Measuring America. Andro Linklater

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СКАЧАТЬ carried the image of King Johannes V; Dutch florins; Swedish dollars or riksdalers; as well as the sovereigns, shillings and pennies of Britain. Familiarity taught most people to juggle all these currencies, and just as the teenage George Washington casually reckoned up his pay in pistoles and doubloons, so Thomas Jefferson, scribbling a quick note of a sale of land, recorded that the price had been ‘200 [pounds] of which 20 half-Joes are paid’, or $950 and $160 respectively. Opinion in Congress, however, held that a single currency was needed to help hold the new nation together.

      The first recommendation came from Congress’s Superintendent of Finance, Robert Morris. It was based on an unrealistically small unit, a fraction of a penny, and in the opening shot of their campaign, Jefferson replied with a report early in 1784 recommending instead the adoption of the Spanish dollar as the most convenient basis of the new currency. In the interests of simplicity he suggested that instead of being divided up into eight bits, it should be decimalised. ‘Every one remembers,’ he told Congress, ‘that when learning money arithmetic, he used to be puzzled with adding the pence, taking out the twelves and carrying them on; adding the shillings, taking out the twenties and carrying them on. But when he came to the pounds where he had only tens to carry forward, it was easy and free from error. The bulk of mankind are school boys thro’ life. These little perplexities are always great to them.’ Accordingly, the dollar should be subdivided into tenths or dismes, hundredths or cents, and thousandths or mills.

      It was an argument that everyone could understand, and less than eighteen months later, on 6 July 1785, Congress resolved that ‘the money unit of the United States of America be one dollar’, and that ‘the several pieces shall increase in decimal ratio’. This was not just an intellectual victory for Jefferson; it effectively prevented Morris from achieving his goal of running the United States Mint, a source of potentially enormous profits.

      In the course of the currency debate, Morris had declared, ‘it is happy for us to have throughout the Union the same Ideas of a Mile and an Inch, a Hogshead and a Quart, a Pound and an Ounce’. Even without their earlier hostilities, this would have set him on a collision course with Virginia’s representative, for it was clear to Jefferson that the rationale for replacing pennies and shillings with a decimal unit applied equally to American weights and measures.

      Officially each state had adopted the system of Troy and avoirdupois that Elizabeth I had imposed on sixteenth-century England and that subsequent legislation in London had amended; but barely a single unit was the same from one state to the next – except for Gunter’s chain and the acre. A Virginia tobacco-grower like Thomas Jefferson measured his crop in hogsheads, well aware that a Virginia hogshead was larger than a New York hogshead but smaller than one from Maryland, and that a tobacco hogshead from any state was a different size to a brewer’s hogshead. A Boston brewer might also refer to his hogshead of beer as a pipe, butt or puncheon, knowing that each of them contained two cooms, four kilderkins, eight rundlets, or sixty-four gallons. But a Baltimore brewer who used the same measures somehow ended up with only sixty-three gallons of beer in his Maryland hogshead, while the number of gallons in a Pennsylvania brewer’s hogshead actually changed depending on where the beer was sold, because the law required innkeepers to sell beer inside the inn by the wine gallon, which was smaller than the beer gallon that was used for selling beer outside the inn. And the confusion over liquid measurements was nothing compared to the labyrinth of quarts, gallons and bushels used for measuring corn or flour. Because of flaws in English legislation, each of them could be one of eight different sizes, and might be measured either heaped above the brim of the container, or struck, meaning level with the brim, as custom or the local market dictated.

      Round three of the Jefferson – Morris war was, therefore, bound to occur over weights and measures. The direction of Jefferson’s ideas can be found on a sheet of paper dating from the spring of 1784 and headed innocuously ‘Some Thoughts on a Coinage’, which shows that he conceived of the dollar and a new, decimal American set of weights and measures as being two parts of a single system. The weights would be co-ordinated with the dollar, so that a pound would equal the weight of ten dollar-coins. The lengths were to be derived from the size of the earth.

      The idea that the earth might serve as a scientific basis for a system of measures had first been put forward by the French astronomer and cartographer Jean Picard in 1671. The circle of the equator is divided into 360 degrees, and each degree is subdivided into sixty minutes. The distance of one of those minutes was equal to one nautical mile, a unit that navigators had used since the sixteenth century, and which remains in use today by pilots, mariners and other navigators. Picard’s successor, Jacques Cassini, had estimated the total distance round the equator to be more than twenty-five thousand miles (today’s best figure puts it at 24,902 miles, or 40,075 kilometres), which made each degree a little less than seventy statute miles.

      Notes and tables soon fill the page, to be followed on a separate line by Jefferson’s calculation for the length of a minute, or ‘geographical mile’, in his words: ‘Then a geographical mile will be of 6086.4 feet.’ Acknowledging the difficulty of physically measuring the equator, he comes up with a way of checking the length of this new mile: ‘A pendulum vibrating seconds is by S[i]r I[saac] Newton [calculated to measure] 39.2 inches’.

      It was Galileo, allegedly dreaming in church and watching the slow swing of a chandelier, who first noted that the amount of time a pendulum took to move through its arc from one end to the other depended on its length. The longer the pendulum, the more time it needed – to be exact, the time was proportional to the square root of its length. In London, Isaac Newton’s calculations had shown that the swing of a pendulum 39.1682 inches long took exactly one second (nearer the pole, the stronger pull of gravity would slow the pendulum fractionally), and it was this scientifically testable unit – known as a second’s pendulum – that Jefferson proposed to use to check the length of his mile.

      By the time he starts to compare his new decimal lengths with traditional units, the geographical mile has already become the American mile in his mind:

      Then the American mile = 6086.4 [feet].

      English = 5280 f[eet]. furlong = 608.64 f[eet]. = 660 [feet] chain = 60.864 f[eet]. = 66 [feet] pace = 6.0864 [feet] fathom = 6 [feet]

      The widest discrepancy was with the English mile, but perhaps to comfort himself Jefferson lists all the other miles in use, from the Russian – barely fifteen hundred old yards – and ascending through the Irish, Polish and Swedish to the Hungarian, which stretched for almost seven old miles. In such company there would be nothing strange about the American mile. There the ‘Thoughts’ end, a remarkable race through what was evidently a vast fund of knowledge stored in Jefferson’s mind.

      It was no academic exercise. Jefferson intended to apply his new system to the most important subject facing the new republic – the measurement of the Western Territory.

      That same spring, the Continental Congress, desperate to raise money from the sale of its land, had at last accepted the Virginian condition, and on 1 March 1784 Jefferson led his state’s delegation formally ceding its claims to the immense region to the north-west of the river Ohio. For the first time the United States had a territorial reality to match the spiritual identity outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

      On the same day, and as part of the deal, a committee chaired by Jefferson produced a report on how the Western Territory was to be governed. It covered each stage of the process, starting with the land’s acquisition from the Indians – it could be obtained only by the United States government – through the delineation of boundaries, choice of government, and eventual admission as states to the United States. Once the land had been acquired and surveyed, settlement could take place, and as the region filled up with people, they could apply for their territory to become one of the states of the Union on a level of equality with the original thirteen founders.

      Even the names of some of the proposed states were specified, СКАЧАТЬ