How marking territory helped define a nation

FLYING over the central United States, British historian Andro Linklater was struck by the vast, orderly checkerboard of farmland and the towns laid out on grids of north-south and east-west streets. Linklater wondered where all this straightness and squareness came from. The result of his curiosity was his 2002 book, “Measuring America,” in which he showed how 18th century advances in surveying and astronomy, including ways of marking an east-west line (such as Mason-Dixon) on the ground with greater accuracy, promoted a radical new idea of individual liberty, one based on private property. Land, long the stuff of feudal demesnes, could now be owned by masses of ordinary people and bought and sold like any other commodity.

In “The Fabric of America,” Linklater takes this idea one step further. He sets out to debunk Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which held that our national character was formed by the wild, empty spaces into which, for nearly 300 years, pioneers could flee the restrictions of government.

On the contrary, Linklater argues: What made the United States frontier experience different from, say, the Russian or the South American was precisely the role of government in surveying the land ahead of time and providing pioneers clear titles to it -- the basis of their freedom and security. “[E]very new wave of settlers,” he writes, “had a vested interest in introducing government, and law and order, to the wilderness as quickly as possible so that their claims could be recognized as property.”

Such settlers, of course, were presumed to be white. Andrew Ellicott, the master surveyor who is the central figure of “The Fabric of America,” was threatened near Lake Erie by a war party of Senecas, who knew all too well what the penetration of their country by Anglo-Saxons with chains and telescopes meant. And the private property cherished by the yeoman farmers Thomas Jefferson saw as the foundation of American democracy often included slaves as well as land.

If the nation was a paradox, so too was Ellicott. As Linklater describes him, he was an insecure man who made himself into a paragon of honesty and scientific precision. A passionately loving husband, he deserted his family for years at a time to “run” lines through the wilderness. A Quaker who strongly opposed slavery, he found himself, while surveying the border between U.S. and Spanish possessions in 1797, negotiating on behalf of the U.S. government to accept slavery in Mississippi in order to placate landowners tempted to join Gen. James Wilkinson’s plot to split off Kentucky and Tennessee and form a separate empire reaching to Mexico.

In those early years, Linklater reminds us, the federal government was far from the behemoth it is today. It was much weaker than the individual states it professed to unite. What power it had came largely from its control of the Western territories. Such lands could be surveyed, sold to speculators -- George Washington among them -- and taxed to pay off the debts incurred in the Revolutionary War.

Wherever this engine of development went from 1784 to 1820, the year of his death, there was Ellicott. He “ran” the southern, western and northern boundaries of Pennsylvania; surveyed the District of Columbia, lending solid mathematics to Pierre L’Enfant’s grandiose plan for the city of Washington; marked off the 31st parallel, still the boundary between Florida and Alabama; taught surveying to Meriwether Lewis before the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific from 1804 to 1806; instructed a generation of West Pointers who would explore and map the Far West; and traced the U.S.-Canadian border from the St. Lawrence to the Connecticut River.

In 1820, another line on the ground -- the Missouri Compromise line, at 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude, north of which slavery was banned -- expressed in stark if intangible terms the forces that were uniting the country and tearing it apart. Pro- and anti-slavery settlers alike looked to the federal government to uphold liberty as they defined it. But as Abraham Lincoln pointed out in his debates with Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, their definitions were irreconcilable. The Constitution based freedom on private property; the Declaration of Independence based it on the natural rights of human beings. Slaves were both property and people. To free them demanded a reimagining of the very idea of liberty that had inspired America’s westward expansion for three-quarters of a century.

The Civil War and Reconstruction accomplished this task, however brutally and imperfectly. Since then -- and Linklater’s story, once he has finished with Ellicott, tends to wander -- African Americans, various ethnic minorities, women, gays and immigrants have pushed to broaden and deepen freedom within U.S. borders. In contrast, he says, our record of imposing our values beyond them -- from the annexation of the Philippines to the Iraq war -- has been spotty.

Does Linklater succeed in demolishing the Turner thesis, the romantic myth of the Wild West? Its very persistence argues that he has not. Americans are ambivalent about government rather than simple-mindedly for or against it; the settlers who welcomed a mechanism to file land claims no doubt had a different opinion when the tax collector showed up.

But Linklater is on firmer ground when he describes the U.S. frontier not primarily as a wall keeping out such bad things as the terrorism and illegal immigration that alarm us today but as the rim of a great crucible wherein American values have evolved. “The intrinsic strength of any boundary,” he writes, “is what lies behind it.” Linklater shrugs off fellow historian Samuel P. Huntington’s fear that Mexican immigrants threaten our national identity: “[T]he unparalleled commitment to democracy and individual liberty, and the values of inclusion, for which so much blood was spilled, have proved capable of creating Americans from every nationality under the sun.”

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Michael Harris is a critic and the author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”