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The measures themselves were derived from human activity and the shape of the human body itself. Almost universal was the width of the thumb or finger, which was equivalent to an inch, and in the first century AD, Vitruvius gave the classic definition of its relationship to other measures: ‘four fingers make one palm, and four palms make one foot; six palms make one cubit; four cubits make once a man’s height’. A bushel originated with the amount of seed required to sow an acre of ground – the actual amount varied even more than the size of the acre – while the ell, used for cloth, was either the width of the loom, or the distance from head to wrist (the easiest way to measure woven material is to hold it with an outstretched arm from the chin). Equally organic, and still less exact, were units like the bowshot (the distance an arrow would fly), the houpée (how far a shout would carry) and, among the Plains Indians of the United States, the horse-belly view (the furthest a person could see over the prairies when squatting beneath a mustang – approximately two miles).
The weakness of these variable measures was the scope they offered for cheating. From the beginning of writing, and probably earlier, there have been denunciations of those who used false measures. The commonest deceit was simply to use two sets of weights and containers, a large one for buying, a small for selling, and from the earliest times there is evidence of sacred and secular authorities thundering against the practice. ‘Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small,’ runs the Jewish law in the Book of Deuteronomy, ‘but thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have, that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.’ The Koran inveighs in similar fashion, ‘Woe to those who stint the measure. Who when they take by measure from others, exact the full, but diminish when they measure to others, or weigh to them.’
The existence of variable measures, with all their opportunities for fraud, stifled any wider trade because only those actually watching the wheat bushel being filled or the linen being stretched out knew the quantities involved. The success of the great medieval trade fairs at Troyes in Champagne was largely due to the town’s capacity to impose its own measures on traders; but it was the Dutch, the first great exporting nation in Europe, who understood the advantage of accuracy better than anyone. According to the English economist Josiah Child, writing in 1668, the booming trade that produced their astonishing prosperity in the seventeenth century was largely based on ‘their exact marking of all their Native Commodities’. The Netherlands’ major export was fish – herring and cod packed into huge barrels called hogsheads which were supposed to contain sixty-four gallons. Child noted that the Dutch measures were so reliable ‘that the repute of their said Commodities abroad continues always good, and the Buyers will accept of them by the marks, without opening; whereas the Fish which our English make in Newfound-Land and New-England, and Herrings at Yarmouth … often prove false and deceitfully made, seldom containing the quantity for which the Hogsheads are marked’.
By comparison traders in India, where until the twentieth century every locality had its own, variable measures, found it almost impossible to extend their business beyond the nearest towns. ‘I never can tell what I am buying nor how I am selling,’ a Madras grain trader complained in 1864. ‘My agents inform me that rice is at so much the seer [approximately two pounds] [in one village], while in another it is double that price. I take advantage of the opportunity, invest largely, and expect great profits. When the transaction is closed I find I have lost greatly. The seer in the first place was perhaps less than half the size of that in the other.’ The result was that grain markets in India remained local, and when famine struck in one area, people there died even though food was available elsewhere.
The obvious advantages of exact measuring, and the tragic consequences of local variations, should have made it easy to impose reliable, uniform measures. Yet India has legislation on standard weights and measures dating from four thousand years ago, among the first in the world, while Europe received its inches and pounds from the Romans at the time of Christ. The reason that these systems collapsed is fundamental to the history of weights and measures. However much emperors and rulers might legislate for uniformity, the actual scales and grain containers were held by market traders, landlords and local magnates. They were a source of such profit that no one willingly gave them up, and in every locality throughout history, the clearest guide to where day-to-day power lay has always been the control of weighing and measuring.
It was in 813 that Charlemagne, newly crowned as emperor of most of western Europe by the Pope, issued a famous edict which began ‘Volumus ut pondera vel mensurae ubique aequaliasint et insta’ (We desire that weights and measures should be equal and just everywhere). For nearly a thousand years thereafter, the goal of almost every French king could be expressed euphoniously as ‘ Un Roi, une foi, un poids’ (One king, one faith, one weight). In 1543, François I asserted bluntly that ‘the supreme authority of the King incorporates the right to standardise all measures throughout his kingdom’. But in 1790, according to an authoritative estimate, France possessed thirteen separate lengths for a pied or foot, eighteen for the aune or ell, and twenty-four for the boisseau or bushel. Since the seventy-four parishes of Angoulême near Bordeaux boasted over a hundred different sizes of boisseau between them, with one parish alone offering four separate varieties, this was something of an underestimate.
Just as the power of the Dutch trading guilds was demonstrated by their ability to establish uniform measures for exports, so the bewildering variety in France was testimony to the feudal power of the seigneurs who retained the right to regulate local weights and measures. The emergence of Gunter’s chain as the one measure to determine the dimensions of landed property was due not just to its practicality but to the power of a particular class of people.
On the face of it, England was in much the same position as France. In 960 King Edgar declared that ‘the measure of Winchester [England’s capital] shall be the standard’ for the whole kingdom; but the number of later monarchs who also demanded uniformity – the call for ‘one weight and one measure’ appears identically in Richard the Lionheart’s decree of 1189 and twenty-six years later in Magna Carta – suggests that they were no more effective than their French counterparts.
The most important of these medieval laws, enacted by Henry III in 1266, introduced the sterling system linking weights to coinage, so that there were 240 pennyweights to the pound, a ratio that persisted in the currency for over seven hundred years until 1972 in Britain, and in North America until superseded by the dollar. It failed to prevent most of Henry’s successors finding it necessary to pass laws against ‘false and deceitful measures’, and in 1496 one of them, Henry VII, took the curiously modern step of dumping the sterling pound in favour of a European unit, the Troy pound. Yet in 1588, less than a century later, his granddaughter Elizabeth I had to introduce still more legislation, which she explained was ‘called forth by the uncertainty of the weights then in use, to the great slander of the realm and decency of many, both buyers and sellers’.
