Chapter Thirteen
Just north of the decaying town of East Liverpool, Ohio, once the self-proclaimed “pottery capital of the world,” a stone pillar stands as testimony to the first effects of Jefferson’s blueprint. Half-hidden in the trees that grow along the banks of the Ohio River, the pillar carries a plaque that reads: “The Point of Beginning. 1112 feet south of this spot was the point of beginning for surveying the public lands of the United States. There on September 30 1785, Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, began the Geographer’s Line of the Seven Ranges.”
What Hutchins began beside the Ohio was a grid, a checkerboard of straight lines running north-south as meridians and east-west as lines of latitude. Each square on the board measured thirty-six square miles. The process of making the pattern could hardly have been simpler. From the riverbank, Hutchins’s first team of surveyors scrambled up a steep wooded hill heading directly westward. They were armed with two essential instruments, a magnetic compass and twenty-two yards of metal links known as a Gunter’s chain. Originally invented to facilitate the transformation of feudal English land into private property, Gunter’s chain was to become the instrument that tamed the West more effectively than any rifle. The compass gave the direction, marked physically by a blaze on a tall tree on the horizon; a small army of axmen then hewed a track through the woods and undergrowth, and finally the two chainmen began to measure out the distance toward the mark.
The rear man stood by the starting stake with one end of the chain and ensured that the front man carrying the other end was always in line with the blaze on the tree. At the end of twenty-two yards, a tally peg was inserted, the rear chainman came up, and the process was repeated. Thus they progressed through the wilderness like a caterpillar, hunching up and stretching out, drawing a straight line to the west. Eighty chains made 1,760 yards or a mile, and 480 chains made six miles or one side of a township. Later the surveyors would repeat the process, but this time traveling northward, and when the other sides of the square had been marked out, its area would be subdivided into thirty-six sections, each measuring one square mile.
In September 1787, the land surveyed by Hutchins’s teams went on sale in New York City. John Martin bought a square mile identified as Lot 20, in Township 7, Range 4 (meaning that it was in the seventh square northward and fourth westward from the starting point), a tract now part of Belmont County, Ohio, and thus became the first owner of this new America that would eventually stretch to the Pacific. But the sale of the first seven ranges surveyed west of the Ohio was so disappointing—less than $120,000 was raised—that the public lands survey was set aside for eight years. Instead, Congress chose to privatize the process and sold millions of unsurveyed acres to land companies. Although the companies’ surveys were conducted in hurried, often slapdash fashion, the properties covering most of Ohio were arranged in roughly the same pattern of squares as Hutchins had measured.
The ordinance enacted by the Continental Congress in 1787 “for the government of the Territory of the United States northwest of the River Ohio” also bore Jefferson’s mark. The area covered all of present-day Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and most of Michigan, and although neither the names of the states nor their shapes were those specified by the 1784 report, the ban on entails—specifying who among future generations might inherit the property—and on primogeniture were Jeffersonian measures, as was the provision making slavery illegal. His influence was apparent too in the phrase that justified the allocation of a square mile section at the center of each township to finance public education in the Northwestern Territory: it was, said the ordinance, “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” There was no suggestion, however, that the land would be sold as anything but private property as understood by common law.
The 1787 Ordinance was a remarkable document, not least because for the first time an American state was to grow up around an entirely American structure of government. In a striking sentence used by the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, one of the promoters of the Ohio Company, “there will be no wrong habits to combat, and no inveterate systems to overturn—there is no rubbish to remove before you can lay the foundation.”
In 1796, the process of surveying the public lands was renationalized, and thereafter the gigantic task of converting what would amount to 1.8 billion acres of the United States landmass into federal property became a government enterprise. In the course of more than two centuries, a billion acres would be surveyed and sold as private property, the rest being retained as federal and state land. The lines drawn across the country would become the markers not only of individual properties, but of counties, cities, and states. Roads and streets still follow the original surveyors’ lines, making it possible to peer down from an aircraft window and see below the physical evidence of the infrastructure of American society. In economic terms alone, it is a record of the greatest orderly transfer of public resources to the private sector in history.
The first effects of the survey could be seen in Ohio. The 1800 census found about forty-five thousand settlers in the state, but within twenty years the population had grown more than ten times, to 581,000. Significantly, almost nine million acres of federal land that had sold at between $1.25 and $2.25 an acre, raising more than seventeen million dollars for the U.S. Treasury, were by then worth five dollars an acre for unimproved lots, and almost twelve dollars for cleared land. That rapidly increasing capital value was already being translated into industrial and commercial wealth. A survey in 1819 showed that, driven by agriculture, Ohio boasted no fewer than twenty-seven banks, six furnaces, twenty wool and cotton mills, and three large factories, all this barely a generation after Hutchins’s survey teams had first unrolled a Gunter’s chain in the region.
