The Fabric of America (45 page)

A Great Circle and Rhumb Line

The stars also provided the direction that Pennsylvania's boundary was to take. Each night, as they appeared to move from east to west across the heaven, they were tracked with a transit, or rotating telescope. When the selected star reached the angle of 89°55'51” west of north, the telescope was locked in position so that it could swing no farther, then was tipped vertically down toward the horizon where an assistant stood about half a mile away with a lantern in his hand. Shouted commands sent him right or left until he was located precisely in the crosshairs of the telescope. The spot was marked, and in daylight a line was laid out in that direction. Several stars would be tracked in the same way to reduce the chance of error, but in the morning the lantern markers were usually found to be within inches of one another.

At the point where the Great Circle intersected with the parallel, further meticulous observations and calculations taking up to a week established the precise latitude and longitude. Once any corrections had been made, a visto or avenue through the trees was cleared along the line of the parallel back to the previous intersection point with marker stones inserted at every mile.

To confuse matters further, Andrew Ellicott devised in 1785 a method of determining a parallel that relied on a third view of what constituted due east-west. Sailors found it more convenient to follow a constant compass bearing, for example 90 degrees (due east) or 270 degrees (due west). This line, known as a rhumb line, appears on the ground as a slight upward (in the northern hemisphere) curve. The curve occurs because the vertical meridians are in fact converging toward the north pole, and cutting each at right angles imperceptibly pulls the traveler along a circle. Ellicott's method, whose accuracy depended on multiple celestial observations (Ellicott estimated that at six different points he had made a total of 366 timed sightings) at the meridianal cutting point, became the model for the running of most east-west state lines, and of the U.S.-Canadian border.

Running a meridian or north-south line presented fewer problems. Such lines make a circumference of the whole earth, converging at the north and south poles. Thus a straight line heading due north or south will automatically follow the line of a Great Circle.

Finally, to end on a note of existential anxiety, all geographical terms,
including
north, south, east
, and
west
, are merely conventions, and we can never be absolutely and precisely sure where we are in the real world. Even the center of the earth, the given point for celestial navigation, shifts, because variable densities of mass below the earth's surface change the direction of the gravitational pull toward it depending on when and where the force is measured. Indeed to modern geodesists, able to detect the daily rise and fall of oceans and mountains in millimeters, the earth appears as a gigantic, pulsing, pustulating, irregular globule. To make sense of it, they assume that it takes the form of a perfect earth-shape, known as a geoid, round which a series of related but artificial coordinates can be plotted. The most commonly used system, known as WGS 84, is based on the Global Positioning System, but around the world and in different parts of the United States, regional systems using different geoids and coordinates are employed because they produce more useful local results. When questions over the precise line of boundaries in areas of conflict such as the Middle East can result in violence and bloodshed, this is not a reassuring thought.

To safeguard the ships of the Royal Navy, Parliament offered in 1711 a prize of £20,000 (about $90,000 in an era when $300 a year would keep a family) for the most effective way to work out longitude. The answer had to be a timepiece of utter reliability so that commanders could compare the time at Greenwich, London's port, with their local time and estimate by the number of hours' difference how many degrees they had traveled to the east or west. Famously the answer was provided by the self-taught genius John Harrison, whose watches lost barely one second a day. By taking two chronometers, one keeping Greenwich time, the other adjusted to local time, a sailor could estimate his longitude after weeks at sea to within a few miles. To mariners, the villain of the piece was Britain's astronomer royal, the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, whose machinations denied Harrison the money until shortly before his death. In the navigation of the American wilderness, however, the dry, driven, perfectionist Maskelyne is the hero because his method of celestial navigation was more precise than anything achieved with Harrison's watches.

In 1766 Maskelyne brought together a series of star maps built up by himself, and former astronomers royal such as John Flamsteed and Edmond
Halley, and combined the results with the lunar tables produced by Tobias Mayer, a German mapmaker. The results were published in the
Nautical Almanac
, and for the next forty-five years, Maskelyne personally supervised its annual production. To help navigators, he also brought out four volumes of
Tables Requisite to be used with the Nautical Ephemeris for finding the latitude and longitude at sea,
containing formulas and calculations for use with the almanac. In all these works, Maskelyne based his calculations on the time at Greenwich.

It is notoriously difficult to arrive at accurate figures for state finances between independence and the assumption of states' debts by the federal government in 1790. Taxes were paid, at least in part, in depreciated paper money, and often a year or more late. In Pennsylvania, the numbers are especially confused due to the Enron-like accounting practices of John Nicholson, the state comptroller and financial dictator from 1782 to 1794. Nevertheless, it is clear that wherever borders were run, the states increased their revenues, largely from taxes and duties, but also from land sales.

I should like to thank the Society of Authors for generously providing financial assistance in the writing of this book. The great expert in the field of early American measurement in general, and on the life of Andrew Ellicott in particular, is Silvio Bedini, formerly deputy director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. I am deeply grateful for his friendship, his generosity with advice and expertise, and his kindness in making available the fruit of his own research. I thank my friend Dr. Tom Schmiedeler of Washburn University, Kansas, for his encouragement and for sharing his enthusiasm for midwestern geography. I benefited enormously from the advice and assistance of Jack Ericson, archivist at the Daniel A. Reed Library, State University of New York at Fredonia, New York, concerning the background of the Ellicott family in New York and the wider history of the Seneca. I also thank for their help Edwin Danson, whose
Drawing the Line
is the definitive account of the running of the Mason and Dixon Line; Roger Woodfill of the Surveyors' Historical Society; Dr. Penry Williams, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford University; Alan Smith, John Roberts, and Lyn Cole. I am profoundly grateful to George Gibson of Walker & Company, who has read, criticized, and tirelessly encouraged far beyond the call of duty. As always, I am indebted to my agent, Deborah Rogers, for her enthusiasm and unwavering support. And to my wife, Marie-Louise, my eternal thanks for her loving support throughout the research and writing.

