The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” Lincoln wrote despairingly to a friend. “As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia for instance where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.’”

  Consequently, the idea of freedom that Lincoln developed in the war possessed one profound difference from what had existed before. It was no longer exclusive. That was the import of the words he delivered on the battleground of Gettysburg, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  Every frontier, whether federal or state, had eventually to be marked out on the ground. Without the reality of a physical boundary, disputes over jurisdiction could never be solved. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the frontier between Mexico and the United States was to follow the Rio Grande for some twelve hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso, Texas, then cross about seven hundred miles of baking desert and jagged hills to San Diego. The line that border patrols and illegal immigrants now risk lives and fortunes to defend and cross was first demarcated between 1850 and 1855 by Captain William Emory, U.S. Corps of Topographical Engineers, and José Salazar Ylarregui of Mexico’s Colegio de Minería.

  The Topographical Engineers were in large part Andrew Ellicott’s legacy. Despite his fond hopes of becoming the principal figure at West Point when he was appointed professor of mathematics, he had quickly discovered that the academy remained the personal fiefdom of its autocratic senior officer, Captain Alden Partridge, whose other avian characteristics, according to a contemporary account, included “the body of a penguin and the head of hawk.” In winter he would capriciously decide that ballistics should be taught not in the classroom but by firing cannonballs down the frozen track of the Hudson, and summer semesters were repeatedly cut short in favor of adventure camps in the forest.

  “Some of the men cannot read and write,” Ellicott wrote angrily to Monroe in 1815, “much less do they understand English Grammar, Arithmetic &c.” He was joined in his protest by the academy’s other newly arrived intellectual star, Jared Mansfield, who had returned from setting the Public Land Survey in order. Together they undertook a campaign for reform that lasted for two years. For a time both were put under arrest by an increasingly eccentric Partridge, but their reward was the appointment in 1817 of the great reforming superintendent, Major Sylvanus Thayer, whose rigorous curriculum and discipline were to win him fame as “the Father of West Point.”

  Undisturbed by these upheavals, Ellicott continued to teach his specialty, celestial navigation, and to the few cadets with sufficient ability, he introduced the different methods of calculating longitude—using the moon’s location, the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites, eclipses of the sun, and the occultation of stars by the moon—together with the fiendish math that went with them. The influence of his teaching permeated the discipline of topography (the art of detailed mapping) that began to emerge from West Point in those years.

  The need to have accurate records of territory available at short notice persuaded the army to create in 1818 the prototype of what was to become the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Soon afterward, its officers began to be allocated the task of demarcating on the ground the lines of the new Territories that Douglas’s committee had selected. Here, Ellicott’s legacy could be seen. Many of the earliest topographical engineers had worked under him, such as Isaac Roberdeau and Stephen Long, his assistant at West Point, or came from the generation of cadets he taught, among them James Graham, a founding officer of the corps, who managed to run both the Canadian frontier in the 1840s and the initital stages of the Mexican border in the 1850s. Thus a direct chain of expertise connected Ellicott’s Pennsylvania boundaries to the meridians and parallels drawn by his nineteenth-century successors, as well as to the international frontier run by Emory and Salazar.

  Not surprisingly, the U.S. team on the Mexican border also used Ellicott’s methods of celestial and especially lunar observation to check the line, together with random and true lines for the section of it that followed a parallel. Although the Mexicans relied more on triangulation, they agreed to accept the Americans’ figures on the land-based part of the frontier. This was a misjudgment on Salazar’s part because he failed to challenge Emory’s faulty measurements near Nogales, resulting in the American acquisition of three hundred square miles of Mexican territory.

  Nevertheless, the most serious disputes resulted from the constant movement of the Rio Grande. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its repeated meanderings, notably a major alteration at El Chamizal near El Paso in 1864, created disputes that took decades of diplomacy to solve. In 1970, both nations agreed on the unecological solution of channeling the most mobile sections through immobile concrete watercourses. Elsewhere the river remains free, making this the only wandering frontier of the United States.

  While Emory and Salazar’s teams were still at work on the frontier, its line was abruptly altered. In 1853 the financier James Gadsden made a deal with the seemingly immortal Santa Anna, dictator of Mexico for the third time, to purchase for $10 million almost thirty thousand square miles of territory, the southern strip of today’s New Mexico and Arizona, including Tucson, and the most porous stretch of the border with Mexico. Gadsden was planning a railroad to connect the Pacific with Texas, and the flattest route, later followed by the Southern Pacific railroad, lay through country south of the Guadalupe Hidalgo frontier. This new acquisition of territory led directly to Douglas’s final disastrous deal that created the states of Kansas and Nebraska.