Within the grid, land was at first measured out in parcels no smaller than the one square mile section, and sold for a minimum of $640, a sum that had to be paid in full. But legislation rapidly reduced the smallest area, to a half-section in 1800, a quarter-section or 160 acres in 1804, and eventually to a quarter-quarter section, or forty acres, in 1832. The minimum price was only fifty dollars with a down payment of no more than $12.50 and the remainder payable over three years.
Every variety of settler purchased these squares. Some came from Europe, others from already settled territory in the east. Most traveled westward as families, often as whole communities, and a few as individual adventurers. But whatever their background, the process of buying, settling, and improving the land brought each one of them into a process that was distinctively American. Even a pioneer family like the Pulliams, who had no use for authority, found themselves drawn into the system.
In 1796, John Pulliam, the head of the family, who had already squatted on farms in Virginia and Kentucky, chose to leapfrog far ahead of the survey, moving across the Ohio through what would become Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as far west as the Mississippi River. Much of this was compacted prairie soil, where tall bluestem grass and wild rye grew taller than a horse’s head, and their roots knotted into an unyielding mass that could not be broken up until John Deere’s heavy, self-scouring steel ploughs were introduced in the 1840s. The Pulliam family was Scotch-Irish, and as stubborn and restless as its eighteenth-century forebears who had swarmed unchecked through the Virginia Piedmont in the 1730s. With their few goods piled in a cart, accompanied by long-legged hogs and some scrawny cattle, the Pulliams and their like settled for a year or two on land beside any creek where there was enough water to produce a stand of timber and slake the animals’ thirst.
Even shallow-rooted elms and sycamores broke up the ground well enough for it to be ploughed and gave timber for making cabins. Along with maples, whose sweet sap in springtime could be boiled into sugar, there were oaks and beeches that produced acorns and mast for the hogs, and hickories like the pecan whose nuts could be pounded to flour or eaten whole, and fruit trees and wild vines carrying ripe cherries and sweet grapes. This produce ensured that the first prairie settlers were timber-dwellers rather than grassland farmers.
Thus far in the process, there was nothing distinctively American about the Pulliams. They shared the freebooting instincts of their equivalents on the Russian steppes a hundred years earlier, the ornodvortsy, and their self-reliant, muddy, bartering, lifestyle. Both were refugees from their own culture rather than its forerunners. But in 1823, when Robert Pulliam, the pioneer’s son, was farming in what would form Sugar Creek, Illinois, 180 miles southwest of Chicago, the deputy surveyor for that district, Angus Langham, arrived with his chainmen and axmen, known in the woodless prairies as “moundmen” because they constructed mounds rather than blazing trees to mark section corners.
On the map Langham provided for the Public Land Survey, Robert Pulliam’s farm was marked as being in Section 21, Township 14 North, Range 5 West, Third Principal Meridian. Beside it was written the letters “AP,” meaning applied for, which showed that Robert was still squatting, as his father had done, but that he had claimed the right of preempting the land when the survey had been completed. Once the claim was entered on the definitive survey map, paid for, and patented, that parcel of prairie, amounting to 480 acres, became private property, whose ownership would be protected by the full force of the law. John Pulliam would have taken pride in defending his claim with a long rifle packed full of black powder and lead shot, but his son understood that a surveyor’s plat carried far more firepower.
Nevertheless, the capital value of the land in Sugar Creek sucked Robert into a larger economy. Borrowing against the value of his original property, he bought another eighty acres on the far side of the creek and began to construct a dam to power a water mill for grinding flour. It might have been the classic transition from land to business, but in 1837 the land market collapsed, the banks called in the Pulliam loan, and his property evaporated.
It reappeared in the hands of people like the shrewd and careful farmer Philemon Stoute Jr., who in 1846 inherited 350 acres from his father, and by 1881 owned twenty-three hundred acres in Sangamon County. Unlike the first settlers, he employed laborers to work his land and invested the profits in quarter-sections that he rented out to tenant farmers. Most of his hired help and tenants were supplied by the families of settlers who had lost their farms following the 1837 slump. Jefferson’s ideal of republican self-reliance was beginning to take on the classic appearance of private property capitalism.
