The Fabric of America (29 page)

Andrew Jackson

It was not by chance that one of Jackson's earliest exercises in government, as de facto military governor of Florida shortly after its acquisition from Spain in 1819, should have concerned the payment of sheriffs. In a public proclamation creating a structure of administration for the new territory, he stated, “There shall also be a sheriff appointed to each court, to execute the process thereof, whose services shall be compensated by the court to which he is appointed.” In other words he was to be paid a salary rather than living off what he could squeeze from poor farmers. Jacksonian democracy began at ground level. But like the Regulators, the need to safeguard their property also drove the Jacksonians to take an interest in Washington. The reason was simple. Only the federal government could take land from the Indians and measure it out as property for its citizens.

From the moment that Ellicott's frontier enclosed the greater part of Creek territory, its inhabitants became vulnerable to the same pressures that had removed the Iroquois from their land. But until the War of 1812, Benjamin Hawkins had acted as a bulwark, fending off white attempts to move into Creek land, and simultaneously enabling the Creeks themselves to learn through practical farming and elementary schooling the skills they needed to adjust to the relentless advance of the new Americans. His efforts had bought both sides fourteen years of peaceful coexistence.

In 1813, Jackson launched his military career when he led the Tennessee militia in a campaign against those Upper Creeks who had supported Tecumseh's war against the United States. Deriving the name from the Reds or
Kipayalgi
, meaning the warrior faction, Americans called them Red Sticks. The
Italwalgi
, or White Stick Creeks, either kept out of the conflict or fought with Jackson's troops at the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814 that crushed the Red Stick forces. Yet the treaty that Jackson imposed applied to both hostile and friendly Creeks indiscriminately, forcing them to cede half their territory, more than twenty million acres, to the United States.

It was Hawkins's particular torture to be at Jackson's side as the forced cession was announced. He was thus seen to be associated with the betrayal
of those peaceful Creeks who had followed his advice and abandoned traditional ways in favor of those used by property owners. When he died two years later, it was said to be of a broken heart.

But as president, Jackson would have an infinitely larger stage on which to act. The frontiers of the United States were about to expand far beyond the wildest dreams of the most ambitious Tennessee farmer. And one of them would be run by Andrew Ellicott.

… the bargain between freedom and slavery contained in the Constitution of the United States is morally and politically vicious, inconsistent with the principles upon which alone our Revolution can be justified…
If the Union must be dissolved
, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Journal, 1820

The first designated U.S. frontier, the line separating it from Canada, was also the most complicated to run. Less than four years had been needed to establish the southern boundary with Spain, but deciding where on the ground Canada began and the United States ended took more than six decades after the frontier had first been delineated on a map.

The particular difficulty concerned the most easterly part of the line from the Bay of Fundy to the St. Lawrence, in other words the strange, crumpled horn thrusting up into the belly of Quebec and New Brunswick that is Maine's northern border. On gigantic maps more than six feet tall and four feet across, the American and British negotiators at the Treaty of Paris drew thick red lines to indicate where they thought the United States should extend. Then in 1783 they put in words what they thought they had indicated.

According to Article II of the Treaty, the frontier would run “from the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, viz. that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of the Saint Croix River to the Highlands;
along the said Highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St. Lawrence, from those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean, to the northwesternmost head of the Connecticut River; thence down along the middle of that river, to the forty-fifth degree of north latitude.”

If ever there was an argument for defining frontiers by Andrew Ellicott's star-based calculations rather than by natural features, it was provided by Article II. Two Saint Croix rivers meandered through the woodlands; instead of a neat row of mountains, “the Highlands” revealed themselves to be a bewildering mess of hills with no clear watershed to make a northwest angle from which a line could be drawn; and anyway nobody was able to find the source of the Connecticut River. Astronomers could locate the forty-fifth parallel, but the rest was confusion. Consequently the frontier remained undefined until after the 1812 war, when it was decided in the Treaty of Ghent that commissioners from each country should be appointed to sort out the muddle.

