The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Encouraged by the entry of the United States into the negotiations, the Seneca sachem Cornplanter immediately set about enlisting the new president’s assistance, using political skills honed by long sessions in his own confederation. In November 1790, Washington agreed to meet Corn-planter in person and gave his word that Seneca ownership of their lands would be guaranteed by the federal government, which alone had the right to negotiate for their sale. “Here then is the security for the remainder of your lands,” Washington promised Cornplanter. “No State nor person can purchase your lands, unless at some public treaty held under the authority of the United States. The general Government will … protect you in all your just rights.”

  By allying himself to Washington, Cornplanter showed himself to be the most pragmatic of the Six Nations’ sachems. His rivals for paramount influence among the Six Nations, the warlike Brant and the eloquent Red Jacket, counseled complete opposition to the inexorable hunger of American settlers for land, but Cornplanter recognized that this was a force that could not be opposed, only diverted. Washington himself took an equally realistic view of the Six Nations.

  Cornplanter

  His Indian policy was intended to persuade potential enemies to live peaceably within the United States. As a major land speculator himself, he had no qualms about acquiring their land. In 1795 he would buy three thousand acres in New York’s Mohawk Valley, using money borrowed from Governor George Clinton, and resell quickly for a profit of $6,000 on the deal. But self-interest demanded that all dealings be done equably without stirring up hostility. “It will be fortunate for the American public,” he declared in early 1791, “if private Speculations in the lands, still claimed by the Aborigines, do not aggravate those differences, which policy, humanity, and justice concur to deprecate.” Whatever the difficulties, unity always remained the ultimate prize.

  From a federal perspective the need to avoid unnecessary hostility was obvious. In the northwest, Brant and the British were encouraging a western alliance among tribes such as the Delaware, Wyandot, and Miami against further white settlement in the Ohio Valley. In the southwest, Cherokee anger at incursion by settlers from North Carolina and Georgia had already turned to sporadic violence, and it could easily spread by way of the Chickasaw to the Creek in the far south.

  Yet for all that the Constitution, the Congress, and the Father of the Nation might say, within his own frontier Governor Clinton continued to pursue his own program of forcing the Six Nations to exchange lease rights in their former lands for outright ownership of smaller reservations close to the Canadian border. The eight million acres of the Phelps and Gorham purchase were freed up through these arrangements, as were four million acres bought later by Alexander Macomb. The evidence that New York was acting on behalf of speculators regardless of the greater good of the United States drove Washington to a furious outburst to Alexander Hamilton.

  “The States individually are omitting no occasion to interfere in matters which belong to the general Government,” he wrote in April 1791. “It is not more than four or five months since the Six Nations or part of them were assured (through the medium of Colonel Pickering) that thence forward they would be spoken to by the Government of the United States only and the same thing was repeated in strong terms to the Cornplanter at Philadelphia afterwards… To sum the whole up in a few words: the interference of States, and the speculations of Individuals will be the bane of all our public measures.”

  Whatever New York could do for its speculators, Pennsylvania was about to do better. What made this second defiance more humiliating for Washington was that it concerned a tract of land in the extreme west of Six Nations territory, known as the Triangle, that clearly belonged to the United States.

  The Triangle got its name from a curious gap left by Ellicott’s line. Under the terms of New York’s 1780 cession to the United States of its claims to western lands, the state’s western border was deemed to be the meridian running north-south through “the western extremity of Lake Ontario.” Ellicott’s parallel clearly extended westward of this line. Thus the triangular area between New York’s western limits, Pennsylvania’s northern boundary, and the shores of Lake Erie could only belong to the United States. Within this area Seneca land was unequivocally guaranteed to them by the president.

  The most important feature on the southern shoreline of Lake Erie was a spit of rock and sand called Presqu’isle that thrust out like a fishhook into the lake creating a safe and well-protected harbor. That harbor was vital to speculators hoping to interest customers in the potential of the Six Nations land because it would allow farmers to ship their produce to markets in the east. The two principal speculators were Nathaniel Gorham, who owned eight million acres of New York, and to the south, John Nicholson, who laid claim to nearly four million acres of Pennsylvania.

  Nicholson had one overwhelming advantage that Gorham for all his eminence lacked—he had almost unlimited control over his state’s financial affairs. Appointed to the newly created post of comptroller general in 1782 at the age of twenty-five, he had kept Pennsylvania financially afloat at a time when the state was struggling under the emergency of a war economy and the violent antagonisms stirred up by a democratic government fundamentally opposed to the imposition of new taxes. His financial policy of direct taxation supplemented by the issue of paper money backed by the Depreciation and Donations Lands schemes benefited the super-rich, but they repaid him by buying all the bonds the state issued, thus keeping Pennsylvania solvent. It drove the state’s western settlers to the point of rebellion, but the trick that Nicholson carried off was to keep them from outright violence while maintaining investor confidence in the value of his paper money. The clearest sign of his success was a report in the Pennsylvania Gazette on August 14, 1784, that “treasury notes, state money, and public securities of all kinds, pass daily in stores and shops, in town and in the country at their real value.”