It is against this background of incessant variation, deceit and falsehood in weights and measures that the precision of Gunter’s chain needs to be set. More than any of her predecessors, Elizabeth was responsive to the power of the House of Commons and the people represented there. The contrast between the way she legislated for weight and for length and area was significant.
Where weight was concerned, she found it necessary to add to the Troy system the heavier avoirdupois (meaning literally ‘having weight’) range, which went from ounces through pounds and stones to hundredweights and tons. Troy was ideal for measuring small items like gold and silver, but the main English export was wool, which was traded in elephantine quantities and in the Flemish markets was always weighed in avoirdupois. It was a concession to variability to use a goldsmith’s weights for light objects and a wool merchant’s for heavy ones, and a similar surrender appeared in Elizabeth’s decision to legislate for a large gallon for measuring beer and a small gallon for wine. Adding to the confusion, sloppy wording of the specifications for containers resulted in four different sizes of bushel being legalised for measuring grains and flour.
By contrast the specifications for length were both simple and accurate. ‘Foure graines of barley make a finger,’ ran Elizabeth’s law, ‘foure fingers a hande; foure handes a foote.’ Three of these feet made a yard, and 1760 yards made a mile. This was the first time the length of a mile had been specified, and although the other dimensions were not altogether new, the need to state them legally for the flourishing market in land certainly was. In 1601, a brass yardstick of thirty-six inches was constructed as a standard for the country as a whole. Exactness was what the market required, and when Elizabeth’s yard was measured in 1797 against the inches, feet and yards used by eighteenth-century scientists, it was found to be precisely 36.015 inches long.
Elizabeth had the energy and administrative skill of a great ruler. She not only ordered new standards to be made for these weights and measures but sent copies to fifty-eight market towns with instructions that a description of them was to be pinned up in every church and read during the service twice a year for the next four years. For good and ill, it is to her that the credit must go for creating a system of weights and measures that was to persist for almost four hundred years, eventually covering all of Britain, and almost a quarter of the globe.
All in all, it was a measuring age. Accurate measurement was becoming vital to the navigation of England’s mariners, who used Gunter’s cross-staffe and quadrant to find latitude in the trackless ocean, and most notably to Francis Drake in circumnavigating the globe. It was critical to the founding father of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, who advocated measurement and experimentation as the basis of science. When Elizabethans met, they took one another’s measure, they danced tightly paced measures like the galliard and volta, and measured their poetry to the short – long rhythm of iambic pentameters. ‘Marry, if you would put me to verses or to dance for your sake, Kate, why you undid me,’ exclaims rough King Harry wooing his French princess with puns in Henry V. ‘For the one I have neither words nor measure, and for the other I have no strength in measure, yet a reasonable measure in strength.’
It was a joke tailored to a particular audience. Without measure, music was noise, poetry babble, and the land wilderness, and none knew it better than the enclosing, acquisitive gentry, the generation whose parents and grandparents first bought their land from Henry VIII, who stamped the Elizabethan age with their energy and imagination, and for whose benefit the legislation on measures was passed.
John Winthrop was just such a man. His family had acquired their five-hundred-acre estate of Groton Manor in East Anglia from Henry VIII, and he himself was a vigorous encloser and improver of the land. It was as much the downturn in rents and farm prices as his Puritan ideals that persuaded Winthrop in 1630 to volunteer to take charge of the colony that the Massachusetts Bay Company proposed to create in Boston. Authoritarian, clear-sighted and charismatic, he was the colony’s first governor and imbued it not only with his ideals of communal responsibility and individual conscience, but with his attitude to property.
Although the royal patent gave the colonists the right to settle in New England, there were those, notably Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, who felt that the land rightly belonged to the native inhabitants and should first be bought from them. Winthrop summarily disposed of that view with an argument grounded in his own upbringing. ‘As for the Natiues in new England,’ he wrote, ‘they inclose no Land, neither haue any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to proue the Land by.’
Since the native Americans had nothing to show that they owned the land, the new Americans could take it freely, and New England, like the Old, would belong to those who could measure it and enclose it. Thus the answer to the question, who owned America? was another question: who would measure America?
THREE A Hunger for Land (#ulink_eabb0931-434b-55b0-a1ea-db5f08e29ba0)
FROM THE ROYAL PALACE at Whitehall, the answer was simple: the king or the king’s representatives would measure the new-found land. The limits of British America were defined by map references given in the king’s charters, and the boundaries of its colonies were drawn in the soil by surveyors appointed by the proprietors and companies to whom the king had granted the land.
Accordingly, King James I’s 1609 charter to the two companies who had put up the money for the Virginia plantation specified that the London company was to plant its colony ‘in some fit and convenient Place, between four and thirty and one and forty Degrees of the said Latitude’, and the west of England company based on Plymouth was allocated ‘some fit and convenient Place, between eight and thirty Degrees and five and forty Degrees’. The four-degree overlap was reduced in 1620 when a new charter gave the Plymouth company all the land, to be known as New England, ‘from Fourty Degrees of Northerly Latitude, from the Equnoctiall Line, to Fourty-eight Degrees of the said Northerly Latitude’. Similar charters delineated the geographical limits of all the Atlantic colonies from Nova Scotia to Georgia, often with a final phrase extending their width ‘to the South Sea’, in other words to the Pacific Ocean. A few, like Maryland and Pennsylvania, had western boundaries fixed in lines or meridians of longitude.
It was the responsibility of the proprietors, until their charters were revoked, to have those degrees of latitude, so easily described in the Privy Chamber in Whitehall, marked out on the ground. The task provoked a sustained wail of complaint from the surveyors who ran the boundaries between the colonies. It was one thing to follow the lie of the land, as the settlers did, zigzagging up from the coast, following rivers and valleys into the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains or the Alleghenies; it was quite another to run a straight line up the hills, through the swamps and into the unending forest until it emerged into the savannahs of the piedmont. Nevertheless, if the companies and later the royal and aristocratic proprietors named in the charters were to establish their rights of ownership, the boundaries of their colonies and plantations had to be marked westward from the coast.
