Measuring America. Andro Linklater

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