  Even without Gadsden’s railroad project, Douglas would eventually have attempted to create a government for the vast tract of land between Missouri and the Rockies stretching north from the slave frontier of 36 degrees 30 minutes to Canada. Although designated part of the Indian Territory to which Native Americans from farther east had been relocated, its dry, short-grass prairies were already being invaded by white ranchers and farmers, who wanted their properties recognized and protected by the federal government. What prompted Douglas to immediate action, however, was his ambition to make Chicago the hub of the nation’s railroad system.

  He had created the Illinois Central railroad in 1850 by legislating to allow the state to finance it with grants of public land. “If ever a man passed a bill, I did that one,” he crowed afterward. “I did the whole work and was devoted to it for two entire years.” Links to eastern railroads were easily arranged, but no track existed westward through the dry prairies, and until the region could be organized as a Territory, no federal funds and lands would be available to survey a route to the Pacific.

  Four previous attempts to create a Territory in the area had been blocked by the south. Since it lay north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, any Territory would have to be free under the Missouri Compromise, thus tilting the balance even more heavily against slavery. But in a typical deal to buy southern support, Douglas proposed to slice off the southern third of Nebraska to create the Territory of Kansas, reaching west to the Rockies, and to abolish the Missouri Compromise in order to open each Territory for settlement as a slave or free state according to the wishes of the inhabitants. His southern backers accepted on the assumption that Kansas would be a slave state.

  It is a testament to Douglas’s lack of moral awareness that he never understood how offensive the deal would be to antislavers. While the legislation was still before Congress, Ohio’s senators and representatives described it as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge; a criminal betrayal of precious rights … an atrocious plot” and promised that the struggle would
go on even after the proposal became law: “We shall go home to our constituents, erect anew the standard of Freedom, and call on the People to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of Slavery.” In Beloit, college students joined thousands of other northern communities in protesting against the Kansas-Nebraska bill that would allow, as they put it, “the land pledged for freedom [by the Missouri Compromise] to be made into slave states.”

  The sense of outrage brought together the different interests of Free-Soilers, antislavery Democrats, abolitionists, and Free Labor businesses and became the catalyst that formed them into the new Republican Party. But what really showed how disaffected the north had become was the extra-constitutional reaction.

  In New England the Emigrants Aid Society was set up by Eli Thayer and funded by wealthy Amos A. Lawrence to help antislavery settlers find land in Kansas before it was overrun by the “border ruffians” swarming across the border from the slave state of Missouri. When the first settlers left in September, they took with them dozens of Sharps rifles contributed by the congregation of Henry Ward Beecher.

  Their warlike preparations produced an equally violent reaction. “Shall we allow such cut-throats and murderers, as the people of Massachusetts are, to settle in the territory adjoining our own State?” demanded the pro-slavery paper Liberty Platform of Missouri in June 1854. “No! If popular opinion will not keep them back, we should see what virtue there is in the force of arms.” And in the same vein, the Platte Argus urged its Missouri readers, “Stake out your claims, and woe be to the abolitionist who shall intrude upon it, or come within reach of your long and true rifles, or within point blank shot of your revolvers.”

  Yet even as tension grew between the two sets of frontier societies, each obeyed with astonishing formality the rituals of claiming property in land. At Salt Creek, close to the center of Kansas Territory, the first immigrants from Missouri carefully formed themselves into a Squatters Association with a set of twelve rules to “secure safety and fairness in the location and preservation of claims.” Common to all squatters clubs was the third rule: “Every person of lawful age who may be at the head of a family, who shall mark out his claim so that it may be apparent how the same lies, and proceed with reasonable diligence to erect thereon a cabin or tent, shall be deemed to have made a proper claim.” What made Salt Creek different was rule nine: “That we will afford protection to no Abolitionists as settlers in Kansas Territory.”

  Three months later, Charles Robinson, a veteran of settling gold-rush claims in Californa, arrived in northern Kansas with the first New England settlers and stopped at Wakarusa, a high spur of land shortly to be renamed Lawrence that overlooked the Kansas River. Within two days they had set up a city council with a secretary, treasurer, and rules based upon the laws of Maine, meaning that not only would there be no slavery, but no liquor either, and of more immediate importance that the ground would be pre-surveyed before purchase. The same day they appointed a surveyor, A. D. Sean, to lay out the town and surrounding area. At midnight Sean went to the top of the hill with a sextant, compass, and chronometer to find true north from the Pole Star, like Andrew Ellicott and innumerable surveyors before him. The grid of streets and lots running north-south and east-west that he laid out over the following weeks remains at the heart of Lawrence to this day.

  For both sets of pioneers, the need to have their unregistered claims recognized made the creation of a Territorial government an urgent necessity. Unlike other prairie states that emerged from an existing Territory, no framework of government existed in Kansas for settlers to build on. The struggle to write a constitution and elect a legislature that would validate claims and draw county boundaries favoring one side or the other was too important to be settled easily. In 1855, the pro-slavers drew up the Lecompton constitution, endorsing slavery in the Territory, and ferrymen on the Missouri River did a roaring trade taking fake settlers into Kansas to vote for it. As the tension grew, threats and intimidating raids led to murder, culminating in John Brown’s cold-blooded killing in 1856 of five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie near the Missouri border, and in later years “Bleeding Kansas” was taken to be a portent of the Civil War’s carnage. The records show, however, that of 157 documented killings, only one third were certainly political, and at least as many were concerned with land disputes.

