What is history if not a “survey” and historians chain-bearers?
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? —Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
History records that in 1763 two guys surveyed a demarcation line separating Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as bits of Delaware and West Virginia. The surveyors were Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. It took them five years to separate the south boundary of Pennsylvania from Maryland.
The question is why, and the answer is a border dispute which had led to an eight-year conflict of competing interests which resulted in Cresap’s War.
And all because of less than precise boundary definitions.
The two colonies were confused because the original surveyors goofed. The 40th parallel, which was supposed to be the border line, was north of Philadelphia which placed that lovely city of brotherly love within Maryland where, as we all know, it doesn’t belong.
Pennsylvania wasn’t buying and created a county that extended into Maryland.
This little-known story in American history erupted into bloodshed within an area west of the Susquehanna River.
The solution to the dilemma came when the Calvert and Penn families combined to pay for the Mason-Dixon line to be surveyed.
It’s more these days a “trivia” question, but it is interesting to note that the colonies never actually declared war, but in 1768 signed a peace treaty which promised no more tumult.
The border was settled 15 miles south of the City of Brotherly Love and became binding in 1750 when the Mason and Dixon “line” became official after four years of meticulous surveying.
Equally interesting is the means by which the line became an imaginative division between north and south which might not seem very much except the boundary became the differentiating point between slave and free states and/or territories.
Imaginatively, then, the line also separates the north and the south culturally, shall we say; take one step across the line and one arrives in the land of Dixie and the Confederate States and the name of a musical group, the Dixie Chicks.
The term these days is an approbation, complicated by the fact that if at one time a train from the north traveled south and across the Mason-Dixon Line, the train was obliged to stop to allow African-American travelers to remove themselves from the front of the train to the back of the train, which meant segregation and Jim Crow at its finest.
A line, then, that exists in the American imagination as a “surveying” symbol and, presumably, leading to the Congressional debates on the the Missouri Compromise and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 and a fine novel by Thomas Pynchon.
By Way Of Introduction
Any person who writes chortles with delight to stumble across a notion that becomes an extended metaphor, which if used properly offers a variety of facets illustrating subject matter in different ways even if the subject matter varies from, say, the usual boundaries of home sites to a “surveying” doctoral dissertation on Henry James by an internationally unknown scholar.
Consider, then, the term “chain-bearer,” a reference to the person who at one time would carry the chains used to measure land and also a term in use since 1736, at least according to to the OED. The “chain” was 66 feet in length, which according to custom was subdivided into 100 links, ten chains to a furlong, 80 chains to a statute mile. Ten square chains equaled a plat of land for one acre, and from which a chain-bearing survey of 640 acres would equal one square mile.
Such a simple little thing, this chain which “surveys,” but which leaves one wondering if the United States would have had states with counties and counties with townships or train routes or highways or subways or baseball fields or farm steads or housing developments without a measuring chain of 100 links, a compass, and a couple of standard poles.
Consider also for a moment the word “survey,” which is usually thought of as a scientific record of an area of land which allows the construction of a map. Other than size in feet, yards, rods, and even miles, the map is usually topographic, giving “the map-reader” some notion of hills and rills and streams, ponds, lakes, and landmarks of one kind or another.
Easy to understand and necessary since good boundary fences make for good neighbors… which someone once said.
Consider, though, something else….
The Ubiquitous Anthology, A Literature Survey
My understanding is that the Norton publishing house has at least 20 anthologies on their book list. An anthology is a “survey” with headnotes by an editor and often with more than one volume. Call those editors “chain-bearers.”
Such a survey is put to use in what are called academic “Survey Courses.”
What does such an anthological “survey” offer?
The Norton Anthology Of American Literature Pre-1865 makes note that such is a diverse collection of innovative resources to tackle today’s teaching challenges or so argues the tenth edition. Each new edition presents a significant revision which leads to criticisms including small print on very thin “onion skin” paper. If one owns an argument however, on the need to perpetuate a canon, revisions suggest established authors are too represented which leads to “omitting” voices and perspectives from marginalized groups. So a survey is re-surveyed and then re-re-surveyed.
And the result is marginalized groups are represented under rubrics like “Black Literature: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance.”
Here’s a case in point.