  His weapons were charm, ruthlessness, and a spongelike capacity for information that he welcomed from tavern landlords and surveyors as much as from bankers and senators. Those who could not follow his financial wizardry, he deemed “asses, dupes or blockheads” and saw no reason to enlighten them. From 1782 to 1794 about $27 million of public money passed through his hands from tax receipts, land sales, excise duties, and the issue of paper money. No one was sure how much he managed to divert into his own pockets because his supporters defeated an attempt to impeach him in 1794, but he owned public land in every one of Pennsylvania’s thirty-nine counties. And in his rivalry with Nathaniel Gorham, the resources of the state, financial and legal, were at his disposal.

  In 1788, Pennsylvania offered to buy the Erie Triangle from the United States at a high price on condition that a survey be undertaken to establish that Presqu’isle would be included. Gorham retaliated by arguing that the Triangle stood inside New York’s borders and that Pennsylvania’s boundaries had been improperly extended to Lake Erie without any relation to its charter. To counter these charges, Pennsylvania sent Ellicott to New York to testify before Congress in the hot summer of 1789 that the Keystone State’s rectangular shape was based on interstate agreement and impeccable astronomy.

  Sharp-eyed and fleshy-faced, Gorham made a formidable opponent. Like many of the biggest land speculators, he had made his fortune during the war when he was responsible for provisioning Massachusetts’ militia. Elected to the Continental Congress, he had served a term as president, then helped bring the Constitution into being, first as chairman of crucial debates and later as chief advocate in persuading his home state to ratify it. “This Mr Gorham, my opponent, is the greatest man in all new England, and formerly President of Congress,” Ellicott told Sally after facing his hostile questioning through humid days and fetid, candlelit evenings. “[It] has been the most severe contest I have been engaged in, and has employed my whole attention both by night and day.”

  On the other hand, Ellicott himself was no longer a nobody. That year he was ap
pointed geographer-general of the United States following Hutchins’s death, and passing through Philadelphia he asked Benjamin Franklin for an introduction to the newly elected president. In friendly fashion Franklin replied that it was his policy never to bother Washington with personal applications and instead provided Ellicott with a certificate of recommendation: “I have long known Mr Andrew Ellicott as a Man of Science, and while I was in the Executive Council had frequent Occasions, in the Course of Public Business, of being acquainted with his Abilities in Geographical Operations of the most important kind which were performed by him with the greatest Scientific Accuracy.” To have his work endorsed by the eighteenth century’s outstanding experimental scientist soothed even Ellicott’s thin-skinned pride, as did the manner in which the great man ended his letter: “I am dear friend yours most affectionately B Franklin.”

  The most effective proof of his standing, however, came in August when Congress accepted his testimony and overturned Gorham’s objection to Pennsylvania’s right to buy the Triangle. “I carried my point in the lower House of Congress,” Ellicott wrote in triumph. “The art and cunning of the new England people exceed anything that I had any idea of, but in this case they were defeated by perseverance and solid argument.” That fall after the Senate had approved the contract, Ellicott was commissioned by the United States to run the border between the Triangle and New York.

  The task depended on establishing the longitude of Lake Ontario’s most westerly point, then plotting where the same meridian cut across Lake Erie’s southern shore. But Ontario lay within Canada, and a team of Americans mapping and measuring so close to the border was not welcomed by the British. To Ellicott’s irritation, the frontier guard turned them back until permission for their presence was given by the governor of Canada. The delay and the onset of winter meant that the first part of their survey was not completed until January 1790.

  On his return from the wilderness, Ellicott immediately sent the president a report on what he had done. Typically it managed to be both boastful and defensive, asserting that all existing “geography of the Country about the Lakes [is] very erroneous”—on most maps Lake Erie was located almost two hundred miles too far south—and blaming the British for any delays and extra expenses he had incurred. In fact over half the report had nothing to do with geography but consisted of a verbatim account of his argument with an obstreperous British officer at the Canadian frontier. The officer first denied Ellicott the right of entry, then invited his American military escort to lunch while blandly informing Ellicott, “You may retire to the Tavern in the Bottom, and purchase such refreshments as you may want.” Rubbing salt into the wound made in Ellicott’s always vulnerable psyche, the officer refused point-blank to allow him to return by way of the Niagara Falls with the excuse that “too many people have seen the falls already.”

  Nevertheless the map that Andrew Ellicott provided for the president made any sensitivities of temperament irrelevant. He calculated for the first time the true location of Lake Erie and the United States’ northern border, which on previous maps had floated as much as twenty miles too far north or south of its proper position. On top of that he took advantage of the British governor’s permit to measure the distance of the Niagara River from Lakes Erie to Ontario, and to make the first accurate calculation of the 162-foot height of the falls. For good measure he provided an accurate plan of the strategically important ground beyond the border, including “the whole British settlement of Nassau.” It made a sharp revenge for the insult of the tavern lunch.

