Measuring America. Andro Linklater

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