I acknowledge with gratitude the professional assistance of the staff at the London Library, the British Library, the Library of Congress, the District
of Columbia Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the West Point Military Academy Library, the New York Public Library, the Daniel A. Reed Library, the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

2
“stretched along the western border like a cord of union”:
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (paper presented to the American Historical Association at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois).

3
The scene on top of Mount Welcome is described by Andrew Ellicott (AE) in a letter to his wife, Sally (SE), July 30, 1784, quoted from
Andrew Ellicott: His life and letters
by Catherine Van Cortlandt Matthews (New York: Grafton Press, ca. 1908) (referred to as
AE Life
).

8
John Cotton's sermon “The Divine Right to Occupy the Land” (London, 1630).

9
“
I never Saw the inside of a School
”:
The Memoirs of Rufus Putnam
, ed. Rowena Buell (Marietta, OH: Houghton Mifflin, 1904).

9
“A doubloon is my constant gain”
: Draft letter in George Washington's journal, 1748. Quoted in
George Washington
by Henry Cabot Lodge, vol. 1, reprint of 1898 edition (New York: AMS Press, 1972).

10
The so-called Yankee-Pennamite War, in reality rarely more than skirmishes, lasted from 1754 to 1775. Connecticut's claim to the valley was based on its 1662 royal charter allocating it all the land from “Norrogancett [Narragansett] Bay on the East to the South Sea [Pacific Ocean] on the West parte.” This battle saw the seven hundred Pennsylvania militia under Colonel William Plunkit defeated by about three hundred Connecticut settlers under Colonel Zebulon Butler, with, however, only one casualty.

11
Treaty of Westphalia: Despite the tendency to downplay Westphalia's significance in the development of the nation-state, it remains the most convenient moment from which to date the growing importance of territory over person as the chief symbol of the state. This trend is reflected in the different emphases offered by Hugo Grotius's 1625
De jure belli et pacis
and by Emmerich de Vattel in
The Laws of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law
in 1758. www.lonang.com/exlibris/vattel/index.html.

12
“
many are the waking Hours
”: Andrew Ellicott to Sarah Ellicott, September 11, 1785,
AE Life
.

12
“to support a government I venerate
”: Andrew Ellicott to Timothy Pickering, June 19, 1799, Papers of Andrew Ellicott, Library of Congress, control number mm 75019679 (referred to as Papers).

13
“he has the appearance of an antient [
sic
] athlete
”: entry in Ellicott's personal journal,
AE Life
.

14
“Here, every citizen
”: Morris Birkbeck,
Letters from Illinois
(1818).

14
“ ‘Twas they who rode the trackless bush
”: “Pioneers” by Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson, first published in
Town and Country Journal
, December 19, 1896.

15
“Asia for us is that same America
”: Quoted in
Natasha's Dance:A Cultural History of Russia
by Orlando Figes (London: Allen Lane, 2002).

17
The summer of 1784:
“Meteorological Imaginings and Conjectures” by Benjamin Franklin (May 1784), printed in
Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester
(London, 1819).

18
“If we can have clear Weather
”: Personal journal entry, November 12, 1784,
AE Life.

20
“laudable example
”: Bk. 1, chap. 18, “Of the Establishment of a Nation in a Country,”
The Laws of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law
by Emmerich de Vattel (1758), www.lonang.com/exlibris/vattel/index.html.

21
The history of Solebury Township can be found in chap. 18
,
The History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania
by W. H. Davis (Philadelphia, 1905).

21
The Ellicott
family history was assembled by AE's great-niece Martha E. Tyson in
A Brief Account of the Settlement of Ellicott's Mills. With fragments of history therewith connected
(Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, Peabody Fund Publications no. 4, 1867). Joseph Ellicott Sr., AE's father, inherited ten run-down houses in Devon, England, in 1767. A typescript record of his journey to sell them and invest the proceeds in clockmaking tools can be found in his Journal to England from December 18, 1766, to September 21, 1767, Holland Land Company records, Reel 15, Buf 17, Daniel A. Reed Library, SUNY Fredonia (referred to as HLC). The will of Samuel Blaker revealed a feud with his son-in-law over a loan of $200 and near disinheritance of his daughter, Judith. She had good grounds for her shortness of temper.

23
“I would wish thee
”: Judith Ellicott to Joseph Ellicott, June 5, 1804, HLC, Reel 5.

23
“I never was caught in bed
”: AE to James Wilkinson, April 4, 1801, Papers.

23
“I never went to bed
”: AE to Thomas Pickering, January 31, 1799, Papers.

23
“I do not like the Country
”: AE to SE, July 2, 1784,
AE Life
.

24
“bold and indigent strangers
”:
The Conquest of the Old Southwest
by Archibald Henderson (New York: Century Company, 1920).

24
“those mad People
”: Benjamin Franklin to Dr. Dadwaldr Evans, July 13, 1765.

24
Thomas Cresap
:
Thomas Cresap: Maryland Frontiersman
by Kenneth P. Bailey (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1944). AE's meeting: May 17, 1785,
AE Life
. Meeting with George Washington: March 17, 1747–48,
The Diaries of George Washington,
vol. 1, ed. Donald Jackson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976).