There’s an American Literature anthology I used for many years, American Literature, The Makers and the Making, edited by Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, no mean group of American major figures. The aim is American literary/intellectual history which includes a sub-selection titled “Black Literature: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance” and includes Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, W. E. B. Dubois, and James Wendell Johnson. [*]
As with all anthologies, there are headnotes. In this case, then, the editors ask the reader, the enrolled student, to consider an historical moment since the race problem has a context in history: the world of the American Negro following the Civil War and into which the “slave” was freed was one of physical ruin.
But with this caveat to the reader:
For the white Southern American, the world was one of despair, resentment, southern stoicism, and outraged pride. And maybe so. There are pick-up trucks still meandering around the South Carolina country-side flying the Confederate flag and there is in South Carolina a Confederate Memorial Day.
What’s interesting in the headnotes is what follows, a survey by some presumed authority:
For the blacks, it was one of freedom, opportunity, and the promise of joy.
That’s a “survey,” is it not?
The paragraph that follows needs to be quoted in length:
The blacks, however, had little preparation for that world. In the life of a slave there was not much need for self-discipline, planning, focused ambition. Now, merely to move, to set foot in the big road, to walk away—that was the most obvious mark of freedom and the country was full of wandering blacks, tasting their freedom, jubilating, simply on the move, living off of what came to hand or on the handouts from the victorious troops. But when the chance came, we find the touching picture of blacks, even the very old, sitting before some Yankee schoolmarm and puzzling over the blue-back speller. And during the Reconstruction, in the state governments, and elsewhere, a number of black officials and law-makers proved to be intelligent and high-minded men.
So, editors Brooks, Lewis, and Warren told the truth, mainly; if the above is not true, however, have our anthologists perpetuated a lie and thoughtlessly perpetuated a stereotype?
Is it a “surveying” truth that in the “Life of a slave there was not much need for self-discipline, planning, focused ambition”?
And how would I know?
There was one black girl in one of my survey classes when I last used this anthology. After class, she approached me, asked me to read the paragraph, and then said to me that what was in the paragraph was not true and that I would have to do something about it.
I began to work on it for her sake and for mine, for my conscience.
Why?
Because here was a bright student who would not integrate herself into what the text surveyed culturally, and which required her conscience to segregate herself from what the text “surveyed,” culturally and morally.
And so what is the truth?
Is such a concern because editorial choices suggest bias and thus serious concern for the editorial process?
Perhaps the “chain-bearing” slaves, if their voices could be summoned, would “sound” a different “surveying” truth.
The Pilgrims Arrive With Their “Mayflowering”
Consider for another moment and in time, 1620. The Pilgrims have arrived and are “surveying” their awkward “whereabouts” which they agree will require a charter, a covenant to which they pledge themselves in a 200 word document that “surveys” their circumstances.
I would suggest that this moment in time is a major event in world history and which one might argue is a fascinating mix of testing and energy and even creativity.
And it’s symbolic, this word, this “mayflower” standing for hope and new beginnings confronted, however, by a wilderness so immense.
Did you know that Clint Eastwood is a descendant of William Bradford?
The purpose of the “survey”?
To preserve order and to create a unique body politic for the purpose of forming a government and to which the signers organize themselves into a “civil” body politic pledging one and all to abide by laws and regulations for the general good of the colony.
Not to be too facetious but it seems to me to be the origin of what is known these days as an HOA.
What is the document other than a “survey” with ground plans necessary before the actual “platting” and the new contrasted with the old.
1630 And The Puritan Arrival
But consider also, for another moment, 1630, John Winthrop on board the Arbella and his “survey” just before he and his fellow settlers would set about creating a manifest work of the spirit, this colony which would be “platted” differently from the rest of the world, and measurably so.
By name and title, “A Model of Christian Charity.” And its intention is to educate the colonizers as to God’s plan.
A sermon, of course, which was intended to inform the establishment and governance of the Massachusetts Bay Colony which included policies toward religious dissent but would also require a collective effort which meant prioritizing unity, love and charity, and, yes, experiencing God’s wrath should the community fail to live up to this “surveying” ideal.
But it’s also a bit more than that. This group, much larger than the Pilgrim colony, was also a corporate colony which is a “joint-stock company” with a corporate charter which allowed them to govern as a corporate entity which meant in turn that the colony was to be run like a business with share holders and a board of directors.
Is there more?
Like most businesses, this corporation required a “brand” which when “surveyed” was immediately recognized and which resonates even to this day: A City Upon A Hill. The branding “surveying” phrase, loaded with implications,” defines the belief that this business had a divine mission to create a society based on Christian principles.