Divided up into squares, the America that reminded the earliest colonists of God and provoked a sensual hunger in later settlers could also be treated by speculators simply as a commodity defined by numbers. A uniform, invariable shape that took no account of springs or hills or swamps was an obstacle to efficient agriculture, but to a financier tracking the rise and fall in land values, it was a great convenience. The grid, designed by Thomas Jefferson to create republican farmers, also turned out to be ideal for buying, trading, and speculating. The consequence was what D. W. Meinig, doyen of twentieth-century American geographers, termed “the most basic feature of the settlement process: That it tended to be suffused in speculation.” The paradox was that most of the speculators were not big-time financiers—though they were there in plenty—but small-time republican farmers.
The legal framework for this dynamic land market was established by two Supreme Court opinions delivered by Chief Justice John Marshall. In the case of Fletcher v. Peck in 1810, he had cleared the way for the owners of real estate to buy and sell their property according to the relatively clear-cut federal laws of contract rather than by the convoluted principles of common law that in England had become burdened with entails, reversions, jointures, indentures, and other legal defenses against the sale of land.
Thirteen years later, in the case of Johnson v. M’Intosh, Marshall confirmed what Jefferson had always asserted, that only the United States government had the right to buy the territory of “dependent nations,” meaning Native Americans, within its frontier, and thereby ensured that a seemingly inexhaustible supply of nationalized land would be available for sale with clear title to new Americans. Taken together, Marshall’s two judgments made it simple to treat a parcel of land as capital, meaning both as a reserve of past earnings and a resource to be exploited in the future.
The land market that was created by the survey and the law had an energy that astonished the young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville when he began to travel across the United States in 1831. “It is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the American rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him,” he wrote in wonder. “It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the Far West he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it: he builds a farmhouse on the speculation that, as the state of the country will soon be changed by the increase of population, a good price will be gotten for it.”
Between May 1800 and June 1820 the United States sold over 13.6 million acres of public lands at an average price of less than $1.70. Once access to markets was established, the value of even “unimproved” land rose by more than five times that figure. The process of clearing trees or breaking the impacted soil of the prairie more than doubled the price of “unimproved” land, and it was this capital gain, estimated at more than two thirds of a farmer’s total capital stock, that provided the economic impetus for the furious rush into newly released public lands. Adding the growth in value to revenue from the sale of crops and livestock, a farmer could expect an estimated 12 percent annual return on his investment in the mid-nineteenth century.
Adam Smith had pointed to the essential role that banks played in realizing the value in land, “by giving credit to the extent of a certain sum (two or three thousand pounds, for example), to any individual who could procure two persons of undoubted credit and good landed estate to become surety for him.” In the United States, this process was accelerated by the speed with which banks opened up after the sale of public lands. The twenty-seven banks that operated in Ohio in 1819 were not exceptional. Altogether the number in the United States rose from 88 in 1811 to 392 in just seven years, with the new Western banks lending and issuing paper money far more aggressively than in the conservative East.
Banks were not the only means of releasing the capital value in land. Probates and inventories of valuables in rural Massachusetts showed that less than twenty years after the 1786 rebellion, when poverty drove desperate farmers to armed resistance, the rising value of their farms allowed them to borrow money to specialize in more profitable dairy farming, to invest in the region’s cotton mills, and to buy shares in turnpikes, bridges, insurance companies, and even in the banks that lent them money. In 1839 the savings bank in Lowell, Massachusetts, revealed that a hundred working women each had more than $1,000 in her savings account. Farming capital was morphing into industrial and commercial investment.
What is striking about the birth of free-enterprise capitalism in the United States is how much it owed to government direction. The basic structure came from the fund of nationalized land released as private property, but the federal government also allocated millions of acres to encourage the spread of railroads, the mining of iron, the development of the lumber trade, and perhaps most interestingly, the growth of public education. The policy that began in Ohio, of reserving one square mile section in every range for education, would finance every kind of schooling from elementary schools through universities, and in particular the unrivalled system of 108 land-grant colleges and universities, stretching from Florida to California, that provided American industry with the largest well-educated workforce in the world. The whole thrust of government intervention was taken further during the crucial decades of the early nineteenth century, when rural capital was firing up the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Under the leadership of the two giants of Congress, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the federal government adopted a policy of planning that combined trade, tax, and spending measures to shape the development of the country’s economy.
