The Fabric of America (8 page)

In peacetime, the very word
American
began to lose the popularity it had gained in the lead-up to hostilities when people used it primarily to distinguish themselves from Loyalists. But it had never appeared in the Declaration of Independence or the Articles of Confederation. The adjective commonly used by Congress to denote a national identity or collective purpose was
Continental,
as in Continental Congress, and only to distinguish the new national force created in 1783 from Washington's old Continental Army was it given the name of the First American Regiment.

In December 1783 when George Washington resigned his command after supervising the army's dissolution, the substance of the confederation was reduced to little more than the score or so of delegates then meeting in Maryland's Senate chamber in Annapolis, a near bankrupt Finance Department, several overseas delegations arranging trade agreements or foreign loans, and the U.S. post office. “The United States of America” had borrowed money from foreign bankers, exchanged ambassadors, won a war, and accepted the Treaty of Paris, by which the British conceded defeat, but the title represented the multiplicity of states rather than a single entity.

Although the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi
had been ceded by the British to “the United States,” most of the southern half was claimed either by Georgia, or by settlers pouring out of North Carolina and Virginia into what would become Tennessee and Kentucky. North and west of the Ohio River the land was threatened by British and Spanish forts and occupied by hostile Native Americans, and in Congress influential voices held that it belonged to each of the thirteen states rather than to the central government. Without a physical presence to represent the idea of “the United States,” and a frontier to define its extent and power, it was hardly surprising that when people spoke or wrote the phrase, they used the plural tense rather than the singular.

Were it not for
Thomas Jefferson
, “the United States” would have had no territory in which to create a national identity to rival that being created for the states. In a few tumultuously creative months, he not only gave the concept a physical reality but mapped its future territorial expansion until it did indeed become the United States of America.

In the fall of 1782, Jefferson's thirty-three-year-old wife, Martha, died giving birth to their sixth child, and he was overwhelmed by a paroxysm of grief. His daughter Patsy vividly recalled how he “was led from the room [where she died] in a state of insensibility by his sister, Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into his library, where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive. The scene that followed I did not witness, but the violence of his emotion, when almost by stealth, I entered his room at night, to this day I dare not trust myself to describe.”

For weeks afterward, he could scarcely bring himself to talk to anyone, and the smallest reminder of her death left him overcome. “I ever thought him to rank domestic happiness in the first class of the chief good,” wrote his kinsman Edmund Randolph, astonished at the extent of his misery, “but scarcely supposed that his grief would be so violent as to justify the circulating report of his swooning away whenever he sees his children.”

The very violence of his emotion, however, throws a light on the inner being of this most private, enigmatic character, “the Great Sphinx of American history,” as his biographer Joseph Ellis termed him. It indicates better than Jefferson's public explanation the depths of passion that drove his
political commitment, a passion he did his best to conceal. His preferred guise was to present himself not as a politician or statesman, but as a scientist. “
Nature intended me
for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight,” ran one typical explanation, “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.”

There was enough truth in this to make it plausible. His command of botany, the most highly developed science of the time, was evident in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
and spilled over into his magpielike hunger for information about anthropology, agriculture, and meteorology. He took huge pride in succeeding Franklin as president of the American Philosophical Society. And to a degree unmatched by the other Founding Fathers, he saw democracy and the new United States of America as opportunities for experiment.

In June 1783 he accepted an appointment to fill a vacancy as one of Virginia's representatives to the Continental Congress, and the ferocious energy Jefferson brought to bear on the vexed question of the territory beyond the Appalachians would only have surprised someone ignorant of the extreme passion of which he was capable. Among the ideas he wished to test out were the advantages of a decimal system of measurement and a decimal coinage, the abolition of primogeniture or inheritance of property by the eldest child, the guarantee of religious liberty, the restriction of ownership of property to one generation, the limitation of contracts to a period of thirty years, the universal provision of free education, and many others more or less practicable. The most far-reaching of his theories, however, concerned the distribution of land and its effect upon society.

Thomas Jefferson

His model was an image of Saxon England, before the Norman conquest in 1066. Instead of the Normans' feudal belief that the land fundamentally belonged to the king and that all his subjects merely held their share of it from him, the Saxon system was based on alodial law, which held that the person who worked the land owned it outright. “The opinion that our lands were allodial possessions is one which I have very long held,” Jefferson told his friend Edmund Pendleton in August 1776. Just as the Norman system was conducive to monarchy because it concentrated ownership of the land in one person, the Saxon structure created democracy by making ownership available to everyone. “Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our [Saxon] ancestors,” he suggested to Pendleton, “the wisest & most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man?”

In the model he envisioned, the political structure would be built up from the community based on the local “hundred” or county with its own court and administration. And its values would be derived from the independent-minded yeomen farmers who owed no allegiance or obligation for the soil they worked and owned outright.