And they were immigrants who owned a vision for what they believed would become a “redeemer” colony “platted” which means again expectations and even derived from Jesus’ teaching of salt and
light which also meant comparing the new with the old, and the new intended to become unique, exceptional, and inspiring, but all of which would require a certain like-mindedness and exceptional solidarity: commitment to the “survey.”
Chain-bearers, then, Winthrop and his chain-bearing Puritans and others albeit less land surveyors but still mapping out a shape to make the land ours and this, as Robert Frost says, “before we were the lands.”
Fundamental Orders
I suspect the framers of our Constitution did not have Winthrop’s sermon in mind as they developed their own “survey,” but they were surely aware of Hooker’s 1639 “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut” which sought out a more universal form of suffrage allowing the “we the people” of Connecticut the God-given right to choose their own magistrates. What is it other than an early “survey” of our American republic in matters of governance, and thus another “plat” defining what would become fundamental to our constitutional order and Hooker and his congregation of chain-bearers.
Which brings one to the question as to whether Bradford and Winthrop and Hooker would recognize the American City Upon A Hill today or would they argue that the people, the citizens, have so dealt falsely with God in this undertaking that Winthrop bequeathed as to so cause God to withdraw “his present help” such that our story is no longer an admirable “byword throughout the world” and absent dutiful chain-bearers committed to what’s larger than ourselves.
Likewise Hooker with his “Fundamental Orders” and Bradford with the Pilgrim compact.
Why mention this?
Well, in some respects, as Winthrop “surveys” he’s offering a founding document which gives “the people” a common goal to achieve and bind their fate together and all again “branded” with that byword phrase: A City Upon A Hill.
Of course it’s not the same as a compass, a chain, and a pole.
Recently, however, certain byword phrases will have also offered a “survey” meant to be a common goal and to achieve, well, to achieve something: Make American Great Again or Restoring and Strengthening our Democracy. But it’s somehow not the same unless the “same” was what the public relations people refer to as “branding” and intending to influence public perception. History records other such “surveys” including The New Freedom, The New Deal, The Great Society, The New Covenant, and so on….
Cheap At Any Price
The background here is the Louisiana Purchase and then the Treaty of Ghent which set the northern boundary at the 49th parallel. It took about two decades and fifteen million dollars before it came into being as a wilderness so immense, albeit largely un-organized, un-surveyed. To study this illustration, however, is to understand an event of great importance, a blessing and a destiny. This illustration is also overlaid with the outline of what became in time the lower forty-eight, states organized from unorganized territory.
Consider for a moment the lower north-west corner of Minnesota. In time a portion would be annexed into a state and then counties and counties into townships.
If I could place an ink dot on one spot in the lower southwest corner of Minnesota that would become for me a survey of part of my family history which in turn is part of a larger history both of which constitute a “survey.”
My home state of Minnesota became a territory in 1849 organized from unorganized areas formerly within Iowa and Wisconsin territories as well as part of North and South Dakota and even Nebraska .
I like the phrase organized from unorganized and since the process has to have been from “surveying.”
Sadly, according to some, the Minnesota territory was reduced in size when the Nebraska portion became the Nebraska territory: that in 1854.
But more was afoot.
Minnesota became the 32nd state in 1858 but reduced in size once again when the western portion of the territory was assigned in 1861 to the Dakota Territory which gave the state of Minnesota a western border largely north to south with the Red River to a bit south of Lake Traverse where for some reason the Red River becomes the Minnesota River traversing southeast leaving the rest of the border a straight south line to the Iowa border and where the whole thing then makes a ninety degree straight line turn to the east.
And there is something odd about all of the organizing what was unorganized. On the northern side of the Lake of the Woods is something called the “Northwest Angle” also known as the Walleye Capital of the World. People take pride in such as one might find on t-shirts.
Here’s the point because it’s a geographic anomaly and came about because of a map-making error and due to an incorrect understanding of the source of the Mississippi River. In fact, said Northwest Angle isn’t even connected to the rest of the country what with no “land mass.”
Which brings into question map-making and how maps are made from surveys. And I’m curious as to why so many straight lines although I am aware that much of this has to do with latitude and longitude and attempts to create states of roughly equal size which might have been an attempt to prevent secession. Jefferson, for example, thought that the underlying principle should be that all states would be created equal and as if a grid could be impressed upon the landscape.