The most formidable obstacle was the Great Dismal Swamp, a nine-hundred-square-mile expanse of stagnant water, dense bamboo groves and crowded, vine-choked trees lying on the border between Virginia and Carolina. In his account of marking out that border in 1728, The History of the Dividing Line, William Byrd II, one of the boundary commissioners, described the surveyors’ approach to the swamp: ‘The Reeds which grew about 12 feet high, were so thick, & so interlaced with Bamboe-Briars, that our Pioneers were forc’t to open a Passage. The Ground, if I may properly call it so, was so Spungy, that the Prints of our Feet were instantly fill’d with Water. But the greatest Grievance was from large Cypresses, which the Wind had blown down and heap’d upon one another. On the Limbs of most of them grew Sharp Snags, Pointing every way like so many Pikes, that requir’d much Pains and Caution to avoid.’
Undeterred, the lead surveyor, William Mayo, pushed through the reeds and disappeared from sight. On the far side of the swamp, Byrd and the other commissioners waited anxiously. After a week, they started to fire off muskets to guide the surveyors, but with no success until on the ninth day the mud-stained party at last emerged, having run the boundary through fifteen miles of swamp.
In his acerbic memoir, Byrd pictures the surveyors as either clowns or heroes. ‘Neither the unexpected Distance, nor the Danger of being doubly Starved by Hunger and excessive Cold, could in the least discourage them from going thro’ with their Work,’ he remarked of the leaders of the survey party, ‘tho’ at one time they were almost reduced to the hard necessity of cutting up the most useless Person among them, Mr. Savage, in order to Support and save the lives of the rest. But Providence prevented that dreadfull Blow by an unexpected Supply another way, and so the Blind Surveyor escapt.’
The equivalents of Mr Savage were hired to run the line between North and South Carolina in the 1730s after the state split apart. Carolina surveyors, according to John Love, eighteenth-century author of Geodaesia, were either corrupt or inept, and the challenge of marking out the boundary, which was to extend from the coast thirty miles south of the Cape Fear river up to the thirty-fifth parallel and then due west along the parallel, defeated the first two parties within a few miles of the coast. Complaining of the ‘Extraordinary fatigue [of] Running the said Line most of that time thro’ Desart and uninhabited woods’, and over rivers and marshland which were breeding grounds for snakes and clouds of vicious mosquitoes, the surveyors refused to return even at the royal salary of £5 a day, five times as much as Mayo was paid for going through the Great Dismal Swamp. Thirty years later, James Cook from North Carolina took on the task but, distracted by ‘the rains, the hot weather and the insects’ – or so he claimed – ran the boundary eleven miles south of the thirty-fifth parallel and thus took 660 square miles from South Carolina for the benefit of his own state.
Nevertheless, whatever hardships the wilderness threw up, the line had to be run if ownership were to be established. In 1746, Lord Fairfax employed Thomas Lewis and Peter Jefferson to mark off the boundary of his five-million-acre property, virtually a state within a state, that stretched to the Blue Ridge mountains. On 5 October, Lewis wrote of their descent of a mountain in the dark: ‘Setting off, we fell into a place that had precipices on either [side], very narrow, full of ledges and brush, and exceedingly rocky. A very great descent. We all like to been killed with repeated falls, and our horses were in a miserable condition. The loose rocks were so [dangerous] as to prove fatal. We at length got to the bottom, not much better, there being a large water course with banks extremely steep that obliged us to cross at places almost [vertical]. After great despair, we at length got to camp about 10 o’clock, hardly anyone without broken [bones] or other misfortune.’
Ten days later the line cut across a swamp: ‘Wednesday, October 15th … The swamp is full of rocks and cavities covered over with a kind of moss [to] considerable depth. The laurel and ivy are so woven together that without cutting it is impossible to force through. In what danger must we be, all places being obscured by a cloak of moss! Such thickets of laurel to struggle through, whose branches are composed of iron! Our horses and ourselves fell into clefts and cavities without seeing the danger before we [fell].’
When they finally got out of the swamp, Lewis wrote in heartfelt relief, ‘Never was any poor creatures in such a condition as we! Nor ever was a criminal more glad of having escaped from prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Laurels! From the Beginning of Time, when we entered this swamp, I did not see a [dry] place big enough for a man to lie nor a horse to stand.’
By comparison Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had only the occasional attack by hostile Indians to fear when they were hired in 1763 by the proprietors of Pennsylvania and Maryland to sort out the disputed boundary between the two provinces. There were grades of expertise in surveying, and the equipment provided the best guide. Everyone carried a 16½-foot rod, or Edmund Gunter’s invaluable chain, but for professionals a circumferentor, which by the eighteenth century had developed into a theodolite or transit with cross-hairs in the lens of the telescope, and built-in compass and plumb-line, was also necessary. The experts brought along a quadrant or sextant as well for making sun-sights to check their position; in addition to all that, Mason and Dixon had with them a zenith sector built by John Bird, London’s foremost instrument-maker. This was a telescope almost six feet long, exactly calibrated and pointing vertically, beneath which they lay flat on their backs to take sightings on particular stars as they passed precisely overhead. Star-charts showing the positions of those stars at different dates and latitudes then enabled them to calculate their latitude with great precision. At the crude end of surveying, anyone able to see straight and multiply and divide could do it, but those at the top end had the scientific exactness and mathematical talent of astronomers.
Taking star-sights with the zenith sector, and sun-sights with the quadrant, cutting a long swathe or ‘visto’ through the forest for back-sights and fore-sights with the theodolite, and measuring each yard with brass-tipped rods carried in special boxes and calibrated to a five-yard brass standard constructed by the Royal Society of London, Mason and Dixon spent five years on surveying 244 miles at a cost of £3500. To the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania, it was worth paying that massive bill to have the extent of their property established beyond doubt. They would have been gratified to learn that the far cheaper line between North and South Carolina was not agreed for another eighty years.