  The survey also established that New York’s border lay almost twenty miles east of Presqu’isle, and that the natural harbor therefore fell within the Triangle. Thus the chief beneficiary of Ellicott’s science turned out to be John Nicholson.

  To secure the Triangle, Pennsylvania had agreed to pay the United States seventy-five cents an acre, but as comptroller general, Nicholson made sure that when the deal went through in 1791 most of it was paid in the form of old certificates issued by the Continental Congress, which were once thought worthless but with interest were valued at almost $90,000. It was a good deal for the state, but a better one for Nicholson, because within a few months of its title being confirmed, Pennsylvania sold most of the Triangle to various buyers, nearly all of whom turned out to be either John Nicholson under different aliases or associates connected with his newly created Pennsylvania Population Company.

  Just as Clinton had defied the United States in the interests of Gorham and Macomb, so Pennsylvania’s governor, Thomas Mifflin, ensured that the state supported its premier speculator. Once the Triangle passed from U.S. jurisdiction to that of Pennsylvania, Cornplanter and his associates were bribed by state officials with money and three thousand acres on the Allegheny River to sign a document giving outright ownership of Seneca land in the Triangle to Pennsylvania. This extinguished the rights of Seneca ownership that Washington had personally guaranteed would not be transferred without the involvement of the United States. Not only did it defy both the president and the federal government, but it produced exactly the result that Washington had feared would come from not treating the Indians with “humanity and justice.”

  The sense of outrage among the majority of Senecas who repudiated the agreement immediately spilled over into the western alliance of Native Americans in the Ohio Valley. Seneca warriors joined the force assembled by the Miami general Michikinikwa, or Little Turtle, that inflicted two disastrous defeats on federal armies in 1790 and 1791, bringing settlement there to a halt. Ironically the same anger, now strengthened by victorious fighters from the western alliance, also held up the settlement of Presqu’isle for four critical years. During that time, Washington struggled to impose the authority of the federal government on Mifflin and the state of Pennsylvania. Not until 1794 did he succeed, and the U.S. government begin its long climb to ascendancy from this, the most blatant example of the states’ contempt for its authority.

  The readiness with which both Pennsylvania and New York ignored instructions from “the general government,” as it was called, helps illustrate the basic problem faced by the framers of the Constitution—the fragility of the idea of the United States compared with the robust reality of the states. What drove the least federally committed delegate to want a more perfect union than that created by the Articles of Confederation was the specter of chaos within the states represented by Shays’s Rebellion and the fear that warfare between the states might destroy their hard-won independence. But exactly how perfect, whether a compact of states or a consolidated nation, could not be specified without offending the very powers they wished to unite.

  During a debate in the Constitutional Convention on the relative strength of the power of the general government compared to that of the states, the wealthy Connecticut lawyer Oliver Ellsworth won general approval for his suggestion that “the U.S. are sovereign on one side of the line dividing the jurisdictions—the States on the other, [and] each ought to have power to defend their respective Sovereignties.” But that suggestion that the federal government might even be on a level with the states required the United States to have something more than words to define it.

  The power of the states, both north and south, led the framers to back off from confronting the issue that came closer than any other to breaking the Union they created. On both sides, the arguments about the morality of slavery were well understood. The anomaly of fighting to establish a confederation committed to the proposition that all men were born equal while enslaving one sixth of its population had already prompted John Jay, from the largely slave-owning state of New York, to admit, “To contend for liberty, and to deny that blessing to others involves an inconsistency not to be excused.” Smarting from defeat on the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Johnson had put it more acidly: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

  The contradiction had earlier led Pennsylvania to pass its 1780 law providing for the grad
ual abolition of slavery. “We conceive that it is our duty,” ran the preamble, “and we rejoice that it is in our power to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended to us; and a release from that state of thraldom to which we ourselves were tyrannically doomed.”

  Prompted by similar motives, Massachusetts declared the trade in slaves to be illegal in 1783, followed by all the New England states, and eventually New York and New Jersey. In the most important legislative act of its peacetime life, the Continental Congress made it a provision of the 1787 Ordinance governing the settlement of territory northwest of the Ohio River that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The entire free economy of northern states from Ohio to Wisconsin was to grow from that sentence.

  Yet not only did the argument of inconsistency fail to carry weight among delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the U.S. Constitution contained three separate provisions condoning slavery—that a slave should count for three fifths of a free man for the purposes of calculating the amount of taxation and representation in Congress allotted to each state; that the slave trade should continue for twenty years; and most explicitly of all that slaves who escaped and reached a free state should not regain their freedom but be returned to their masters.

  James Madison’s notes on debates in the Constitutional Convention reveal how clearly the delegates understood the nature of the double standard being applied, especially during the tortuous argument about the three-fifths formula. James Wilson, soon to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court and author of a famous series of lectures on the natural rights of man, asked “on what principle the admission of blacks in the proportion of three fifths could be explained. Are they admitted as Citizens? then why are they not admitted on an equality with White Citizens? are they admitted as property? then why is not other property admitted into the computation?”