As for my state, the story is that as settlers moved into the state petitions were made asking the legislature to create new counties organizing what was unorganized through surveys. There are now 87 mostly grid-like counties. The question as to how a county is surveyed and organized is a good one and the answer is that a river might well be a natural border but more often then not a county border is just straight lines incorporating a set number townships which are subdivisions within a county.
Ultimately, however, it could also be a population issue which also means a taxation issue.
On the other hand, borders must be surveyed and the townships inside those borders must also be surveyed and if I might add to my thesis in this here essay, what’s inside those surveyed borders is history; a survey is thus a metaphor and for some a family history.
The metaphor intrigues me.
Suppose you are traveling along Interstate Highway 90 which crosses southern Minnesota for 276 miles while running parallel to the Iowa state line. Tired, you look for a place to stop and rest. The Windom, Minnesota, Quality Inn has four stars and they suggest that the best place for a meal is at Duffy’s. You drive around for a bit and notice the historical society has a museum close by and still open.
You drop in for a look-see.
In a glass case there’s a plat book open to some county plat maps. It’s curious because the shape of each county is nearly a 4 x 5 rectangle made up of squares called “townships” and inside each township is a square 6 x 6. And what’s more curious then is that each square equals a square mile which means a township is made up of 36 square miles and each square contains 640 acres.
The mind boggles for a moment or so because those acres are also divided and each division is marked with a nice piece of handwriting and each division has a name and the name is that of the person who owns the land or in some cases owned by a railroad company or a land company.
Consider the following for a moment which is a portion of section 18 of Amo Township in Cottonwood County.
And there are what appear to be monopoly pieces, churches and schools. But closer study suggests that all of those acreage plats are farms.
Remember, then, my comment about the ink dot on the Louisiana Purchase.
On the corner of number 18 on this plat map and just beneath that is a name, James Sundahl, my grandfather. He was a Norwegian immigrant who left Norway at age 16 arriving first in northern Iowa where he was a laborer for few years which with his savings allowed him to buy 80 acres in Cottonwood County in southwestern Minnesota and with those acres his dream of owning the finest herd of Holstein dairy cows. And he set about that dream on those 80 acres and this in 1896. In time, then, he purchased the adjacent 160 acres from L. L. Parker and again in frugal time purchased across the road 80 acres from H. A. Roberts and 80 acres from the First National Bank of Ceylon. The farm, then, totaled 400 acres of prime Minnesota farm land.
Subsequent land plat surveys illustrate the evolution of my grandfather’a farm which he would also own in the southwest corner of number 19 inside of which would one day own a school house monopoly piece and by name, “Sunnyside.”
What’s interesting is that the farm neighbors the acreage of Torris Bondhus, the same Torris Bondhus my grandfather’s neighbor back in Norway.
And the little monopoly piece marked church in Torris’s farm land is Amo Lutheran Church with grave markers and a plethora of Scandinavian names including my grandfather’s and, yes, Torris Bondhus buried in neighborly proximity.
There’s small town weekly newspaper, The Storden Times; there’s an issue on the front page remarked with the headline, “The Last of the Pioneers.” As it was, my grandfather died and within a few hours Torris Bondhus died. Their funerals were held at Amo Lutheran back-to-back and interred equally so.
Thomas Jefferson would call these folk “yeoman farmers” and in whom he placed faith; they worked their own land but neighbored with others. They were the key to part of the social structure at the time embodying values like hard work and self-sufficiency.
They were called “family farms”and those families formed the basis of republican values and when organized became a political force.
It’s a survey, is it not?
Organizing What Was Unorganized
These days the tools are high tech with names like “Topcon” which is a digital laser. There are also magnetic locators with names like “Smart-Trak” and sell for $688.00. And there’s rebar and rebar caps.
Time was, however, when surveying tools would have been level compass sights on a wooden leveling tripod with a plumb bob and either a chain or a 100 foot open reel tape. The chain would have been again 66 feet in length with 100 chain lengths. Some English clergyman math guy invented the thing which was used until another guy invented a theodolite.
The stuff worked this way: from the placement of the compass at a starting marker the chain would be stretched a distance equal to 66 feet and marked by a perch or a pole at distances of 16.5 feet and each of those distances called a “rod.”
It’s in the Bible.