Establishing the exact boundaries of a colony or plantation could be deferred until the population had grown large enough to reach the borders, but from the start every proprietor needed to decide how land inside those boundaries should be measured and settled. There were two models to choose from. In Virginia, the thousand-acre tobacco plantations, and the fifty-or hundred-acre farms granted to each colonist who had paid his own passage, had to be surveyed and registered, but the actual choice of land and of its shape – usually the bottom land along a navigable river with some nearby woodland to provide building material – was left to the landowner.
The early planters developed a crude way of gauging their acreage. Each property was reckoned to run back for a mile from the riverbank. Using the old English measurement of a rod, they simply measured out a length of twenty-five rods along the riverbank, making a straight line which ignored the river’s bends. This produced a seemingly awkward distance of 137 yards, one foot and six inches – but multiplied by the 1760-yard depth of the farm, it gave a total of 242,000 square yards, or precisely fifty acres. A hundred-acre farm was fifty rods broad, while a shareholder entitled to five hundred or a thousand acres measured out 250 or five hundred rods. This was frontier maths, and it became second nature to anyone who wanted to own land.
These first farms and plantations were more or less square, but later arrivals fitted in around them, producing crazy patterns of settlement. To define the boundaries of their property they blazed trees or scratched boulders or raised mounds, and described their holdings in terms of these markers. This was the old English practice of using ‘metes and bounds’ to define the extent of an estate. Thus a surveyor’s notes might describe a line as running from the river, ‘thence S[outh] 36 [degrees] E[ast] 132 rods to a white oak blazed, thence S 40 W 11 poles to two barren oaks’. Because trees were often destroyed by fire and boulders washed away by floods, boundary disputes filled the courts. It was easier to move on and occupy fresh land far from other claims. ‘People live so far apart,’ the German immigrant Gottlieb Mittelberger complained in 1756, ‘that many have to walk a quarter or a half-hour just to reach their nearest neighbour.’
A different method of surveying evolved in New England, because the climate and soil were harder, and the first colonists arrived as religious groups. It placed the emphasis on communal rather than individual exploitation, and the land was usually granted in rectangular blocks, six or ten miles square, to an association or church which then allocated it to individuals. On 14 May 1636, for example, William Pynchon, Jeheu Burr and half a dozen others were given permission to create a new settlement at Agawam just west of the Connecticut river. The land was to be divided between forty and fifty families, each of which was to have enough property for a house together with some farmland, and parts of a ‘hassocky marsh’ and nearby woodland. The precise width of each house lot was laid down: ‘Northward lys the lott of Thomas Woodford beinge twelve [rods] broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Woodford lys the lott of Thomas Ufford beinge fourteene rod broade and all the marish before it to ye uplande. Next the lott of Thomas Ufford lyes the lott of Henry Smith beinge twenty rod in bredth and all the marish before it, and to run up in the upland on the other side to make up his upland lott ten acres.’
No gaps were left between one individual holding and the next, and one township and the next. The northern settlers might not be able to choose the precise parcel they wanted, but they enjoyed one advantage over the southern planters. In the south, the last remnant of feudalism required landowners to pay the proprietor or colonial government an annual ‘quit-rent’ of up to two shillings (about fifty cents) an acre, to be quit of the obligations and services they would otherwise owe as vassals. Failure to comply would result in a notice ordering the owner ‘to pay your arrears of Quit-Rents and Reliefs and to make your Oath of Fealty’ or be fined. In New England, the complication of levying the quit-rent through the church or town soon led to it being abandoned, which meant that freeholders in a New England town effectively owned their farms in fee simple – free of all feudal dues and obligations. They had other social duties – to pay the minister’s salary, and attend the church or meeting-house – but their land was undeniably property.
Looking at the two ways of measuring out the land, later proprietors automatically opted for the New England model. The square township, which in New England was known simply as a town, seemed to the aristocratic Carolina proprietors to be ‘the chiefe thing that has given New England soe much advantage [in size of population] over Virginia’. They also believed, mistakenly, that this system would give them more control over the colonists. Accordingly their 1665 constitution decreed that all the lowland area, the Tidewater, should be pre-surveyed by a surveyor-general and divided into squares and rectangles ‘by lines running East and West, North and South’. From these blocks they proposed to build an American aristocracy, with ordinary immigrants receiving a headright of one hundred acres, and paying quit-rent on them, and above them proprietors, lords of the manor and lesser nobles whose rank depended on the size of their landholding. To ensure compliance, the proprietors instituted a complex system which required the settler to obtain a land warrant from the governor, followed by a survey from the surveyor-general, before the land could be allocated and the claim registered.
Had the colonial proprietors and councils succeeded in maintaining control, the history of North America might have remained colonial. But the idea of property that the colonists carried with them created its own revolutionary current.
The first years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth in the bitter winter of 1620 indicated the direction that history would take. Under the terms of their agreement with their financial backers, they were to work the land in common, sharing the proceeds with the investors in England. The goal of communal land ownership should have been particularly attractive, for they arrived with a close sense of unity arising from the shared desire for religious freedom. Yet in the first years, when they attempted to pool their resources and farm collectively, with young men assigned to work for those who had families, the fields were neglected and they almost starved. In desperation, Governor William Bradford responded to demands that the land be divided up. ‘And so,’ he noted in his history of the Plymouth colony, ‘assigned to every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number … This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious.’
The dramatic increase in yields soon assured the colony’s food supplies; but the change came at a cost. ‘And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all,’ Bradford observed sadly, ‘all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scatered all over the bay quickly and the towne in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne.’ Religious freedom might have been the settlers’ prime reason for sailing to America, but once they were there, the desire to own land came a close second. Or as Richard Winslow put it in his 1624 pamphlet Good Newes from New England, ‘Religion and profit jump together.’
