The Fabric of America (5 page)

Taking advantage of the confusion, Cresap made a specialty of registering in Maryland claims to land that lay in Pennsylvania and selling it to German immigrants whose lack of English left them unsure of what was happening. In his home state of Maryland his activities earned him the name the Border Ruffian, but elsewhere he was more generally known as the Maryland Monster. He farmed one such claim himself, close to Oldtown and lying well inside modern Pennsylvania. In 1736, when Pennsylvania settlers who had bought the same land from the Penns arrived to claim their property, Cresap drove them off at gunpoint. The settlers retaliated by bringing in Sheriff Samuel Smith, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but he was greeted by bullets flying round his ears. On his next visit, the sheriff took the precaution of arriving with a posse of fifty-five heavily armed farmers and succeeded in cornering Cresap and fourteen companions in his house.

According to Smith's deposition, when called upon to surrender, “Cresap, with several horrid oaths and the most abusive language against the proprietor and people of Pennsylvania, answered that they should never have him until he was a corpse.” A furious gun battle broke out, and as the sheriff later recalled, “They would not surrender but kept firing out ‘till the House was set on fire.” Despite his defiant promise, Cresap was among
the outlaws who eventually gave themselves up, singed but unrepentant. As he was marched in chains through the streets of Philadelphia, he exclaimed to his guard, “Damn it, this is one of the prettiest towns in Maryland!”

Released from his shackles, Cresap decided to settle legally in what would become Oldtown. According to his own account, he used to offer such hospitality to the Indians who came into western Pennsylvania to trade furs that they called him the Big Kettle. The seventeen-year-old George Washington, who took shelter with Cresap in 1749 on his way to survey Lord Fairfax's five-million-acre estate across the border in Virginia, recorded being “agreeably surpris'd by the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from War with only one Scalp. We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them Part. It elevating there Spirits put them in the Humour of Dauncing of whom we had a War Daunce.”

The war party almost certainly came from the Iroquois federation in the north, who were then engaged in long-term hostilities with the Catawbas in the Carolinas. But the contact with the Europeans was not untypical of what modern historians call “the borderland,” the ill-defined area where squatters, natives, fur dealers, and missionaries lived and bred, absorbing each other's culture, and forming an uneasy, mutually rewarding, self-adjusting society.

A memorial to Thomas Cresap in Cumberland, Maryland

What none of them could have known was that the arrival of the apprentice surveyor working on behalf of his patron, Lord Fairfax, presaged the end of the borderland. The huge Fairfax property, almost amounting to a separate colony, stretched across the northern neck of Virginia up to the Maryland and Pennsylvania boundary. The previous year his lordship had employed Thomas Lewis and Peter Jefferson, father of the future third president, to map the southern boundary of his gigantic holding. With its outer limits defined, the task of his new team of surveyors, including Washington, was to establish who was living on the Fairfax estate and how many acres they were working. Squatters paid no rent, and Fairfax's kingdom had to turn a profit. Within a few years of Washington's survey, dozens of illegal settlers had either been evicted or had signed ninety-nine-year leases paying a rent of about $5 annually for one hundred acres. Fully surveyed, the Fairfax property might produce as much as $250,000 a year. The lesson did not go unheeded.

“
The greatest Estates we have in this Colony
,” the young Washington confided to a friend, “were made … by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” In 1752, at the age of twenty, he purchased 1,459 acres in the Virginia Piedmont, the first step in a career of land-dealing that eventually made him owner of more than 52,000 acres spread across six different states.

Washington was not alone. A growing number of speculators had come to the same electrifying conclusion that immigration was pushing up the value of land. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin predicted that the population of the colonies would double to 2.6 million by 1775. The logic was inescapable, and it led to the formation of more than a score of land companies to survey and register claims to unowned territory. The soaring value of property left no room for Cresaps or other banditti. In colonial legislatures throughout British America, landowners, speculators, and proprietors brought pressure to bear to impose order in the backcountry. New counties
were created, new county surveyors were appointed to register properties— among them George Washington for Culpeper County, Virginia—and new county sheriffs were sent to exact taxes.

From the point of view of the eastern politicians and speculators, this was no more than a restoration of government. To western farmers forced to travel up to one hundred miles to pay taxes or appear in the new county courts, it appeared like tyranny. Thus during the critical years before 1775, when resistance to London's attempt to impose taxes on its colonists began to create a distinct sense of being American, two different struggles for democracy were building against two different governments—the colonies against Britain, and western farmers against east coast authority.

In Pennsylvania, the attempt by Penn and his heirs to regain control from Cresap and his fellow banditti began with a prolonged legal battle in London to have the boundaries in their royal charter drastically revised. Not until 1732, long after Penn's bankruptcy and death, did they succeed in persuading the Court of Chancery in London, the senior English court dealing with equity and contracts, to shift the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania south. The northern boundary was now to be the forty-second degree, and the southern was to run exactly fifteen miles south of Philadelphia along a line that did intersect the arc round New Castle.

Once more, what seemed clear-cut on a map proved impossibly complicated on the ground. For thirty years the difficulties of drawing straight lines, arcs, and tangents across the curvature of the earth and getting them to meet at the right point bamboozled the best surveyors in the colonies. Eventually Penn's heirs agreed with the Calverts, the earl of Baltimore's family who owned Maryland, to share the enormous cost of having a definitive boundary run by the eminent British astronomers
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon
.

