Measuring America. Andro Linklater

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       FIVE Simple Arithmetic

      GENERAL RUFUS PUTNAM had had a good war in every sense. His rank was a reward for the sterling service he had rendered Washington both at the siege of Boston and during the fighting in New York. When the continental army’s strategic retreat in 1776 pulled the focus of the war further south, Rufus had returned home to command the 5th Massachusetts Regiment in defence of his own state. There he had found time to father three more children, two in the dark days of defeat, and a third to celebrate the approach of victory – not for nothing were there rampant boars on the Putnam coat of arms – and to acquire the fine estate of Rutland that formerly belonged to a wealthy loyalist. But he was not content to rest on his laurels. With the return of peace, he was impatient to stretch his surveyor’s chain across the wide-open spaces beyond the Ohio river.

      In April 1783, Timothy Pickering, a delegate to the Continental Congress, reported that ‘there is a plan for the forming of a new State Westward of the Ohio. Some of the principal officers of the Army are heartily engaged in it. The propositions respecting it are in the hands of General Huntington and General Putnam, the total exclusion of slavery from the State to form an essential and irrevocable part of the Constitution.’

      Rufus was not a speculator – his stand against slavery, effectively ruling out land sales to Southern planters, was evidence of that – but he was proposing to acquire as much land as any of the pre-revolutionary companies, almost eighteen million acres from the Ohio to Lake Erie. Nevertheless, he wanted to divide this land up into ‘756 townships of six miles square’, because, as he told his former commander George Washington, ‘I am much opposed to the monopoly of lands and wish to guard against large patents being granted to individuals … it throws too much power in the hands of a few.’ Instead, he hoped to see the entire area settled by veterans of the continental army who could acquire land either by using the warrants issued on completion of service or by paying a fixed, small price. This would have the double benefit of settling a part of the United States vulnerable to British invasion from Canada with reliable soldiers, and of reviving the value of the military warrants, whose worth was ‘no more than 3/6 & 4/- on the pound [i.e. less than 20 per cent of the face value] [but] which in all probability might double if not more, the moment it was known that Government would receive them for lands in the Ohio Country’. Rufus petitioned Congress to grant him the land, and when it did not respond he wrote again to George Washington in April 1784 to ask, as was his habit, what should be done.

      ‘The Settlement of the Ohio Country, Sir, ingrosses many of my thoughts and much of my time since I left Camp,’ he wrote, and the delay was making the veterans impatient. ‘Many of them are unable to lie long on their oars waiting the decition [sic] of Congress on our petition.’

      Washington, who had retired from command of his victorious troops and returned to his estates, was no less impatient for Congress to reach some decision about the land beyond the mountains. Throughout the war a stream of settlers had moved into Tennessee and Kentucky, and the increase in their numbers after the fighting was over prompted Washington to warn the Congress that without some policy, ‘the settling, or rather overspreading of the Western Country will take place by a parcel of Banditti who will bid defiance to all Authority’. The thorny pre-revolutionary conflict between settlers and squatters, proprietors and Goths, had not gone away.

      Yet nothing could be done until the states agreed to give up individual claims to territory that they had all won from the British. Virginia, for example, as the original colony, had some rights to all the land from Lake Erie west to modern-day Wisconsin and south to St Louis, while Massachusetts could point to a phrase in its charter giving it ‘the mayne Landes from the Atlantick … on the East Parte, to the South Sea [the Pacific] on the West parte’. States like Maryland and New Jersey whose western boundaries had been drawn by surveyors refused even to sign the Articles of Confederation, which bound them to act together against the British, until these gigantic claims had been abandoned.

      Although Rufus Putnam seems not to have been aware of it, the key to the deadlock was in the hands of the Arch Enemy. In 1781 Jefferson as Governor had ceded Virginia’s claim to the Western Territory to the Continental Congress. One by one, the other claimant states followed suit, and the Articles of Confederation were at last signed in 1781, shortly before the war ended. But true to his Enlightenment self, Jefferson had added a reservation. Only the United States government could acquire the territory from the native American nations who owned it. Consequently any claims made by pre-revolutionary land companies were cancelled. Congress, however, was filled with company sympathisers. No United States territory could exist until one or other side backed down.

      Over the next twenty years Jefferson was to engage in an ideological war with land speculators whose interests were diametrically opposed to his. In the Continental Congress their ringleader was Robert Morris. He had out-manoeuvred Jefferson over Virginia’s disposal of land within her existing boundaries, and was now the Congress’s Superintendent of Finance, an influential position which helped ensure that the congressional mood remained in favour of the land companies.

      The two men were polar opposites: Morris, whose fat, friendly, asthmatic appearance distracted attention from a cold, abacus mind, and the lean, controlled, complex Jefferson, concealing his emotional weakness and high-flown idealism behind a stream of words and studied informality. ‘His whole figure has a loose, [shambling] air,’ observed Senator William Maclay of Jefferson in 1790. ‘He has a rambling vacant look, and nothing of that firm, collected deportment which I expected … He spoke almost without ceasing. But even his discourse partook of personal demeanour. It was loose and rambling, and yet he scattered information, wherever he went, and some even brilliant sentiments sparkled from him.’

      Unlike Jefferson’s privileged background, Morris’s past was one of unremitting effort from his arrival as a penniless immigrant from England in 1747, through long years as an accountant working for the wealthy Philadelphia merchant Charles Willing, until he was made a partner in Willing’s company, and became one of the wealthiest men in America. During the war he had used his wealth to underwrite contracts for the purchase of supplies and munitions for Washington’s army, and with the goodwill this earned he secured still more profitable contracts for himself.

      The second skirmish in Jefferson and Morris’s long campaign occurred over currency.

      When George Washington replied to Rufus Putnam in April 1784, his letter illustrated the basic money problem facing the new republic. Pointing out that Congress was still deadlocked on the land question, Washington offered instead to lease his thirty thousand acres in the Ohio valley to the impatient Massachusetts veterans. The rental would be high, about $36 per hundred acres, he explained, because ‘it is land of the first quality’ and the cost of improvements he had made amounted to ‘£1568 Virginia, equal to £1961/3/3d Maryland, Pennsylvania or Jersey currency’. If Rufus was still not sure how much that meant in Massachusetts, Washington added that ‘a Spanish milled dollar shall pass in payment for six shillings’.

      The handicap to Washington’s real-estate deal was one that hobbled every commercial transaction in the United States at that time. Although the legal tender remained officially the British pound, divided into twenty shillings, each in turn subdivided into twelve pennies, its value in America differed from one state to the next. The commonest single coin, the Spanish dollar, was worth five shillings in Georgia, but thirty-two shillings and sixpence across the border in South Carolina, and six shillings in New Hampshire, while the official London rate was four shillings and sixpence. Still more confusingly, it was divided into eight bits in Pennsylvania, but contained ten bits in Virginia. Along with Spanish dollars and doubloons, there were also СКАЧАТЬ