A wall of tariffs, imposing duties up to 40 percent on imported goods, was put in place to shield the fledgling American industries growing up around the Public Lands Survey from Britain’s more developed, industrial production. To control the supply of money, a central bank, the Second Bank of the United States, was created in 1816 (the First Bank, set up by Alexander Hamilton in 1791 with a twenty-year charter had been dissolved in 1811); finally a federal investment program was put in place to create an infrastructure of roads, notably the Cumberland Road through the Alleghenies, and canals linking distant producers of wheat and hogs and cotton with their markets in the north and east.
The American System, as Clay named it, to distinguish it from “the British colonial system” of unregulated free trade, represented a new, government-directed form of capitalism. Its shortcomings, particularly the failure to control the cycle of boom and bust, were exploited by Andrew Jackson to bring about its demise in the 1830s, but for twenty years the system had a direct impact on the economic development of the United States by easing the transformation of rural capital into industrial investment. Indeed, its effectiveness created such an impression on one German visitor, the economist Friederich List, that he used the American System as the basis of his program for the hugely successful planned economy of nineteenth-century Prussia.
The conjoined nature of land and credit became obvious in 1819, when the engine of growth abruptly died. Confidence in the clouds of paper money issued by the banks, amounting to sixty-eight million dollars in 1816, suddenly faded. By chance, the public demand for cash coincided with the United States’s need to make its last payment to European banks for the Louisiana Purchase. In an ill-judged move, the new central bank called in silver from its branches and from state banks just as customers were trying to change paper to cash. Unable to meet their obligations, many state banks crashed, causing more panic, the supply of paper money quickly contracted by a third, and sales of public lands collapsed from almost fourteen million dollars a year to little more than one million in 1821.
In its response, the Monroe administration conspicuously did not bail out the banks, but instead took significant steps to safeguard the capital investment of the purchasers of public lands, many of whom had bought on credit. Either the terms were eased, notably by extending the period of payment, or buyers were allowed to keep what land they had paid for and write off the rest. The engine soon fired again, and quickly became a boom producing a surge in sales that earned fourteen million dollars in 1835, almost half the revenues of the United States government. “Who ever heard of a man buying and selling a farm at the same or a lessened price?” an agricultural commentator observed in 1836. “It is so well understood that the seller is to have more than he gave, that it has almost become a settled principle in the purchase of real estate.”
The next year the engine spectacularly blew up once more, before surging again in the 1840s. But despite its seemingly uncontrollable cycle of boom and bust, the power of rural capitalism continued to drive the nation’s headlong expansion into the West. Inseparably attached to it was the relentless spread of government.
In the summer of 1836, at the height of the boom, Caleb Blodgett from Vermont built a log cabin with the help of his sons and some friends, and plowed a hundred acres on some grassy bluffs overlooking the Rock River that marked the western border of Illinois. With this evidence of “improvement,” he and his helpers made squatters’ preemptive claims to some seven thousand surrounding acres. The following spring, Dr. Horace White from Colebrook, New Hampshire, arrived and bought almost one third of Blodgett’s claim, about two thousand acres, on behalf of the New England Emigrating Society for $2,500. As White explained fifty years later, “Purchasers of claims took their chances of being able to hold what they had bargained for. What was paid for in such a case was the chance that the government land office would eventually recognize the claim as valid under the pre-emption laws, and give a patent for it.” Until then, the fourteen settler families had to rely on the unofficial rules of claimants’ associations that based ownership not just on payment but on use and occupancy.
Squashed into three log cabins, they barely survived the first year. In winter the snow blew in through the crevices in the rough-hewn walls, and until the first crops were harvested, the community had to live on what they could hunt and fish, and on barrels of flour carted in on almost impassably muddy tracks. The married women suffered terribly. Worn down by childbirth and breast-feeding, with no respite from the need to farm and pickle, preserve and cook, several died in their thirties during the early years. Lack of food forced the settlers to slaughter an ox used for plowing and send an emergency team to buy a barrel of pork from a settlement downriver.
Yet, looking back over half a century, White could also remember the beauty of the untouched prairie. “Blackberries, strawberries, wild plums, wild grapes, hickory nuts, hazel nuts and black walnuts were to be had for the trouble of gathering them, and as for wild flowers I cannot begin to tell you how the prairies, the woods and the river banks glowed with them,” he told a an audience of students in the 1880s.
