The Fabric of America (28 page)

The warning was ignored, and instead of federal employment Ellicott chose to take an obscure job as secretary to the Pennsylvania Land Office. The family moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster, the state capital, in October 1801, and Ellicott sank into the routine of administering the sale of Pennsylvania's public lands. It made him unexpectedly happy. At the back of the house, they had a large garden where Sally grew vegetables and he planted fruit trees, and both became passionate about growing things. “To this place,” he wrote contentedly, “to my fine garden and young thriving fruit trees and grape vines, all the work of my own hands, I feel more attached than to any other place.” The state only paid him $1,500 a year, but it left him time for science, and the clear air of the piedmont made the heavens very visible.

Here he built an international reputation as an astronomer. It was based on the extraordinary series of observations—more than four hundred in all—that he had taken from the mouth of the Ohio River down the Mississippi to New Orleans, across the south to Florida, and ending at the Okefenokee Swamp. When these were published by the American Philosophical Society, they attracted intense interest in France, where the science of earth measurement had been born, and a well-funded scientific establishment understood the value of so much data about the shape of the globe from an area that had hitherto been a blank.

Nothing gave Ellicott more scientific pride than the letter sent to him by the secretary of the National Institute of France, Jean-Baptiste Delambre, “the most able astronomer of any country in the world,” according to François de Lalande, concerning “the reception of my printed observations made on our southern boundary.” Modestly Ellicott passed on the news to Jefferson that “the work is not only spoken well of [in the institute], but complimented far beyond its real merit, and a correspondence is requested.” This was an honor that even Rittenhouse had never known.

In the history of U.S. astronomy, the years between the death of Rittenhouse in 1796 and the opening of the nation's first official observatory at Harvard University in 1844 are generally regarded as a blank. Internationally, the
major observational work was being carried out in Britain, principally by William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, binary stars, and infrared radiation from the sun, and in France with strong theoretical contributions from Pierre-Simon de Laplace about the formation of the solar system, and Delambre on aberrations in the earth's movement. Yet if a single person kept the thread of astronomical research alive in the United States in the first years of the nineteenth century, it was Ellicott.

His observations were regularly published in the American Philosophical Society's journal, inspiring other astronomers such as William Dunbar in Natchez, who credited Andrew for “my resolution of providing myself with a sufficient number of good instruments to enable me to make useful observation.” At the same time, Ellicott kept up a detailed correspondence with Delambre, dispatching long tables of observations and calculations for use with his theories on earth perturbations, receiving in exchange news of the latest science from Europe. The value of Ellicott's work was recognized in 1808 by his election to the National Institute of France as one of only eight foreign members, an honor shared with Nevil Maskelyne and Herschel.

In that same year events were set in motion that brought Ellicott's career to an end. First Daniel Clark accused Wilkinson of complicity with Burr, and at a subsequent court of inquiry the general dubbed Clark a traitor himself. Once the mud began to fly, both men turned for confirmation of their charges to the one person whose honesty could not be questioned. Their letters arrived at Ellicott's quiet house in Lancaster within days of each other.

To Wilkinson's request for testimony to his character, Ellicott replied with what was in effect a repetition of the letter he had sent Jefferson in 1801. It began with Washington's warning against Wilkinson as a Spanish sympathizer, continued with the letter intercepted at Darling's Creek showing that Wilkinson had received money from Gayoso, and ended damningly with the evidence of Captain Portell in Apalachicola that he handed over $9,640 for Wilkinson as payment for his services to Spain.

To Clark, Ellicott answered simply that the ciphered dispatch he had sent to Pickering in November 1798 concerned Wilkinson. “This letter places the improper conduct of general Wilkinson, and some others of our citizens, in a
point of view not to be mistaken,” he declared. “If corruption is criminal, this letter establishes the criminality.” And he added, “To my knowledge, the present administration has been minutely informed of the conduct of general Wilkinson, and why he has been supported, and patronized, after this information, is to me an inexplicable paradox.”

Jefferson's relationship with Wilkinson remains inexplicable, since any explanation requires the president to be either unbelievably blind or incredibly irresponsible. It is possible that the general dispelled suspicion by claiming to be a double agent, secretly loyal to the United States, and since Jefferson saw no reason to fear Spain's crumbling hold on her empire, he might have decided the claim was credible. Conceivably too there were political considerations. From the first days of the Republican administration, the general had publicly aligned himself with its policies and acted as Jefferson's eyes and ears in a military establishment that the president distrusted as a hotbed of Federalism.

Nevertheless, when the court of inquiry called for all relevant papers to be made available to it, Jefferson's relationship with the general forced the president into an uncharacteristically barefaced lie. In a special message to Congress on January 20, 1808, the president claimed to have turned over all the documents called for except Ellicott's ciphered letter to Pickering, which had been sent on conditions of secrecy. Its contents could be obtained from Ellicott, the president explained, “and directions have been given to summon him to appear as a witness before the court of inquiry.”

Ellicott's appearance in court and his testimony of Wilkinson's corruption would surely have ended the career of a man judged by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to be “the most consummate artist in treason that the nation ever possessed.” But Jefferson's message ended with a fatal, final paragraph that rendered any simple response impossible:

“That which has recently been communicated to the House of Representatives, and by them to me, is the first direct testimony ever made known to me, charging General Wilkinson with the corrupt receipt of money.”