  Nevertheless, news of the events in Kansas confirmed the north’s worst fears about the spread of federally sponsored slavery. In Beloit, Wisconsin, so recently a frontier settlement itself, young men started to volunteer to go down to help the free settlers against the slavers. To the end of a long life that continued into the twentieth century, William Brown, a college student at the time, remembered how at the town meeting before the youths left in early 1856, the most peaceful citizen in Rock County, the “lamblike Deacon Samuel Hinman, got up in front, flourishing his big bowie knife in one hand and a six shooter in the other and calling out his son, presented those weapons to him in succession saying, ‘I give you this knife and I give you this revolver so that with them you may help save Kansas for freedom.’”

  When unambiguous evidence of fraudulent voting appeared, it seemed that violence would certainly spread. But Douglas’s impassioned advocacy persuaded Congress to reject the Lecompton constitution in the face of President James Buchanan’s plea to accept it. “No Democrat has ever opposed his party without being crushed,” Buchanan warned Douglas grimly, but the senator was not deterred. Popular sovereignty demanded an honest poll, and to the supreme deal-maker some hostility from the south was a useful means of retrieving his reputation in the north.

  In the summer of 1858, Stephen Douglas agreed to a series of seven debates with his Republican opponent for the Senate, the almost unknown former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, a stringy beanpole towering over him by more than a foot, but a pygmy by comparison in terms of political influence. “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure,” Lincoln noted privately when comparing himself with Douglas. “With him, it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown even in foreign lands.”

  By the time the debates began, Douglas must have felt that the storm had been weathered. Kansas had adopted a free constitution, property was being registered, and few believed that cotton or slavery could flourish there. “We rely wholly upon numbers now,” remarked one relieved Kansas voter, “and not upon Sharps rifles.” Despite John Brown’s foray across the Missouri border to release slaves and murder another slaveholder, a relative calm had fallen over the north, and the midterm elections offered Douglas a renewed opportunity to persuade voters that popular sovereignty was the only way to reconcile the differences between north, south, and west.

  The senator had every reason to suppose that his policy would be overwhelmingly accepted. In little more than a decade, he had made possible the admittance of Texas and California as fully fledged states to the Union, the division of Oregon Territory into Washington and Oregon with the latter about to be admitted as a state, and the separation of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota so that all three became parts of the Union. From the smoke-filled rooms of the Capitol, he and his committee had cut in half the Mormons’ maverick state of Deseret that sprawled from San Diego to Denver and from Wyoming to the Mexican border. He could claim the credit for having delineated California’s boundaries, given Utah Territory its southern border, created a Territory of New Mexico containing an embryonic Arizona, and—fatefully—for the double creation of Kansas Territory and a huge Nebraska Territory reaching to the Canadian border. On top of that, he was laying the foundations for the transcontinental railroads that would unify the nation and put Illinois at its heart. No Illinois Democrat could have doubted his quality as senator, and looking ahead to the 1860 presidental election, even Horace Greeley, one of the founders of the Republican Party, was prepared to support Douglas as a “more practical” way of defeating slavery than running their own candidate.

  In s
ultry summer heat and dusty fall winds, before audiences of thousands so that each speaker would begin by asking for silence in order that all could hear him, Douglas and Lincoln hammered at the same old incompatibilities of the slavery question—that the Constitution guaranteed property, that the Declaration of Independence promised liberty. In practical terms, there was not much between them. Both agreed that the Union must be preserved at all costs, that slaveholders could not be deprived of their property by force, and that the federal government ought not to be allowed to impose slavery on territories or states against their wishes. Lincoln did not foresee slavery ending “in less than a hundred years at least,” as he admitted in the fourth debate, while Douglas implied that economics might lead it to wither away much sooner. “We in Illinois… tried slavery,” he reminded his listeners, “kept it up for twelve years, and finding that it was not profitable we abolished it for that reason.”

  Their first major division was over the impact of the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case. Called on to decide whether the slave Dred Scott had been made free by being taken to live in the free state of Illinois, Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing the majority decision, had determined that he remained a slave. His ruling was made on the sweeping grounds that no federal or state laws guaranteeing citizens’ liberties could apply to black Americans, whether free or slave, because the Constitution did not recognize them as citizens. Like most people, Lincoln believed that in tandem with the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision would allow slavery to spread into every state because wherever slave owners went, the United States was required to protect their property. Douglas, however, still maintained that where people were opposed to slavery, they could “by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst.” It was to prove a damaging argument when he returned to the south, but in Illinois it did him no harm.