this Colony,” the young Washington confided to a friend, “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, he purchased 1,459 acres in the Virginia Piedmont, the first step in a career of land-dealing that eventually made him owner of more than 52,000 acres spread across six different states.

  Washington was not alone. A growing number of speculators had come to the same electrifying conclusion that immigration was pushing up the value of land. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin predicted that the population of the colonies would double to 2.6 million by 1775. The logic was inescapable, and it led to the formation of more than a score of land companies to survey and register claims to unowned territory. The soaring value of property left no room for Cresaps or other banditti. In colonial legislatures throughout British America, landowners, speculators, and proprietors brought pressure to bear to impose order in the backcountry. New counties were created, new county surveyors were appointed to register properties— among them George Washington for Culpeper County, Virginia—and new county sheriffs were sent to exact taxes.

  From the point of view of the eastern politicians and speculators, this was no more than a restoration of government. To western farmers forced to travel up to one hundred miles to pay taxes or appear in the new county courts, it appeared like tyranny. Thus during the critical years before 1775, when resistance to London’s attempt to impose taxes on its colonists began to create a distinct sense of being American, two different struggles for democracy were building against two different governments—the colonies against Britain, and western farmers against east coast authority.

  In Pennsylvania, the attempt by Penn and his heirs to regain control from Cresap and his fellow banditti began with a prolonged legal battle in London to have the boundaries in their royal charter drastically revised. Not until 1732, long after Penn’s bankruptcy and death, did they succeed in persuading the Court of Chancery in London, the senior English court dealing with equity and contracts, to shift the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania south. The northern boundary was now to be the forty-second degree, and the southern was to run exactly fifteen miles south of Philadelphia along a line that did intersect the arc round New Castle.

  Once more, what seemed clear-cut on a map proved impossibly complicated on the ground. For thirty years the difficulties of drawing straight lines, arcs, and tangents across the curvature of the earth and getting them to meet at the right point bamboozled the best surveyors in the colonies. Eventually Penn’s heirs agreed with the Calverts, the earl of Baltimore’s family who owned Maryland, to share the enormous cost of having a definitive boundary run by the eminent British astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon.

  The pair had already worked together on the world’s first great international scientific project, the observation of the 1761 transit of Venus across the face of the sun, an enterprise that involved scientists from most of the nations of Europe. Although they had successfully viewed the phenomenon from Cape Town, the restless, inquisitive Mason, forever striking up conversations with strangers and traveling, as he put it, “for curiosity to see the country,” appeared to be an odd match with the dour, concentrated Dixon, who rarely stirred far from his precious telescopes. Nevertheless, in the four years from 1763 to 1767, the two of them not only untangled the geometrical confusion around Philadelphia, but more impressively solved the problem of running an accurate parallel or line of latitude due east-west, a feat never before accomplished in North America, and probably not in Europe.

  Although the United States’ longest frontier is a parallel, as are the top and bottom borders of many states, it is easy to overlook the fiendish challenge each presented its maker—to draw a straight line across the rounded surface of the globe. At sea, mariners would simply follow a constant compass bearing—270 degrees to head due west—but on land ordinary compasses became too unreliable due to magnetic variation, the presence of mountains, and the action of other distorting forces. Until the invention of the solar compass in the 1840s, a boundary-maker intent on the utmost accuracy had to rely on celestial navigation. But then, a second, more horrible predicament presented itself—on the surface of the three-dimensional earth the shortest line between two points lying east and west of each other is not straight but, paradoxically, a curve, known as a Great Circle or a circumference of the globe (see appendix).

  The complex solution found by Mason and Dixon was to run a Great Circle from one observation point to the next, a distance of about a dozen miles, then track back along the line of the parallel. Close to a week of star sightings was required at each point, and the use of the finest scientific instruments in the British empire. The combined wealth of the Penns and Calverts had purchased for them a six-foot-tall, vertically suspended telescope known as a zenith sector, a transit and equal-altitude instrument, and a Hadley quadrant, all constructed in brass and mahogany with achromatic lenses by John Bird, instrument-maker to King George III. On April 5, 1765, accompanied by more than one hundred surveyors, chainmen, axmen, and laborers, Mason and Dixon set out with these instruments from Alexander Bryan’s farm, exactly fifteen miles south of Philadelphia, to run Pennsylvania’s boundary along the line of latitude 39 degrees 43 minutes 18.2 seconds (39° 43′ 18.2″) north of the equator.

  More than two years and 230 miles later, their star-derived line reached another, older boundary high in the Appalachians, the Catawba warpath. This one, established by violence and bloodshed, marked the limit of the influence of the Six Nations, who had guaranteed their safety, and the beginning of Delaware and Shawnee territory. On October 9, 1767, Mason noted in his journal that their Six Nations guards “would not proceed one step further westward,” and so, on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River, a mound five feet high was built to mark the end of what would become known as the Mason-Dixon Line.

  The effects of the new boundary were immediately apparent. Both the Penns and the Calverts began to survey and sell land near the border, and squatters already there were forced to buy or rent, and most significantly to pay tax. A principle had been established that would last throughout American history and remains strictly applicable to present-day problems on the border with Mexico—a clear-cut boundary is government’s first weapon in the control of its citizens.

  When delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania met in 1779 under the auspices of the Continental Congress to resolve the problem of their undefined border, they decided to take the Mason-Dixon Line as their starting point. There were practical reasons for the choice—the line already covered about two thirds of what would be the southern boundary of Pennsylvania—but it also recognized that the states were now heirs to many of the colonies’ concerns. They too needed clear-cut borders not just to keep the peace between them, but to enable each to govern efficiently, to register property, to tax citizens, and to enforce law and order. But the colonial governments had been able to call upon the huge scientific resources of Britain built up around the Royal Society since its foundation in 1660, and to make use of the most advanced scientific instruments from London manufacturers who were supported by royal patronage and the demands of the industrial revolution, while the states had to find their own homegrown scientists who were often forced to rely on instruments they had made themselves.

  The long apprenticeship that Andrew Ellicott had served as a clock-maker was essential to his later success as an astronomer. The skills in one field transferred easily to another, and Ellicott’s craftsmanship as an instrument maker is still evident in some beautifully made telescopes that he built and that are now held in the Smithsonian Institution.

  He owed his interest in the subject to the chance arrival in Solebury of an intense young Irishman called Robert Patterson, whose talents led soon after to his appointment as professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. For a brief period, however,
he ran a school in the area. In June 1769 when the planet Venus made a transit across the face of the sun, Patterson supervised his fifteen-year-old student’s observation and timing of the event and evidently mixed instruction on the astronomical significance of the occasion—in theory it would allow the distance to the sun to be calculated—with his own political feelings of hostility to the British and affection for his new country.

  “You were in your young days my preceptor,” Ellicott wrote Patterson much later. “It was under your guidance that my mind was directed to the love of my country and to science. If I have been useful, you are entitled to the credit, if not it has been my own fault.”

  The depth of Patterson’s influence was apparent when the Revolution broke out, and in defiance of his family’s pacifist beliefs, Ellicott volunteered for military service. By then the entire Ellicott clan—Joseph, his two brothers with their families, and their children’s families—had moved south to Maryland in search of a site where they could build new, more powerful mills. Barely ten miles from the rapidly growing port of Baltimore, they found the perfect position on the fast-running Patapsco River, and the successful flour-milling operation they set up would eventually grow into Ellicott City, now part of the conurbation of Greater Baltimore.

  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 w
ine 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.