During their first summer, the Public Lands Survey mapped Blodgett’s Settlement, locating it inside Section 35, Township 1 North, Range 12 East, Fourth Principal Meridian. Despite their hunger, a delegate from the settlement was promptly sent to the General Land Office in Milwaukee to pay the federal government the purchase price for the land. According to a series of Pre-Emption Acts passed since 1831, the payment conferred a right of ownership until a formal patent could be issued. This was the classic squatter’s progression, adding layer after layer of ownership from occupancy and improvement, through purchase and registration until with the issue of a patent for the land it became official property.
But what was most noticeable about the story of Blodgett’s Settlement, and a thousand frontier communities like it, was the way the survey bound them into a system of democratic government. The surveyors had not only noted their claim but had placed it inside the newly designated Wisconsin Territory, whose federally appointed governor, Henry Dodge, nominated the chief justice, judges, and sheriffs to maintain order, including protection of land records. In 1836, the Blodgett Settlement pioneers registered with the territorial census, in order to be able to vote for a territorial legislature with the power to legislate for frontier needs. On the basis of the census, the territorial government divided the eastern half of the territory into four large counties. This placed the pioneer families of Blodgett’s Settlement in Rock County, and made them eligible to vote for a Board of Commissioners with responsibility for law enforcement and administration of the county.
Thus even before the patent was issued confirming the settlers’ ownership of the their land, and before they had completed the water-driven sawmill that would produce boards so that proper houses could be built to replace the log cabins, the settlement had three layers of government—county, territorial, and federal. By 1840, it also had a federally appointed postmaster, and a year later a county courthouse was being constructed in a place that now preferred to call itself Beloit City. It had taken less than five years for the frontier community of Blodgett’s Settlement to transform itself into a city with a Board of Commissioners, a school district, a federal postmaster, a delegate to the territorial legislature, and a courthouse where prairie flowers and wild plums had grown just a few summers before.
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The importance of the survey to the shape of capitalism and democracy was made vividly obvious by its absence from Kentucky, on the southern bank of the Ohio River. Instead of the simple squares of the Public Lands Survey, real estate there was delineated according to the old English system of “metes and bounds,” that is by reference to natural objects such as streams, boulders, and mountain peaks, a method that gave rise to complex shapes beyond the ability of inadequately trained surveyors to measure accurately. Adding to the confusion, until 1792 the state had existed as a county of Virginia and the land had been used as backing for a mass of financial securities, including treasury bonds, military warrants, and paper money, creating multiple claimants to the same parcels of land. “The titles in Kentucky w[ill] be Disputed for a Century to Come yet, when it’s an old Settled Country,” predicted Uria Brown, a real estate lawyer, in 1816. The resultant turmoil of fraud and corruption prevented any but the wealthy establishing secure title to their property.
In 1820, land with uncertain title could be bought in Kentucky as cheaply as ¢12.5 an acre, and the population, five times that of Ohio in 1800, was now smaller than its neighbor’s. Unable to establish their claims, a steady stream of poorer families, including that of Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham, left the state. As Abraham Lincoln himself explained, their move to Indiana and then Illinois was “partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky.” By 1829, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story concluded that Kentucky’s system of land distribution had virtually broken down, forcing settlers to take land wherever they could, “without any previous survey under public authority, and without any such boundaries as were precise, permanent, and unquestionable.”
For generations, Kentucky was taken as an awful warning of what could go wrong. When Stephen Austin secured Mexican agreement in 1821 to settle Texas, he specifically cited the state’s problems as his reason for measuring out Texan land in rectangles before selling it to would-be settlers. But to some extent the South as a whole suffered the same distortions. From the colonial era, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia had opted not just for metes and bounds surveys, but for a complicated system of registration and patenting ownership that rewarded those with political connections and deep pockets. With independence these characteristics spilled across the Appalachians, and, following the Louisiana Purchase, across the Mississippi. The consequences were far-reaching.
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For obvious reasons, the conventional explanation for the particular nature of Southern society took slavery to be the critical factor. But only 384,000 of the Southern white population of 8,099,760 in 1860 actually owned slaves. And the great majority of owners held fewer than five slaves, not enough to be important economically, and socially significant only after color had come to define the difference between free and unfree. Because of the legal constraints imposed by a slave society, few in the South could escape the influence of the “peculiar institution.” But to judge by editorials in Southern newspapers—almost uniformly hostile to slavery until the 1830s—the support of most Southerners was negligible until in the 1850s slavery started to become a test of Southern identity, and even then in the Appalachians, especially in west Virginia and eastern Tennessee, where slaves were virtually absent, anti-slavery feeling was widespread. At least as important in shaping Southern society was the pervasive economic and social effects of the uneven distribution of land.