The point is, however, that in 1785 Congress passed the Land Ordinance Act which prevented lands apart from the original states to be sold for settlement without first having been surveyed which meant in turn by a survey dividing the land into areas of six sections which would define a township and interestingly one portion of a section would be designated as a school section which would have names: Shady Nook, or Red, White, and Blue, or Red Rock Ridge
What follows in time is the Homestead Act.
That 1862 law which provided 160 aces of federal land to anyone who would agree to farm the land which in turn transferred millions of acres of “federally surveyed” land to varieties of settlers.
Some native Americans suffered since much of the land was taken by the government and sold to the settlers.
And there’s politics. The idea was floated prior to the War Between the States as part of the Free Soil policy of northerners who wanted individual farmers to own their own farms but opposed by southern slave owners who wanted to buy much larger tracts of land as plantations and rather than farming themselves use slave labor thereby shutting out free white farmers who would farm land themselves.
In time other problems emerged since in the far west available 160 acre land plats were not enough to “til”; the land was better fitted to ranching which then required an amendment which granted larger 640 homestead acres.
Some Personal “Surveying”:
But there’s more to this extended metaphor, this “chain-bearing,” as in personal “surveying” in which I “bore” the chain one link at a time.
I have had occasionally and frustratingly made at optimum times “surveys” of the ten thousand pages (likely more) of the Internal Revenue Code the purpose of which was to find information to explain to an IRS agent the tax code, chapter and verse as the code applied to me and why my “chain-bearing survey” offered the legal basis as to why I didn’t owe back taxes.
The “survey” which I last made again and again was conducted over a period of two years before a letter arrived and in which the introductory sentence read, “Good news; you owe no taxes!” And, yes, punctuated with an exclamation mark.
I daily “survey” the financial news but have given up the political news since the “ survey” would vector into an abyss.
I can also say that over numerous semesters I happily taught “survey” courses of The Great Books, happily admiring those “chain-bearing greats.” What a “survey” that Dante made!
And in my retirement I am writing a memoir, a sort of “survey” of a life that in honesty owns some regrets and about which I am careful to protect names. Portions of that memoir have been published here, in The Imaginative Conservative.
I have been and still am a “chain-bearer.”
Consider this, however, before moving on.
In the Salem, Massachusetts library one can find and “survey” Joseph Barlow Felt’s Annals of Salem or if not Salem travel on-line to the Internet Archive which allows for an on-line “survey.” What’s curious is the archived library card at the Salem Library which allows one to see who has checked the volumes for personal use. There are numerous entries in Felt’s Annals including one about man named Endicott who cuts up a British flag, And another entry about a law passed requiring a first offender charged with adultery to wear on his or her clothing the letter “A” in different colored cloth. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s name is on that library card and his “survey” led to a fine short story and a very famous American novel.
The book was returned on time.
If we let the imagination wander for a bit, well, Nathaniel in the process of checking the volumes, chatting with the librarian, and then home to browse and, lo, discover in the “surveying suggestive germs worthy of imaginative plunder” and his transmutations which gives the scholar opportune ideas as to how Hawthorne made literary use from early American history. There’s an MA thesis in there somewhere.
And what is history if not a “survey” and historians chain-bearers?
The Surveyor Hall Of Fame
Thomas Jefferson owned a brass and copper theodolite which in itself is a lovely piece of art work. It’s at Monticello and we know that Jefferson used the tool to survey his own lands and to determine the elevation of some of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
More on Jefferson in a bit but where’s the physical detail that leads to the metaphor which leads to the extended metaphor?
Well, again as part of the surveying process, one person was assigned the responsibility for laying out a length of chain, a line, straight and true. Such a person was also “sworn in” since to manage land holdings which was one of the fundamental issues as to what land ownership meant under the Constitution also meant that a “surveyor” could be called into court to testify. Thus there’s something more to this than simply laying out a sixty-six foot chain by placing first a ranging rod, a colored pole in the ground as an originating point from which the chain would then be laid out straight by the chain-bearer who would then place a pin in the ground at the end of the chain and then repeat until the destination rod would be reached.
The surveyor would note how many lengths of chain had been laid from which it was a simple matter to make a scale diagram. But the point was ownership with numerous implications including economy. Most “surveys” included descriptions of what was on the land which would suggest water rights, mining rights, and even lumbering rights.
Which Brings Us To James Fenimore Cooper
Perhaps few know that The Chainbearer is the the title to a James Fenimore Cooper novel which in itself is a “survey.” It’s not an easy read. Cooper’s attempts at dialect, features of speech presumably selected to reflect American linguistics, challenges one’s ability to make good sense and thus a difficult read filled with what another American novelist referred to as “Cooper’s literary offenses.”