In 1817 the U.S. boundary commissioner Cornelius Van Ness wrote to the sixty-three-year-old Ellicott asking for his help in running the forty-fifth parallel. His presence was vital, Van Ness said, not only “so that great accuracy should be attained, but … so as to gain to both governments entire confidence in its accuracy.”

It was a belated tribute to a man who by then had almost been forgotten. His obscurity was partly the consequence of his prickly personality, but mostly because he had blown the whistle on President Thomas Jefferson's favorite general. Denied the chance to earn a living from his science, Ellicott had survived largely on handouts from his wealthy brother Joseph, chief agent for the Holland Land Company, who earned a commission on every acre sold in upstate New York and ended up owning most of Buffalo and assets worth half a million dollars.

Money had never been Andrew Ellicott's priority. What he valued was civilization, by which he meant a proper respect for science. But as though Wilkinson's hostility were a curse, even a contract in 1811 to run the state line between Georgia and North Carolina turned sour. Convinced that the existing line drawn along the thirty-fifth parallel was almost twenty miles too far south, Georgia's governor, David Mitchell, a feisty immigrant from Scotland, employed Ellicott to establish the true line, hoping to gain about eight hundred thousand acres from North Carolina. In his usual, meticulous
fashion, Ellicott spent weeks establishing that the existing line was in fact too far north. “All that part of the country [was] erroneously laid down in all the maps of the state,” he explained to Joseph. “This discovery embarrassed me extremely as our subsequent operations would have to be performed in the most rugged and mountainous part of the United States.” It was far more embarrassing to Governor Mitchell, who learned that instead of gaining land from North Carolina he was about to lose almost 625,000 acres of Georgia. In his frustration, he refused to pay more than $3,000 of Ellicott's bill for $5,000.

Only when Wilkinson was at last relieved of his command did Ellicott's luck turn. Appropriately, the realization that the army needed better-trained commanders was what led to his rehabilitation. In 1813, James Monroe, secretary of war in Madison's administration, wrote asking him “if the appointment of Professor of Mathematics in the Military School at West Point in the State of New York with the pay & emoluments of a Major of Infantry in the Army, equal to One thousand Dollars per annum, with allowance for quarters, fuel & servants, will be acceptable?”

Originally chosen as the site of a fort for its strategic command of the river below, West Point consisted of a scattering of white-walled, red-tiled barracks, schoolrooms, and houses that looked out across a vast parade ground to the Hudson Valley. The military academy had been founded in 1802 with the intention of training officers for the Corps of Engineers and was at first restricted to just twenty cadets, whose selection and education depended largely on the whims of the superintendent. At the outbreak of war, Congress authorized a dramatic increase in its roll to 250 cadets, and the introduction of a more structured curriculum.

“The emoluments it is true are small, but I believe sufficient to support myself and small family,” Ellicott acknowledged, “but in point of respectability it is inferior to none in the government, and in the Europe the first scientific characters are attached to their military academies. And there, as well as in this country, the professor of mathematics is considered the principal or president of the institution.”

He had always enjoyed passing on knowledge to his “family” of young assistants, and it is clear from their affectionate memories that he was equally good with the cadets. They nicknamed him Old Infinite Series, in reference to his fondness for the circle-squaring sequence, 1 − 1/3 + 1/5 − 1/7 + 1/9 − 1/11,
that Rittenhouse had taught him long ago on the Pennsylvania frontier and that had beguiled the silences of many long Quaker meetings. Cadets would remember how he used to carry a miniature blackboard and sponge attached to his watch chain so that he could work out problems on the move, how his lectures on astronomy began with beguiling ease on the way the sun rose higher in summer than in winter and ended with fearsome equations to work out longitude from the position of Castor and Pollux, and how perfectly he drew geometric shapes on the blackboard with a cord and straightedge. “There are some,” ran one account, “who will recollect Professor Ellicott sitting at his desk at the end of a long room, in the second story of what was called the Mess Hall teaching geometry and algebra, and looking and acting precisely like the old-fashioned school-master, of whom it was written,