In 1691 the thinly populated colony was absorbed into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay colony. But it too had changed since John Winthrop had founded it as the shining light of Puritanism, ‘the city upon a hill’. By then the Puritan preacher Increase Mather was lamenting that the grandchildren of the original settlers had grown insatiable for land. ‘How many men have since coveted after the earth,’ he thundered, ‘that many hundreds nay thousands of acres have been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians have forsaken churches and ordinance, and for land and elbow-room enough in the world?’
In Virginia, the first Jamestown colonists never had that religious sense of cohesion. They only saved themselves from starvation by raiding the farms of Powhatan Indians, and in 1624, eighteen years after the first settlers arrived, it was estimated that massacre and disease had killed six thousand out of 7300 migrants from England. The colony’s only source of income came from the sale of tobacco, and that was not enough to prevent the Virginia company from going bankrupt. But what kept the colony alive was a decision in 1618 by one of its shareholders, Sir Edwin Sandys, to attract immigrants by offering a ‘headright’ of fifty acres of good Virginia soil to anyone who crossed the ocean at his own expense, and as much again for every adult he brought with him. The lure of free land brought a stream of would-be settlers, most of whom died, but by the 1630s the flow of migrants outstripped the death rate from fever, and soon land was being bought and sold at five shillings (about $1.25) for fifty acres.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, in New England and Virginia, land was passing into private hands to be held virtually freehold, except for the quit-rent in the south. So widespread was the process that no one thought it strange, yet for another century this restless hunger to own land made the British colonies unique in North America.
In Mexico and up the Pacific coast, the Spanish acquired land as part of a general pattern of royally sponsored exploration and settlement by the king’s representatives. A Spanish civilisation was created in Mexico, with a university, a bishop and a capital housing over fifteen thousand Spaniards, before the first English colonist landed in Massachusetts. The Law of the Indies, enacted in 1573, specified in detail how the colonial government was to lay out towns and settlements. The sites were to be surveyed, religious missions were created to convert the natives, military presidios to defend the colonies, and civilian pueblos where colonists and colonised could live. It was an empire created from above, belonging to the king and administered as a royal dominion, and even in its final years, during the half-century that Spain ruled California from 1769 to 1821, fewer than thirty individuals were permitted to acquire their own ranchos or estates.
For over 150 years, from 1608 when Samuel Champlain established an armed post at Quebec, New France was ruled almost as rigidly. A string of trading ports was established along the Saint Lawrence river, as far as the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities like Montreal and New Orleans were founded, and farms were cultivated in Canada and in the Mississippi delta. Nevertheless, French America was administered feudally. The Crown owned the land and chose who could settle there – Protestants, for example, were banned. It created monopolies to exploit the fur and timber. The habitant who actually worked the soil never had clear rights to it. What he owned was the use of the land and the improvements he made to it, but he held the land from a seigneur in return for dues and rents, and the seigneur held the land from the Crown. French traders and trappers knew the country intimately – they supplied British mapmakers with much of their geographical information – yet by the middle of the eighteenth century barely forty thousand had acquired land outside the main cities.
The land-hunger of the British colonists seemed most bizarre when set alongside the attitude of the native Americans. From the farming Powhatan in Virginia to the Iroquois in New York and the Six Nations in the Appalachians who were primarily hunters, they shared a pervasive understanding that a particular place belonged to a particular people only to the extent that the people belonged to the place. Rights over land were gained only by occupation, long usage or family burial, and these rights were communal, not individual. ‘What is this you call property?’ Massasoit, a leader of the Wampanaog, asked the Plymouth colonists whom he had befriended in the 1620s. ‘It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?’
Yet the British colonists bought and sold land as though they owned it outright – in fee simple, to use the legal term. Compared to the opportunities offered by New Spain and New France, the Atlantic colonies seemed irresistibly attractive. Little more than a century after the first permanent settlement was established in Virginia, over one and a quarter million settlers were scattered across the wide, empty spaces between the coast and the mountains.
The shape of British America was long and thin, stretching from thirty-one to forty-nine degrees north, a distance of over two thousand miles, but, so far as measured, settled land was concerned, rarely more than two hundred miles deep, a sort of northern Chile. It was in the first years of the eighteenth century that siren voices from beyond the swamps and pine barrens began to tell of the irresistibly fertile ground to be had in the piedmont. ‘The best, richest, and most healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited,’ wrote Francis Makemie in Plain and Friendly Persuasion in 1705, ‘above the falls of every River, to the Mountains.’
This was the time when the uncontrollable surge of German immigrants, most of them Mennonites and Moravians, followed by the Scotch-Irish, began to move into the area, upsetting Penn’s surveyed plan. Pennsylvania alone had an estimated one hundred thousand squatters by 1726, and two-thirds of the colony settled in the 1730s was occupied illegally. Further south in the Virginian piedmont, William Byrd watched crowds of Scotch-Irish squatters taking whatever land suited them, and was reminded of ‘the Goths and Vandals of old’. In Massachusetts, settlers moved out into the hilly Berkshires, and in New York up the Mohawk valley, constrained only by fear of French attack. In an attempt to retain control, the Massachusetts government established a string of new townships like Litchfield and Great Barrington in the Berkshires during the 1720s. Elsewhere, proprietors in Maryland and Pennsylvania, great landowners in New York and northern Virginia, either offered leases to squatters on their land, or tried to drive them out. Royal governors in Virginia and the Carolinas invented schemes to make the squatters legal by offering free land in new townships created on the frontier following the New England model.