When he was elected governor of Virginia in 1779, Jefferson immediately took advantage of the opportunity to try out his ideas. In a general reform of its system of government, he presented to the legislature a bill based on the Saxon system that, he explained, “
proposed to lay off every county
into hundreds of townships of 5. or 6. miles square,” each of which would be a center of government with a school, a court, constables, and elected officials. The bill failed, but he never deviated from this basic model. Thirty years later he still insisted, “These little republics would be the main strength of the great one … Could I once see this I should consider it as the dawn of the salvation of the republic, and say with old Simeon, ‘
nunc dimittas Domine.
'”

Most delegates thought of the western lands simply as a source of funds. They could be offered as collateral, Thomas McKean suggested in a letter to Samuel Adams in 1782, arguing that Dutch bankers would be prepared to lend more money “
if we can obtain an indisputed title to the Western lands that belonged to the Crown of Great Britain
.” Jefferson, by contrast, was determined that they should also provide the structure for his republic of yeomen farmers. “It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour,” he wrote. “… While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.”

Constitutional thinkers from the Roman poet Virgil to Vattel had suggested similar ideas, and the social thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose books bulked large on Jefferson's shelves, made the same argument. In the words of Francis Hutcheson, doyen of the group and Adam Smith's teacher, “Lands must be dispersed among great multitudes, and preserved (thus dispersed) by agrarian laws, to make a stable democracy.”

What made Jefferson's ideas different from those of every theoretician before him was not their originality but the staggering opportunity that independence presented for putting them into practice. Once the British had ceded their land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, he and other delegates to the Continental Congress faced the challenge of dealing with four hundred thousand square miles of territory. No scientist could have asked for a better chance to experiment.

In the winter of 1783–84, Congress met in the elegant, azure-painted surroundings of the Senate chamber in Maryland's State House in Annapolis, a space not much bigger than a schoolroom, but easily large enough for the twenty or fewer delegates who usually attended. There, seated in four rows at plain wooden desks, they settled the business of the Union. In any company, Jefferson's vision and intellect would have stood out; in that small circle he was exceptional. And in those months, perhaps more than at any other time in his life, he was driven to bury in public business the private agony of Martha's death. “I can accept all of the economy of life,” he once confessed to John Adams, “and all of human activities and human nature except one thing: what is the use of grief?”

Amidst a mass of other work ranging from the ceremonial to be observed when General Washington came to resign his commission as commander in
chief through reports on the Treaty of Paris and the organization of central government—
by his estimate it could be run
by just forty-eight employees at an annual cost of $68,525.33—Jefferson found the time and energy to formulate the pattern for the territorial growth of the United States. It is no exaggeration to say that his three reports on the western lands rank alongside his role in writing the Declaration of Independence and his negotiation of the Louisiana Purchase in terms of their impact upon the long-term development of the United States.

To have a value, the backlands had to be transformed into property. Every delegate understood the process of purchase, survey, and sale, but disagreed about the way each step ought to be carried out. Should individuals be allowed to buy land from the original inhabitants, or only the states, or even the United States alone? Was it to be surveyed before being sold, or afterward? And should the shape of the property be determined by the seller or the buyer?

Quick answers were urgently needed. Both the states and the United States had run up huge debts during the war and looked to the western lands as their one source of capital. But already lines of wagons and convoys of flatboats were carrying pioneers westward to occupy lands without paying anything for them. Their occupation threatened not only the United States and the individual states, but the claims of more than a dozen speculative land companies that had been granted the right before the Revolution to survey and acquire most of what is now Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Despite the urgency, all the players faced an immovable obstacle that Jefferson himself had created.

In 1781, while Jefferson was governor, Virginia had ceded to the United States its charter claims to the vast expanse of territory beyond the Ohio River that fanned out to the north and west as far as the shores of Lake Superior. The purpose was to persuade Maryland to sign the Articles of Confederation, and later that year Maryland did indeed finally join the other twelve states in the Union. One condition was attached to Virginia's cession—the territory was to become national domain, with the United States alone possessing authority to make treaties with the native inhabitants and acquire land from them. Since this would rule out the claims of
other states and of the land companies, the overwhelming majority of delegates in Congress wanted the Virginia delegation to drop its condition.

Instead of backing down, Virginia's delegates decided, as Jefferson put it, to “
leave it to [the other delegations] to come forward and tell us they were ready to accept
.” The stalemate lasted until February 1784, when the Virginians upped the stakes. The next time they were asked to give way, Jefferson noted, “We replied, ‘No,' if the lands are not offered for sale the ensuing spring, they will be taken from us all by adventurers; we will, therefore, put it out of our power, by the execution of a deed to sell them ourselves, if Congress will not.”

Fearful of losing the backcountry altogether, the other delegations agreed to accept Virginia's conditions on March 1, 1784, a date that marks the creation of the first U.S. Territory. Amongst the rapid sequence of events that saw the Revolution's explosion of ideas solidify into nationhood, the importance of giving physical expression to the idea of a single United States has often been overlooked. In the short term, the national domain beyond the Ohio River simply offered the central government the prospect of a source of income, but in the long term it was to be the arena in which an American identity was formed.