And that was of course Mark Twain where in his own “surveying” he wrote a book or two in which he told the truth, mainly.
Here’s a more of less readable passage by the narrator of Cooper’s novel who carries the burden of abstract principles argued not long after the murders of Chainbearer and Thousand Acres. The issue concerns the sense of the expansion west through first the measuring and second the legal or illegal acquisition of land by the westward movement of civilization. The point being that those who carry the measuring chains are those who help civilization grow from the wilderness vis-a-vis “surveying” which depends upon accuracy. The problem that follows, however, is that this new civilization, ever expanding, used force in order to lay claim to these western lands.
Of course there’s also a love story.
And here’s the long paragraph:
There lay the two victims of the false principle that the physical condition of the country, connected with its passive endurance of encroachments on the right, had gradually permitted to grow up among us. Squatting was a consequence of the thinness of the population and of the abundance of land, the two very circumstances that rendered it the less justifiable in a moral point of view; but which, by rendering the one side careless of its rights, and the other proportionable encroaching had led, not only to this violation of law, but to the adoption of notions that are adverse to the supremacy of law in any case. It is this gradual undermining of just opinions that forms the imminent danger of our social system; a spurious philanthropy on the subject of punishments, false notions about personal rights, and the substitution of numbers for principles, bidding fair to produce more of the most important revolution that has ever yet taken place on the American continent. The love of real liberty, under such circumstances, should never forget that the road to despotism lies along the borders of the slough of licentiousness even when it escapes wallowing in its depths.
It’s an easy enough point to consider. One person has acquired a very large piece of land early in American history either through colonial grant or through a haggling purchase from one or more native tribes.
Squatters take up residence on the far western reaches of this very large property with the argument that they have a “right.” Which is either legal or not. If not, well, squatting is licentiousness.
So, it exists; the land is there but has not been “surveyed,” measured, platted. When that process begins to occur in time, as the novel makes clear, well, “squatters” are discovered who make their living cutting down the abundance of trees and with a saw mill making the trees into lumber, into boards floated down river to market.
But the trees do not belong to the squatters and thus neither does the lumber.
Cooper was never short on chain-bearing words or chain-bearing sentences or long chain-bearing paragraphs freighted with literary offenses. There are, however, some key words to these chain-bearing encroachments: squatting, abundance of land, adverse to the supremacy of law, gradual undermining, danger to our social system, spurious philanthropy, false notion of personal rights, road to despotism, borders of the slough of licentiousness and so on.
Both for the novel and the surveyor hall of fame, however, the chain-bearers do not make for a large membership but those enshrined are well known: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Charles Mason, Jeremiah Dixon, and a litany of those less known: Andrew Ellicott, Benjamin Banneker, David Rittenhouse, Thomas Hutchins, and John Charles Fremont.
George Washington Surveys His Turnip Garden
There are maps attributed to Washington made after he learned his lessons in geometry; one is a practice survey of a turnip garden. Practice you see. And thus his idea to become a surveyor as a profession.
One example is interesting in as much as King Charles II deeded five million acres to a group of his supporters among whom members of the Fairfax family. Point then being something like this: settlers moving into the Fairfax area needed to acquire a “survey warrant” from what was called the Proprietary Office. The warrant would be for a set amount of acreage in a specific location. Therefore the surveyor would be obliged to make a just and true survey determining and “making” lines that would “plat” and thus limit boundaries. “Plat” in this case is a cadastral map drawn to scale and with distance and bearing between section corners and often with topographic and vegetation information. Such a map would identify and delineate individual claims which would also serve as a basis for issuing titles.
Records indicate Washington conducted nearly 200 such surveys which denoted for him an official role but one could easily enlarge to suggest that Washington gained intimate knowledge of the country and a sort of formal training not only for his military career but also his political career and his maps a ground plan necessary for what America would become once it was surveyed and such surveys present in the country’s founding documents.
Call it practical knowledge but call it also service to his country, decades of service and a faithful counsel to the people as their president.