None of it worked. The lure of so much property was irresistible. In Virginia, Governor Spottswood himself succumbed to the land rush and claimed eighty-five thousand acres of the newly opened uplands for himself, and in the Carolinas the system of land allocation was overwhelmed by the demand for surveys. Amateur surveyors were hired to help. Wildly unrealistic plats were registered. No one minded. Within two years, warrants were issued for about 600,000 acres, and nineteen thousand of them went to the Governor, while the Assembly Members voted themselves six thousand acres apiece. Between 1731 and 1738 approximately one million acres were registered in Carolina, and when the Surveyor-General, Benjamin Whitaker, complained in 1732 that ‘the law enables any common surveyor to perpetuate frauds for his employers through not having to turn his survey into any office’, the outraged Assembly sent him to prison for contempt. By then the proprietors had lost all control, and in despair turned the colony over to the Crown.
Georgia’s proprietors, particularly the idealistic James Oglethorpe, also intended to survey the colony’s territory before distributing it in order to create a slave-free society of smallholders and farmers. In the beautifully proportioned squares and gardens of the capital, Savannah, can be seen all that remains of the plan, for here too the temptation of so much potential property could not be resisted. South Carolinian planters moved across the border, and both they and the Georgians claimed vast estates beyond the Savannah river, outside the squares surveyed by Georgia’s founders. In 1751, these proprietors also gave up and returned the colony to royal control.
By that year the population of the Atlantic colonies had risen to over one million, far outstripping that of New France and outnumbering the Spanish-descended inhabitants of New Spain, who had been there for more than two hundred years. Families were larger than in the Old World because farms were bigger and more hands were needed to work them, but there was also the lure of unclaimed acres that drew the dispossessed from the far side of the Atlantic. If they could not pay their own passage, they came as indentured servants, willing to act as near-slaves for a number of years for the chance of eventually acquiring property.
Even in Elizabeth I’s reign, the enclosures in England deprived so many villeins and labourers of the common land and common grazing on which they depended to keep their families alive that they were forced to beg in the towns, giving rise to a series of ferocious laws against ‘sturdy rogues and vagabonds’ and ‘wandering beggars’. They were joined in the seventeenth century by the Diggers, radical Puritans who had fought for Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War and who, having defeated the King, tried to reclaim common land by digging and cultivating it – hence their name. ‘True religion and undefiled is to let everyone quietly have erth to manure [cultivate],’ wrote their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, ‘that they may live in freedom by their labours.’ But Cromwell and his generals were property-owners to a man, and promptly turned them out. When enclosure reached Scotland in the eighteenth century, and improving landlords in the Lowlands and clan chiefs in the Highlands took as their own the land that their tenants and clansmen once held in common, the newly dispossessed provided more raw material for the colonies.
There was a certain irony that these newcomers should now be amongst the hungriest of all America’s property-owners, relying on the surveys and chains that had driven them off their homeland. But in 1628 the landed gentry in Parliament had forced King Charles I to accept the Petition of Right which guaranteed the right of the property-owner not ‘to be put out of his land or tenements … without being brought to answer by the due process of law’; and none knew better than the dispossessed how powerful was the lure of owning a farm which could not be taken away.
It was from England that the idea of land as property had originally come, and it was no coincidence that with it had arrived Gunter’s chain – twenty-two precisely calibrated yards, each exactly thirty-six inches long (plus that miserly 0.015 of an inch extra that would not be discovered for almost two centuries) – and the practice of showing an estate’s exact extent on a surveyor’s plat drawn to scale. From England came too the philosophical underpinning developed by John Locke that the individual earned a right to property by ‘mixing his labour’ with what had once been held in common. Every landowner who had ever enclosed, manured and improved a field understood this proposition perfectly, but by 1750 the American idea of property had evolved further.
What surveyors like George Washington, Peter Jefferson and Daniel Boone were doing was speculating on the future value of land. However much they could earn from surveying fees, it was dwarfed by the profits to be made from buying good land cheap. ‘The greatest Estates we have in this Colony,’ the young George Washington acknowledged after a summer spent surveying the vast Fairfax estates, ‘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, Washington purchased 1459 acres in Frederick County, in the Virginian piedmont, the first step in a career of land-dealing that eventually made him owner of over fifty-two thousand acres spread across six different states. He usually ‘improved’ his holdings by clearing them of trees, but for most speculators their property rights did not depend on any idea of ‘mixing their labour’ with the soil. Their sole claim to ownership lay in the survey and the map that came from it.
In 1751 Benjamin Franklin stated openly what was apparent to authorities on either side of the Atlantic, that the population of the colonies was growing at such speed it would double to 2.6 million by 1775. It would not be long, he predicted provocatively, before ‘the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the water’. To some Americans, that prospect raised constitutional questions about being controlled from across the Atlantic; but to the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas, and to financiers in New York and Philadelphia, it also indicated that the purchase of American land was a wise investment. Nowhere was it cheaper than west of the range of mountains known generally as the Appalachians, but divided from south to north into the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies and the Adirondacks.
In 1756, a South Carolina surveyor, John William de Brahm, was sent to build a fort at Loudon on the Little Tennessee river on the other side of the mountains, in country that still belonged to the Cherokee Indians. ‘Their vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out,’ he reported back in admiration. ‘Should this country once come into the hands of the Europeans, they may with propriety call it the American Canaan, for it will fully answer their industry and all methods of European culture, and do as well for European produce … This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up.’
Control of all this desirable territory as far west as the Mississippi still remained with the French but in 1763 they were forced to cede it to the British following their defeat in the French and Indian War. Soon other surveyors took the chance to follow de Brahm. Their findings were brought together in a famous map by Thomas Hutchins, not published until 1778, but whose attractions were known a decade earlier.