By one modern estimate, up to 90 percent of Kentucky’s agricultural land ended in the hands of an elite minority, while the least productive areas were left to mountain farmers, squatters, sharecroppers, and free people of color. When Kentucky’s first historian, Humphrey Marshall, wrote of its foundation, he castigated the corruption that had enveloped its politics. The society that emerged from the chaos of its land distribution was not republican, he declared, but an oligarchy that proved that “those who hold and exercise the governing power . . . will take care of themselves—and by consequence will take care of those who possess a similarity of interest and of feelings.”
When the new federal government attempted to introduce the Public Lands Survey in 1790 to the Southwestern Territory, roughly today’s Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, it proved impossible to measure out the North’s neat squares. Surveyors encountered large swaths of land that had either been allocated under metes and bounds surveys to holders of military warrants and other financial securities, or been sold to state-sponsored land companies, such as the Yazoo Land Company, a consortium of investors who acquired forty million acres in the Yazoo valley from a bribed Georgia legislature. In addition to these frequently absent owners, the surveyors’ plats had to register claims made under Spanish land law and individual deals arranged by speculators with Cherokee and Creek owners.
Despite such difficulties, the most important economic group of immigrants could always be sure of securing title to the property they wanted. When cotton prices doubled in the early years of the nineteenth century, growers in Virginia and the Carolinas started to move in increasing numbers from the exhausted soil in the east to find more productive plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. The cotton planters were accompanied by lines of slaves and long wagon trains carrying furniture and machinery in an undertaking on the scale of relocating an automobile factory today. Such buyers had to be sure beforehand that they had good legal title to the ground, and in 1818, a year after General John Coffee was appointed surveyor-general of Alabama, the Public Lands Office in Huntsville, Alabama, promised customers that it was prepared to “do business on commission . . . [and] give any information to people wishing to purchase an advantage” in return for “a liberal per centum” of the price. Whether the client wished to locate a suitable tract or to engross several different parcels, if necessary by removing squatters, the people in Coffee’s office were prepared to “do business on commission, and receive in pay either a part of the land purchased; or money.”
Unlike the North, with its broad-based access to rural capital, the antebellum South ended up with a vestigial middle-class—just 12 percent of the population owned plantations big enough to employ twenty or more slaves—and a minute elite of barely a thousand families owning gigantic spreads requiring more than one hundred slaves to work them. In 1850, this elite earned almost as much as the rest of the population, an income disparity that would not be repeated until the twenty-first century.
In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase added nine hundred thousand square miles of new territory to the four hundred thousand already in the public domain, giving fresh urgency to the work of the Public Lands Survey. Much of the territory around New Orleans was already measured out in French arpents; further north, on the banks of the Mississippi, more had been surveyed in varas by the Spanish Empire and sold to settlers, including a spread in Missouri to Daniel Boone. But as one outraged surveyor complained after examining land registry records in the Louisiana Territory, “There has been Leaves cut out of the Books and others pasted in . . . the dates have been evidently altered in a large proportion of the certificates. Plats have been altered from smaller to Larger. Names erased and others incerted . . .”
The need for greater authority in the work of the Public Lands Survey led to the appointment in 1803 of a new surveyor-general by the Jefferson administration, Professor Jared Mansfield, formerly head of mathematics at West Point Military Academy. Mansfield chose to align the survey’s squares on a series of precisely drawn north-south lines known as the Principal Meridians, whose path was painstakingly established through celestial navigation, and crossed at right angles by an equally exact east-west baseline.
With these major lines acting as checks, any deviation in the lesser township and section lines run by grunt surveyors, such as those employed by Hutchins, could be easily corrected. The First Principal Meridian, calculated by Mansfield himself, was quite short, forming the state border between Ohio and Indiana, but the longest, the Fifth Principal Meridian, began in Arkansas, and was extended northwards as far as the Canadian border, acting as a control for the survey in Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and most of Minnesota.
Eventually the squares of the Public Land Survey would stretch west from the Appalachians as far as the Pacific Ocean, and from the Mexican border north to Canada. Painstakingly marked out yard by yard and chain by chain by teams of surveyors, they would cover more than three million square miles and represent what must be the largest, homogeneous, man-made structure in history.