Knowing this to be untrue, Ellicott found it impossible to appear in court where cross-examination might force him to reveal that the president had lied to Congress. He provided the court with an affidavit covering the material he had sent Clark, but refused to appear in person. Without his presence and manifest integrity in court, his written testimony amounted to no
more than hearsay evidence. Although Daniel Clark provided confirmation that Wilkinson had received regular payments from Spain, he was deemed a hostile witness, and Wilkinson's Spanish paymaster testified that the $9,640 was in fact compensation for a spoiled cargo of tobacco. In June 1808 the court found James Wilkinson innocent of treachery.

The consequences of his acquittal reached far. It led to the dismissal of Ellicott from the Pennsylvania Land Office following the election of Thomas Snyder, a supporter and friend of Wilkinson's, as governor of Pennsylvania in 1808. In what amounted to a vendetta, Snyder's administration went on to deny Ellicott the use of a powerful telescope belonging to the state, and to frustrate an attempt by the American Philosophical Society to create an observatory for him in Philadelphia.

On a national level, the damage went deeper, since Wilkinson's long tenure as senior officer continued until the eve of the War of 1812 with a corrosive effect on the capability of the U.S. army. Neither Jefferson nor, from 1809, James Madison questioned his assurances about the state of military preparedness. With an overconfidence chillingly familiar to the present day, Secretary of War William Eustis declared, “We can take the Canadas without soldiers, we have only to send officers into the province and the people… will rally round our standard.”

The U.S. army that marched into Canada in 1812 was the product of the Wilkinson years, and it was easily turned back by a hastily assembled force of Canadian militia who inflicted heavy losses on the attackers. Only in 1813, and after his promotion to major general, was Wilkinson at last dismissed, and then for inefficiency rather than treachery.

In their contempt for the new boundaries of the United States, Burr and Wilkinson belonged to an earlier era when adventurers like Blount and Se-vier, and secessionists like Rufus King and Theodore Sedgwick, barely considered the frontier to be any constraint to their ambitions. The New England shippers who turned smugglers in defiance of Jefferson's 1807 Embargo Act forbidding trade with Britain shared the same outlook, as did Governor Caleb Strong of Massachusetts when he set out to explore the possibility of the state making a separate peace with Britain in 1814. Yet, that the entire nation did go to war in 1812, despite the furious opposition
of New England and New York, was itself evidence of the growing sense of oneness.

Out of the conflict came a national anthem, but also a government that, more than any since Washington's, was seen to be national. When the newly elected James Monroe toured the eastern states in 1817, he was acclaimed not just as president but as the representation of the nation, almost an elected king. His arrival in Connecticut, the
New Haven Herald
commented with uppercase pleasure, was the occasion “for a general burst of NATIONAL FEELING,” and in Baltimore the welcoming committee “waited upon him and made a speech suitable to the occasion, according to the ancient customs in France, whenever the grand monarch visited different parts of his kingdom.”

Nowhere did this deepening sense of loyalty to the Union take firmer hold than in the western states, which had been formed out of U.S. land and had never known a separate existence before the Union. But there national feeling took on a different form. The young generation growing up beyond the Appalachians held independent, egalitarian views at odds with the east coast's instinct for hierarchy. The Atlantic states might have won the Revolution, but as Fielding Bradford, editor of the
Kentucky Gazette
, irreverently put it in 1821, they also “drowned and burned
witches
, and stood with their hats under their arms at the doors of great men.” The westerners had their own superstitions, but they did not doff their hats for anyone. They considered themselves to be the very democracy for which the Revolution had been fought.

The incarnation of their values was Andrew Jackson, who was to prove himself the great champion of the U.S. government against the states. He was also the champion of western farmers determined to win land from the Native Americans for their own use. Like no other president before him, he used the formidable power that the federal government possessed within its frontiers to make property available for Americans. And he chose to benefit a class of Americans that had until then been kept away from power by the restrictive voting demands of the eastern states.

So indelibly is Jackson's name and fiery personality associated with the stunning rout of Britain's first-line troops at the battle of New Orleans in 1815, it is easy to forget that he was a lawyer by profession. The traditional picture of him is the archetype of the frontiersman administering his own
justice in duels and physical violence, in accordance with the sage advice of his mother: “Andrew, never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself.”

Nevertheless his living came from the law, and in Tennessee's tangled system of land distribution, the majority of legal cases concerned property boundaries and titles. People might fight over personal issues—and for white men the southern code of honor that developed in the antebellum years insisted on this as a mark of masculinity—but where property was concerned, they went to court. There, as a recent historian put it, they would find that the law “
treated property offenders much more harshly than those accused of violence.
”

In fact Jackson's passionate loyalty to the Union and his adherence to a legal system devoted to defending property were two sides of the same coin. Like many of his contemporaries who bore names like Boone, Calhoun, Crockett, and Houston, Jackson traced his family roots to the self-assertive Scots-Irish immigrants who had settled and often squatted in the backcountry of the old Atlantic colonies. Politically he and his colleagues were the heirs of the Regulators, suspicious of eastern elites, hostile to Indians, insistent on representative government and equal voting rights—at least for white, adult males—and deeply concerned with the efficiency of local administration.