On the map’s crackling parchment, the Appalachians appear as a black, impenetrable mass of cross-hatching running from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right-hand corner; but west of them are broad rivers and rolling hills denoted by lines which curl gently towards the Mississippi and are interspersed with Hutchins’ own observations in neat italic writing: ‘A rich and level country’, ‘Very large natural meadows; innumerable herds of Buffaloe, Elk, Deer, etc feed here’, and along the Wabash river, ‘Here the country is level, rich and well timber’d and abounds in very extensive meadows and savannahs; and innumerable herds of Buffaloe, Elk, Deer, etc. It yields Rye, Hemp, Pea Vine, Wild Indigo, Red & White clover etc.’
Not even the promise of dancing-girls could have inflamed the colonial appetite more than the prospect of such fertility. That the land belonged to the Cherokee, Shawnee and Six Nations was a detail that could be overcome by personal negotiation, as Judge Richard Henderson and surveyor Boone did, or by killing and terror, as numerous others did. To the planters it was obvious that, with the French claims removed, the entire area between the mountains and the river now lay open for occupation.
But ownership of land is never simple. It includes rights not just to the soil, but to the metals below, the vegetation above, the sunlight and the air; to its use, development, access and enjoyment; and to much more that, for a fee, a lawyer will reveal. Since any or all of these may be rented, leased, loaned or distributed in different ways, landed property is usually described as a bundle of legal rights which can be split up and dealt with separately. Although no one can now claim all of them outright – environmental laws and national needs limit the owner’s rights – under feudal tenure they all belonged to the King. Thus, much of the 1629 charter creating the Massachusetts Bay Company is made up of lists of different types of land, forms of ownership and the way they are to be transferred. King Charles I promises to ‘give, graunt, bargaine, sell, alien, enfeoffe, allot, assigne and confirme’ to the Company all the ‘Landes and Groundes, Place and Places, Soyles, Woods and Wood Groundes, Havens, Portes, Rivers, Waters, Mynes, Mineralls, Jurisdiccons, Rightes, Royalties, Liberties, Freedomes, Immunities, Priviledges, Franchises, Preheminences, Hereditaments, and Comodities’. Nevertheless, ultimately the land still remained the King’s, to be held by the Company ‘in free and common soccage’ – which meant that having given, granted and all the rest, the Crown retained an overriding, feudal competence over that part of America.
It was because they were part of that feudal structure that the original proprietors had charged a quit-rent in place of feudal dues. But most of the proprietors had gone now, defeated by the settlers’ uncontrollable desire for land, and the colonial legislatures, such as Virginia’s House of Burgesses, were effectively forums for the colonists’ interests. It was easy for settlers, squatters and speculators looking longingly towards the land beyond the Appalachians to forget the King’s feudal power.
Then, on 7 October 1763, came a harsh reminder of the legal reality behind American property. By royal proclamation, George III declared it ‘to be our Royal Will and Pleasure … that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our Colonies or Plantations in America do presume for the present, and until our further Pleasure be Known, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West’. In effect, a line had been drawn along the watershed of the Appalachians beyond which land could not be measured and owned, and everyone who had already settled west of it was commanded ‘forthwith [to] remove themselves from such settlements’.
The King had the right to order this, because legally all the land in British America was his; but it planted feudal authority full in the path of the property-seekers.
FOUR Life, Liberty and What? (#ulink_f89ce145-e097-5ee0-ad2d-fecbe2ff4b86)
THERE WERE MANY STRANDS leading to the moment when the colonists felt driven to weave their anger together into a single declaration of opposition to rule from London. The decision of the British Parliament to close the port of Boston in 1774 as punishment for the destruction of a valuable cargo of tea brought to the surface the resentment of northern merchants already burdened by duties on their goods, a general fury at the earlier killing of civilian rioters by British troops, and a pervasive fear that colonial assemblies were powerless against the King’s ministers. But that autumn, when delegates of the discontented colonists convened in Philadelphia as members of the First Continental Congress in order to articulate their grievances, it was not by chance that the first resolution they agreed was ‘That they are entitled to life, liberty, & property …’.
Here property meant more than land alone, but for Virginians especially it was land as property that they had in mind, and in particular land beyond the Appalachians. Hence the declaration of the first paragraph of the Virginia constitution, drawn up in June 1776 by George Mason, ‘That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights … namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.’ Entitlement to this sort of property was a subject on which the humblest Conestoga mule-driver was at one with the grandest planter.
Barely ten years earlier, the reaction of Colonel George Washington to the royal veto on the acquisition of land beyond the mountains could have served as a warning of what was to come. There had been no more loyal and energetic commander in the French and Indian War, but the Colonel was also a Virginian planter and land speculator, and his views were widely shared.
‘I can never look upon the Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,’ Washington wrote in 1767 to his colleague and fellow-surveyor Colonel William Crawford. ‘It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying those lands. Any person who neglects hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it.’
George Washington was not a man to be deflected even by his sovereign’s express command, although as a serving officer he deemed it best to be discreet. ‘If you will be at the trouble of seeking out the lands,’ he continued to Crawford, ‘I will take upon me the part of securing them, as soon as there is a possibility of doing it and will, moreover, be at all the cost and charges of surveying and patenting the same … By this time it will be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land. You will consequently come in for a handsome quantity.’
Alas, poor Crawford never did. The King’s veto was still nominally in force when he was taken prisoner by a Cherokee band while leading a column of troops in territory beyond the Appalachians. On 3 August 1782 the Virginia Gazette carried a report of his ordeal by a Dr Knight, who had been captured along with Washington’s colleague: ‘… the unfortunate Colonel was led by a long rope to a stake, to which he was tied, and a quantity of red-hot coals laid around, on which he was obliged to walk bare-footed, the Indians at the same time torturing him with squibs of powder and burning sticks for two hours, when he begged of Simon Gurry (a white renegade who was present) to shoot him. [Gurry’s] reply was, “Don’t you see I have no gun.” [Crawford] was soon after scalped and struck several times on the bare skull with sticks, till being exhausted, he laid down on the burning embers, when the squaws put shovel-fuls of coals on his body, which made him move and creep till he expired. The Doctor was obliged to stand by and see this cruelty performed; they struck him in the face with the Colonel’s scalp, saying “This is your great Captain’s scalp, tomorrow we will serve you so.” ’
Gruesome stories such as these were used to justify acts of equal cruelty on the other side. John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary living with the Tuscarawas Indians, told in 1773 of the Indian-hunters ‘who maintained that to kill an Indian was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo and would fire on Indians that came across them by the way – nay more, would decoy such as lived across the river to come over for the purpose of joining them in hilarity; and when these complied they fell on them and murdered them’.