His Farewell Address: Washington Surveys Political Parties
The office of president took its toll on Washington who became anxious for a peaceful retirement. Politics had become grueling; the Democratic-Republican party opposition was relentless in vilifying Washington who was non-partisan;
The issue became exasperating throughout most of his second presidential term which when nearing its end led him to compose with help from Madison his Farewell Address published in newspapers. The issue was the divide between Hamilton and Jefferson both of whom in their own “surveying” owned profoundly different surveying views as to how America would be “platted” and according to very different economic philosophies Both were vigorous in advancing their own interests and those interests included loyalty to a party which Washington thought could interfere with the system of checks and balances.
Thus, as Washington “surveyed ” the political landscape, his particular interest was political parties which he believed the bane of republican government. The “surveying” party lines and boundaries that were forming, Washington believed, were “factions” which he thought would disrupt the separation of powers. Factional strife, he argued prudently, could lead to despotism even if informal.
But why?
Very simply, as he “surveyed history” if disorder and misery developed in time, factionalism would gradually incline the minds and hearts of the American population to seek security by imposing absolute power in an individual. He cautioned especially against three interrelated dangers that threatened to destroy the Union: regionalism, partisanship, and foreign entanglements. But his larger concern of the three was regionalism in which regional loyalties would overwhelm national attachments. “The name of America…must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”
At this time, and in the few decades to follow, most Americans primarily identified with their state or region and about which Washington argued that such attachments could serve to divide Americans more so by designing men who would work to convince them that differing local interests made the Union both unworkable and unnecessary.
Perhaps his “surveying” caution about factional parties maintains some relevance yet today.
And there’s some foresight when, as he “surveys,” he argues that in union lies strength; Union is the main pillar in the edifice of real independence, “the support of … tranquility.” His worrisome point is that the north and the south and what will become the west must develop harmonious interests lest the union fail to develop a community of interests as one nation.
A Brief Judicial Survey: Our First Vice President Becomes Our Second President, And Our First Secretary of State Becomes Our Third President
So, when it comes to 1796, and against Washington’s wishes and not mentioned in the Constitution, two political parties emerged and around which many Americans began to align themselves with one or the other.
What was the point?
It’s an interesting “survey.”
So, again, John Adams, Washington’s Vice President is elected president in 1796 and under the banner of the Federalist Party and opposed by Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia based Democratic-Republicans. The campaign issues were strident but if surveyed, well, the Eastern Federalist favored a strong “centralized” governing system and a national bank which becomes a catalyst to the partisan split.
Adams’1776 Thoughts on Government is notable and in which one finds his “survey” on three branches of government: executive, judicial and legislative and which we know is a system of checks and balances.
His “survey” gains interest when we understand that in response to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Adams rejects the idea of single legislative body arguing that such could become tyrannical.
So, the two parties owned differences in their surveying values.
We know the Federalists argued a for more broad understanding of the Constitution and what was called the doctrine of implied powers. The party’s stronghold was New England. The argument? It depends upon who is “surveying.” On one hand, there’s the notion that the Constitution is a bit elastic and “implies” that there are powers granted to the federal government not explicitly stated in the document. Consider the surveying court case McCulloch v Maryland and whether the federal government, in this case the congress, has the power to establish a a national bank albeit the Constitution owns no language mentioning the power to create a national bank.
The Democratic-Republican party, the party of Jefferson, denounced most of the Federalist policies especially the implied powers interpretation of the Constitution to which a Bill of Rights needed to be added and also an argument that states had the right to nullify federal laws and acts, a sort of catch all included in the 1791 Tenth Amendment.
In other words, early in this “survey” of the American political landscape was an argument as to whether or not the states should have the power to govern themselves in areas not specifically outlined in the Constitution. For Jefferson, unlike Adams, the idea was that a social compact existed among the various states giving them a significant degree of autonomy and that the federal government could carry out only those “enumerated” expressly granted powers stated in the Constitution and which were understood to have been ceded to the national government.
And as we all know the concept was later led to tension which led to the War Between The States
So, as far as a “survey” is concerned, unlike Washington’s two presidential terms, the presidencies of Adams and Jefferson began the first “survey” of what the Constitution said or didn’t say and the arguments both for and against a strong federal government favoring banks as opposed to Jefferson’s party which favored states rights and an agrarian economy.
Thomas Jefferson: Surveyor And Nation-Builder
He created the Public Land Survey System. So, on a airline flight over the middle of the “fly-over”country and clouds permitting, look down and what one can see is land divided into square areas but also with meridians and base lines which cause many of the states to be rectangular or often close to rectangular. Consider Iowa , for example, with straight baselines to the north and south but bounded by rivers on the east and west.