“‘And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew

“‘That one small head could carry all he knew.' ”

From this comfortable existence he was summoned to help establish the northern frontier as he had the southern. His first summer in 1817 on the line from the St. Lawrence to the Connecticut River was an uneventful exploration of the route. On his return two years later to establish the exact frontier, he had the disturbing experience of being overtaken by history. On the forty-fifth parallel, he was joined by the new generation of boundary-makers, Ferdinand Hassler, the Swiss-born U.S. surveyor, and the British representative, Dr. J. L. Tiark. From August through the end of September, Ellicott followed the old routine of viewing, timing, noting, and calculating that had served him throughout his life. He observed the alpha stars in the constellations of Aquila and Aquarius, the Pole Star, and the beta star in the Little Bear, bodies as familiar as those of his children; he measured their movements and read up his findings, but this time the routine did not quite give him the confidence it always had in the past.

“As to our business I can say nothing at present,” he wrote cautiously to Sally, “and candidly confess that I do not yet comprehend the method pursued by the British astronomer and Mr Hastler [
sic
], it is different from anything I have yet seen or heard of, not more than one observation in ten can possibly be applied to the boundary. Those that can are probably good, but their mode of calculation is laborious in the extreme.”

In truth time had caught up with him. Unlike his eighteenth-century
predecessors, who had to provide their own instruments, Hassler spent thousands of government dollars on the finest apparatus by the most advanced craftsmen in London—telescopes by George Dollond, lens-maker to King George III, a mechanical dividing engine from Jesse Ramsden capable of machining metal to accuracies of one thousandth of an inch, and the jewel of them all, a thirty-inch repeating theodolite weighing three hundred pounds, created by the Tiffany of instrument manufacturers, Edward Troughton, an object so perfect that Hassler named his next son after its creator. Money bought him time as well. While Ellicott congratulated himself on measuring ninety miles on the Pennsylvania border in ninety days, Hassler spent forty-three days measuring a line less than nine miles long. The difference appeared in their results. The late-nineteenth-century commissioners who checked the Pennsylvania border congratulated Ellicott on making errors of less than one foot in a mile, a ratio of less than 1 in 5,280, but in the 1970s Hassler's work was found to have an error rate of just 1 in 100,000.

Between them, however, the astronomers succeeded in running the forty-fifth parallel from the St. Lawrence 120 miles east to the Connecticut River. Neither they nor anyone else could resolve the confusion created by the nonexistent Highlands and multiple rivers until 1842, when a compromise line was agreed in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. But sufficient harmony existed in 1819 for the United States and Britain to come to an understanding about the rest of the frontier running west from the Great Lakes. From their shores, it was to follow the forty-ninth parallel as far as the Rockies. Beyond that lay the Oregon Country, the chunk of coast and mountain between the Russian colony of Alaska that stretched as far south as 54 degrees 40 minutes, and Spanish California, which reached a little north of San Francisco. Both Britain's Hudson Bay Company and the United States' John Jacob Astor had fur-trapping bases in Oregon Country, and so in the remarkable Convention of 1819 that settled the rest of the Canadian frontier, the two countries agreed to share control of the area for ten years.

At almost the same time as this agreement was being hammered out in London, the secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was bringing to an end two years of negotiations with the Spanish foreign minister, Luis de Onís, about the southern frontier. The talks were triggered by Andrew Jackson's ferocious campaign against the Seminoles of Florida to prevent their attacking cotton plantations in southern Georgia and the Mississippi Territory. In 1817
he led a militia force across the boundary with Spanish Florida that Ellicott had so meticulously drawn. He burned Seminole villages, captured Pensacola, hanged two British citizens there, and assured the president, “Let it be signified to me through any channel that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.”