These atrocities were evidence of the mounting conflict between land-hungry colonists and native inhabitants. Consequently when George III banned land purchases beyond the mountains, it was, as the proclamation worded it, so that ‘the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed’. But even Americans who might have sympathised with this strategy could not accept the King’s feudal right to impose the ban.
The power that the land beyond the mountains exerted on people’s minds can be deduced from the attempts to circumvent the veto. Two land companies had been created to speculate in the west before the ban was in place – the Ohio Company, which proposed to purchase 500,000 acres beyond the Ohio river, and the Loyal Land Company, organised by Peter Jefferson with investment coming mostly from his neighbours in Goochland County, Virginia, which aimed publicly at buying 800,000 acres of Kentucky, but privately had ambitions of exploring and acquiring millions more as far west as the Pacific Ocean. In the fifteen years after George III’s proclamation, a whole succession of similar speculative ventures came into being.
The Mississippi Company was created in 1768 to settle land along the river with George Washington as one of its founders, followed by the Illinois and Wabash in which Patrick Henry had an interest, and the Watauga Association which settled eastern Tennessee and later tried to establish the independent state of Franklin. In 1775 Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina sent Daniel Boone, a brave scout but an incompetent surveyor, to find territory in southern Kentucky, where he signed a treaty with the Cherokee Indians giving Henderson’s Transylvania Company several million acres – Boone’s surveying lapses made it unclear exactly how much land was involved. The most ambitious of them all, the Vandalia Company, which aimed to acquire sixty-three million acres in what is now Illinois and Indiana, employed Benjamin Franklin as its London agent and even counted among its members such influential figures in the British government as the future Prime Minister, Lord North, and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Camden. ‘One half of England is now land mad,’ remarked one of its promoters, ‘and everybody there has their eyes fixed on this country.’
These powerful interests created some loopholes in the prohibition, but it was still in place in 1773 when a young surveyor named Rufus Putnam sailed up the Mississippi to Natchez. There he began surveying over a million acres on the banks of the river so that it could be sold to New England veterans of the French and Indian War. He was a rarity among the mostly southern land speculators, because he came from Massachusetts. His career is instructive because it illustrates how widely the effects of the ban were felt. In character he more or less resembled the coat of arms he later adopted which showed three bristly wild boars below a roaring lion surrounded by thistles and the motto in spiky Gothic lettering, ‘By the name of Putnam’, and almost everything he achieved he owed to his ferocious determination.
In 1745, when Rufus was barely seven years old, his father died, leaving the family destitute. His mother’s second marriage was to an illiterate drunkard named Sadler. ‘During the six years I lived with Capt Sadler,’ Rufus wrote bitterly, ‘I never Saw the inside of a School house except about three weeks.’ At the age of fifteen he apprenticed himself to a man who built watermills, and sucked up knowledge where he could; but as he confessed in his autobiography, ‘having no guid I knew not where to begin nor what corse to pursue – hence neglected Spelling and gramer when young [and] have Suffered much through life on that account’.
Rufus’s prospects were transformed by the French and Indian War. In 1757 he joined the Royal American Regiment, where he became an engineer, a trade that taught him how to carry out every kind of measurement. When peace came in 1763 the orphan used his new skill first to build mills, and later to survey land. The demand for surveyors in British America was such that a good practitioner could command an income that matched a lawyer’s. Even at the age of seventeen, George Washington was able to boast of his earnings to a friend. ‘A doubloon is my constant gain every day that will permit my going out,’ he wrote, ‘and sometimes six pistoles.’ Since a doubloon was worth about £15, and six pistoles around $22.50, a good week might bring in around $100; even as President he hardly earned much more.
Soon Rufus felt secure enough to marry the wealthy Persis Rice, daughter of Zebulon, who in the first six years of their marriage bore four daughters and a son. What he wanted, he wanted immediately. Neither in private nor public life did he ever show any guile, and rarely much patience. With five children to feed, and the expectation of more on the way, he turned to land speculation, surveying and acquiring land in the West Indies and what is now Alabama for New England veterans. The Natchez venture was on a far larger scale, and like George Washington, who was trying to secure land on the Ohio river for Virginia veterans of the same war, Rufus Putnam proposed to keep some of the best sites for himself.
It was Richard Henderson who put into words the dream that drew Rufus and thousands more into the western territory beyond the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. ‘The country might invite a prince from his palace merely for the pleasure of contemplating its beauty and excellence,’ he wrote in praise of his company’s Kentucky acres, ‘but only add the rapturous idea of property and what allurements can the world offer for the loss of so glorious a prospect?
When that rapturous idea was snatched away by the proclamation of a feudal monarch three thousand miles away, it was small wonder that the colonists should have felt the need to state not simply their inalienable right to life and liberty, but also to the acquisition of property. Typically, when Rufus too fell victim to the royal prohibition, he preferred action to words. He had spent eight months laying out the ground for future settlements at Natchez when the Board of Trade in London issued an order specifically forbidding any further surveys on the Mississippi. Returning home to Massachusetts, he found his personal frustration echoed in the accumulating anger of the colonists.
Persis had kept the family going during Rufus’s long absence, and nine months after his return to the marriage bed, another son was born; but by then he was soldiering again. This time he was fighting the King, one of the first men to be commissioned into the Massachusetts Regiment following the first ringing shots at Lexington in April 1775.
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.’