During the three decades after the Louisiana Purchase, the history of the United States was marked by national events such as the War of 1812 that threw off the last British influence, the acquisition of Florida followed by the destruction of the Spanish Empire, the election of Andrew Jackson, and the development of a new kind of democracy. In a sense, however, these were merely superficial disturbances to the real history experienced by most Americans, the process that put three-quarters of them in possession of the land that fed, sheltered, and clothed them, and, quite extraordinarily, made many of them wealthy. Until about 1830, sales of public lands rarely amounted to more than a few million acres a year. But between 1830 and 1837, more than fifty-seven million acres were sold, proof of the effectiveness of Jared Mansfield’s squares.
“The possession of land is the aim of all action, generally speaking and the cure for all social evils among men in the United States,” wrote the visiting English writer Harriet Martineau in 1837. “If a man is disappointed in politics or love, he goes and buys land. If he disgraces himself, he betakes himself to a lot in the west . . . If a citizen’s neighbors rise above him in the towns, he betakes himself where he can be monarch of all he surveys.”
It takes a small effort to appreciate how odd her words must have seemed to an English readership that expected the privilege of owning land freehold to be confined to the aristocrat, the squire, and the gentleman. Few Americans would have found anything remarkable in this pattern of land ownership, but to European visitors, used to hierarchical, agricultural societies, it was strikingly foreign.
In one earlier account, John Melish, a political radical who first traveled through the West in 1806, explained to his British readers that the way Americans owned land was the key to their independence of spirit. “Every industrious citizen of the United States has the power to become a freeholder, on paying the small sum of eighty dollars, being the first installment on the purchase of a quarter of a section of land,” he wrote in Travels in the United States; “and though he should not have a shilling in the world, he can easily clear as much from the land, as will pay the remaining installments before they come due.”
Even in the early days, this was optimistic. Not only were office records filled with entries of farmers who had failed to keep up their payments, many began their lives as tenants, renting land until they could afford their own. But Melish was quite clear about the social impact. “The land being purely his own, there is no setting limits to his prosperity. No proud tyrant can lord it over him—he has no rent to pay—no game laws—nor timber laws nor fishing laws to dread.”
In his fascinated exploration of the phenomenon of democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville was drawn again and again to the same factor, the influence of this limitless source of unexploited property on the American character. Across the border, he found French Canadians “closely crowded on a narrow territory” where they held land under seigneurial conditions, and the contrast drove him to conclude, “Other peoples of America have the same physical conditions of prosperity as the Anglo-Americans, but without their laws and their manners; and these peoples are wretched. The laws and manners of the Anglo-Americans are therefore that efficient cause of their greatness which is the object of my inquiry.”
In his experience, no one was immune to the psychological experience of owning land. “It is in America that one learns to understand the influence which physical prosperity exercises over political actions, and even over opinions which ought to acknowledge no sway but that of reason.” As an example, he cited an old acquaintance from France, who in the 1790s had been “a great leveller and an ardent demagogue,” but had undergone a complete change of heart on becoming a wealthy landowner in Pennsylvania, and, to de Tocqueville’s astonishment, talked of “the rights of property as an economist or a landowner might have done.”
Yet somehow in the United States, the unlimited freedom conferred by property rights had not resulted in inequality. The key to it, as de Tocqueville discovered in his exploration of the Midwest’s rough and ready society, was the apparently inexhaustible supply of land. Frontier behavior repelled him, but it did not lessen his respect for the extraordinary nature of America’s egalitarian society.
What the Public Lands Survey created during the tumultuous early nineteenth century was the frontier, a propertied, free enterprise, egalitarian society based on individual ownership of the land. Its spiritual heart came from the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s that gripped westerners in general and frontier people in particular.
The revivalist message of individual salvation they heard from wandering ministers in the backwoods cut across the deference that had been expected from them by Puritan and Presbyterian churches alike. The star preacher was Lorenzo Dow, whose sermons, enlivened by theatrical groans, tortured screams, and shouts of triumph, were anchored firmly in the American tradition of human rather than property rights. “But if all men are born equal,” he cried out, “endowed with unalienable right by their Creator in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then there can be no just reason, as a cause, why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.”
Like the Pilgrim Fathers, the camp meetings fused spiritual and material worlds. Neither faith nor property amounted to anything without individual effort and self-reliance. The personal commitment that Dow and other revivalists called for as the first step on the road to salvation was exactly what the survey’s squares required if they were to become fruitful. Equality was guaranteed by the inexhaustibility of the reward. To win it demanded lifelong dedication, but no one was excluded, either from the endless spiritual bounty or from the unlimited supply of land.