The pair had already worked together on the world's first great international scientific project, the observation of the 1761 transit of Venus across the face of the sun, an enterprise that involved scientists from most of the nations of Europe. Although they had successfully viewed the phenomenon from Cape Town, the restless, inquisitive Mason, forever striking up conversations with strangers and traveling, as he put it, “for curiosity to see the
country,” appeared to be an odd match with the dour, concentrated Dixon, who rarely stirred far from his precious telescopes. Nevertheless, in the four years from 1763 to 1767, the two of them not only untangled the geometrical confusion around Philadelphia, but more impressively solved the problem of running an accurate parallel or line of latitude due east-west, a feat never before accomplished in North America, and probably not in Europe.

Although the United States' longest frontier is a parallel, as are the top and bottom borders of many states, it is easy to overlook the fiendish challenge each presented its maker—to draw a straight line across the rounded surface of the globe. At sea, mariners would simply follow a constant compass bearing—270 degrees to head due west—but on land ordinary compasses became too unreliable due to magnetic variation, the presence of mountains, and the action of other distorting forces. Until the invention of the solar compass in the 1840s, a boundary-maker intent on the utmost accuracy had to rely on celestial navigation. But then, a second, more horrible predicament presented itself—on the surface of the three-dimensional earth the shortest line between two points lying east and west of each other is not straight but, paradoxically, a curve, known as a Great Circle or a circumference of the globe (see appendix).

The complex solution found by Mason and Dixon was to run a Great Circle from one observation point to the next, a distance of about a dozen miles, then track back along the line of the parallel. Close to a week of star sightings was required at each point, and the use of the finest scientific instruments in the British empire. The combined wealth of the Penns and Calverts had purchased for them a six-foot-tall, vertically suspended telescope known as a zenith sector, a transit and equal-altitude instrument, and a Hadley quadrant, all constructed in brass and mahogany with achromatic lenses by John Bird, instrument-maker to King George III. On April 5, 1765, accompanied by more than one hundred surveyors, chainmen, axmen, and laborers, Mason and Dixon set out with these instruments from Alexander Bryan's farm, exactly fifteen miles south of Philadelphia, to run Pennsylvania's boundary along the line of latitude 39 degrees 43 minutes 18.2 seconds (39° 43′ 18.2″) north of the equator.

More than two years and 230 miles later, their star-derived line reached another, older boundary high in the Appalachians, the Catawba warpath. This one, established by violence and bloodshed, marked the limit of the
influence of the Six Nations, who had guaranteed their safety, and the beginning of Delaware and Shawnee territory. On October 9, 1767, Mason noted in his journal that their Six Nations guards “would not proceed one step further westward,” and so, on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River, a mound five feet high was built to mark the end of what would become known as the Mason-Dixon Line.

The effects of the new boundary were immediately apparent. Both the Penns and the Calverts began to survey and sell land near the border, and squatters already there were forced to buy or rent, and most significantly to pay tax. A principle had been established that would last throughout American history and remains strictly applicable to present-day problems on the border with Mexico—a clear-cut boundary is government's first weapon in the control of its citizens.

When delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania met in 1779 under the auspices of the Continental Congress to resolve the problem of their undefined border, they decided to take the Mason-Dixon Line as their starting point. There were practical reasons for the choice—the line already covered about two thirds of what would be the southern boundary of Pennsylvania—but it also recognized that the states were now heirs to many of the colonies' concerns. They too needed clear-cut borders not just to keep the peace between them, but to enable each to govern efficiently, to register property, to tax citizens, and to enforce law and order. But the colonial governments had been able to call upon the huge scientific resources of Britain built up around the Royal Society since its foundation in 1660, and to make use of the most advanced scientific instruments from London manufacturers who were supported by royal patronage and the demands of the industrial revolution, while the states had to find their own homegrown scientists who were often forced to rely on instruments they had made themselves.

The long apprenticeship that Andrew Ellicott had served as a clock-maker was essential to his later success as an astronomer. The skills in one field transferred easily to another, and Ellicott's craftsmanship as an instrument maker is still evident in some beautifully made telescopes that he built and that are now held in the Smithsonian Institution.

He owed his interest in the subject to the chance arrival in Solebury of an intense young Irishman called Robert Patterson, whose talents led soon after to his appointment as professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. For a brief period, however, he ran a school in the area. In June 1769 when the planet Venus made a transit across the face of the sun, Patterson supervised his fifteen-year-old student's observation and timing of the event and evidently mixed instruction on the astronomical significance of the occasion—in theory it would allow the distance to the sun to be calculated—with his own political feelings of hostility to the British and affection for his new country.

“
You were in your young days my preceptor
,” Ellicott wrote Patterson much later. “It was under your guidance that my mind was directed to the love of my country and to science. If I have been useful, you are entitled to the credit, if not it has been my own fault.”

The depth of Patterson's influence was apparent when the Revolution broke out, and in defiance of his family's pacifist beliefs, Ellicott volunteered for military service. By then the entire Ellicott clan—Joseph, his two brothers with their families, and their children's families—had moved south to Maryland in search of a site where they could build new, more powerful mills. Barely ten miles from the rapidly growing port of Baltimore, they found the perfect position on the fast-running Patapsco River, and the successful flour-milling operation they set up would eventually grow into Ellicott City, now part of the conurbation of Greater Baltimore.