The Land Was Ours Before We Were the Land’s
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A history of America concerning its land, gained in war and diplomacy, would not in itself be a remarkable thing. Andro Linklater has written a history of America that looks at land from a slightly different angle — that of real estate.
“When we shall be full on the [east] side,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, after he had made the Louisiana purchase, “we can lay off a range of states on the western bank from head to mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply.” His language is not that of manifest destiny, nor is it quite martial. Rather, it is one of development. Jefferson knew that land would make his nation rich.
From the beginning, asserts Mr. Linklater in “The Fabric of America” (Walker, 336 pages, $25.95), territory was a source of revenue for the budding American government. After the Revolutionary War, the sale of frontier land served to soak up currency and stave off war debts. At that time, few states knew where exactly they ended, and the stakes for contested lands were high.
Connecticut claimed large parts of northeastern Pennsylvania. Virginia believed it owned a large part of what is now the Midwest, as far as Lake Superior. And Massachusetts was claiming much of upstate New York.
The most acceptable way to resolve such conflicts, in the late 18th century, was astronomy. The surveyor, with his European instruments and his spheroid trigonometry, became a crucial figure in colonial politics, marking out the longitudes and latitudes of a state’s charter in the real world. Until this period in history, most political borders worked on a “metes and bounds” system, using rivers and even large trees to demarcate a government’s jurisdiction. The straight lines of more modern countries required careful math and tedious expeditions — fodder for Mr. Linklater’s storytelling.
But the history of surveyors offers more than anecdote. As Mr. Linklater persuasively argued in his 2002 book, “Measuring America,” a landscape divided into equal squares is ultimately more stable than one dependent on wandering creeks and rolling hills. The patchwork of fields that some associate with the monotony of “flyover” country is, according to Mr. Linklater, a great symbol of rapid economic prosperity, a system of ownership in which land could be easily bought and sold.
It is not a coincidence that Ohio, a neatly surveyed wilderness, quickly outpaced the more motley state of Kentucky. Land that could be neatly delineated was worth more: In 1830 an acre in Ohio cost $5, compared with 12.5 cents in Kentucky. Mr. Linklater quotes Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, to good effect: The family moved to Indiana, Thomas Lincoln said, “partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky.”
A brisk trade in real estate brought revenue to the states and, with the first general U.S. territories, to the federal government, but it meant something more than money to the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, famously a champion of small farmers, specifically cherished the Saxon idea of alodial law. Alodial law maintains that the man who works a piece of land holds it outright. Jefferson believed this idea had been subverted by the Norman system of monarchical ownership. And Mr. Linklater finds ample evidence of squatter’s rights in American history. A frontiersman made his claim, and eagerly awaited the arrival of organized American jurisdiction.
Indeed, Mr. Linklater’s history is one of increasing federal power. A territory had to meet federal standards before it could be admitted as a state, and so the interior became more loyal to federal power than the original 13 colonies. The most exciting episode in this book concerns a plot to break Kentucky and Tennessee off from the union, in collusion with the Spanish government at Natchez. Only the good offices of Andrew Ellicott, Mr. Linklater’s favorite surveyor and perennial hero, prevented the conspiracy, by proving in 1797 that Natchez actually lay within American territory, in modern day Mississippi — as opposed to Spanish Florida. After Ellicott promised the local white landowners that their property — including slaves — would be preserved, the assumption of American jurisdiction was assured.
The delicacy of law — in the form of a treaty or a deed — is Mr. Linklater’s real subject here, though the book goes out of its way to make a larger, and more grandiose claim, about the importance of boundaries at all turning points in our history. Mr. Linklater moves jerkily between the travails of Andrew Ellicott and the more interesting theoretical work defining private property, as pursued by Jefferson or Lincoln.
What emerges, throughout, is the importance of an executive authority that can guarantee ownership. “What made the settlement of the West such an iconic experience was precisely that it took place under the umbrella of the American government,” Mr. Linklater writes. That umbrella is unique, Mr. Linklater argues, noting that it was also the American government that became the global register of Internet addresses, as they were claimed, in a rush, in the last decade.