This individualized, democratic form of Christianity was inseparable from the politics that came out of the West at the same time. While most Atlantic states continued to impose high property and wealth qualifications for voting so that the electorate was restricted to less than 10 percent of the white male population, the new Western states immediately admitted a much wider selection of voters. One third of Illinois’s white males voted in 1820, and an electorate of more than one million sent Andrew Jackson to the White House in 1828. By the middle of the century a majority of states had done what would have been unthinkable to the Founding Fathers and removed voting restrictions for white males altogether.
Atlantic society still regarded frontier manners with a mixture of humor and amazement. In 1826, when Congressman Davy Crockett came to Washington from Tennessee, sophisticated journalists in the capital invented a coonskin cap for him and wrote a fake frontier autobiography in which he boasted that he was “fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping-turtle.” By the time Jackson stepped down from the presidency a decade later, frontier values had become the norm. Even the campaign managers of William Henry Harrison, the unmistakably aristocratic Whig candidate, found it an advantage to portray him on election posters in 1840 outside a log cabin with a pipe in his mouth and a jug of hard cider at hand.
Yet this unprecedented, astonishing, rumbustious democracy grew on territory that once belonged to other people. As early as 1789, Henry Knox, Washington’s secretary of war, expressed his regret “that all the Indian Tribes once existing in those States, now the best cultivated and most populous, have become extinct.” During the nineteenth century, that tragedy would be repeated around the globe with different degrees of severity wherever private property spread. Disease and warfare had cleared the Wampanaog and the Yamassee from colonial America. In the United States, Jefferson’s constitutional advice and Marshall’s legal judgments ensured that all federal land taken from Native Americans was acquired by treaty and purchase, but force, actual and threatened, unmistakably played its part. Innumerable wars and skirmishes persuaded Creeks, Seminoles, Blackfoot, Kickapoo, and others to cede their territory. When the federal government overrode legal opinion in 1838 to drive fifteen thousand peaceful, settled Cherokee out of Georgia to a new, unwanted home across the Mississippi in the tragedy known as the Trail of Tears, it underlined the lack of choice open to the original occupants.
For those most distant from the frontier, the astonishing expansion of the United States was seen as something unique—the working out, in the famous phrase coined by New Yorker John L. O’Sullivan of “our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent”—but those closer to the action often used another term.
As early as 1783, General Rufus Putnam, a future surveyor-general of the United States, urged Congress to allow settlers to take up Iroquois land west of the Ohio River as a step “of lasting consequence to the American empire.” In the 1820s, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton spoke of his dream that westward expansion would create an “American empire” stretching to the Pacific. His dream became a reality in 1848 when American troops encamped in Mexico City forced the Mexican government to surrender a territory that included present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado and part of Wyoming under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe–Hidalgo. But in 1859, William Gilpin, the first governor of Colorado, demanded further expansion to north and south in order to encompass Canada and Mexico in “the Republican Empire of North America” and predicted that his state would soon become “the cardinal basis for the future empire now erecting itself upon the North American continent.”
Such talk did not survive the outbreak of the Civil War. It was silenced in the Confederate states by the perception of the conflict as an imperial war directed at their subjugation, and in the North by the prime importance of saving the Union. But whether seen as manifest destiny or empire building, the future expansion of the United States could be easily visualized, so long as the Public Lands Survey continued to Americanize immigrants from every culture by making ownership of conquered territory available to all who wanted it.
The discovery of California gold in 1848 drew people to the far side of the continent, but it was the grid that enabled the country to be settled at such phenomenal speed. In 1854, Deputy Surveyor William Ives began to plot the most westerly of Mansfield’s meridians, the Willamette Meridian that ran north from a point near Portland. Just sixty-six years after Thomas Hutchins’s chainmen took their first westward steps on the banks of the Ohio River, the land survey had reached the Pacific, and in 1855 the land office of Oregon registered a claim from John Potter, married man of Linn County in Oregon Territory, for “320 acres of Land, known and designated in the Surveys and Plats of the United States as Part of Sections 22 & 27 T[ownship] 9 S[outh]. R[ange] 2 E[ast].” Most of the country from the Mississippi to the West Coast remained unsurveyed, but the squares now spanned the continent.
What had been measured out was unmistakably a democracy, and quite clearly a republic, but its foundation was undeniably imperial. And the structure that had made it possible was to be the model for the greatest territorial empire the world had ever seen.