The problem for Jefferson was what to do with 827,000 square miles of land purchased from France in 1803. I don’t think he had in mind a college or a law school within that college but he did have in mind a corps of discovery. And so two other surveyors who venture into the newly acquired western portion of the country which meant up the Missouri River, across the divide and eventually coming to the Columbia River and “lo” the Pacific Ocean.
All in six months, and by name Lewis and Pike.
It’ one of the great stories in American History but the journals make it one of the truly great adventure stories in American Literature.
And for what purpose?
To declare and place American sovereignty over that huge piece of land. And which was at that time, un-surveyed, un-platted, and yet to be made into territories and yet to be made into states, and yet to be divided north and south with that east/west dividing line, “The Mason Dixon Line.”
And so unknown, no Oregon Trail and no Mormon caravans making their way to the Great Salt Lake basin.
Unknown and un-organized.
Imagine then when on November 7, 1805, the expedition sights for the first time the Pacific Ocean which means one yarn-like thread knitting east to west, tenuous, of course.
And then the return, the final leg, during which Lewis is accidentally shot through the flesh of his buttocks which Lewis describes as a most memorable episode in a chapter of accidents, August 11, 1806, and the very careless Pierre Cruzate.
The chapter is very long and a narrative of close calls including July 15, 1806 when McNeal broke his musket by clubbing a grizzly bear. Or the dramatic moment in which Lewis climbs to the top of Tavern Rock slips and manages to escape a long fall with the help of his knife after which he adds his name among the pictographs at Tavern Cave.
How one wishes there had been a movie camera crew toddling long behind, a very early “Movie-Tone.”
And in time the faithful paddlers receive a boisterous welcome by the citizens of St. Louis having given the explorers up for dead.
What did they accomplish?
What was uncharted became charted with maps of new rivers, mountains and of course land. The survey records information about Native American tribes as well as numerous new plant and animal species which argues for a significant scientific understanding of the region while politically solidifying the United States’ claim to the Louisiana Purchase territory which in turn began a process of shaping not only the United States but established a westward focus as settlers made their westward migration.
The east not forsaken but now a “jumping off place.”
All of this recorded in journals which intimately are also stories enough to fire the American imagination. Noting for the moment how various legs of the journey proved difficult including crossing the Bitterroot Mountain Range, the harrowing Lolo Trail, frostbite, hunger, dehydration, bad weather, freezing temperatures, and exhaustion.
Stumbling, then, upon a tribe of friendly Nez Perce Indians, the travelers regain their health, build dugout canoes, brave the Clearwater River rapids, then to the Snake River, and then to the Columbia and again finally the Pacific Ocean in November where after a hard winter they began their journey home. We know that on July 25 Clark carved his name and date on a large rock formation near the Yellowstone River.
The residue?
An electrified nation and my grandfather’s farm.
The Complicating Fact
The complicating fact at one time, of course, was the land itself, virgin forest, hills and dales and rivers and streams. Two tools were again the only usual ones available: the chain and the surveyor’s compass. I should mention there’s a very fine book on this subject by Dan Patterson and Clinton Terry titled Surveying in Early America: The Point of Beginning, An Illustrated History.
The book’s thesis is that surveying was the primary means to build the American nation while arguing that surveying was not only an historical practice but also a cultural and political practice, i.e., the primary means used to build the nation which in itself is a metaphor.
And one might note also an economic practice because when surveying notes were made the consequence often enough was to make one parcel more valuable than another: forest, for example, to provide wood for the economy rather than, say, a swamp.
The chain, again, was sixty-six feet feet long and would be stretched out on a certain path indicated by the compass, then secured to the ground, recorded and recorded until the surveyor reached an endpoint.
Very crude, of course, compared to contemporary sophisticated tools, lasers and such.
I’m living close by to one older example.
Andrew Ellicott 1754-1820
And the answer to the question who surveyed the boundaries to the District of Columbia and who had a reputation for accuracy.
Not far from me is the Chattooga River and Trail. Meandering along that trail will bring a hiker to a sign pointing to the right. The hike will be a bit of a scramble for about a mile and a half but the reward is Ellicott’s Rock inscribed by Andrew Ellicott in 1811. The carving inscription reads “N-G” and denotes the “survey” marking the “point” where the boundaries of North Carolina and Georgia join together.
It’s fairly accurate, but incorrect for about twelve feet from Commissioner’s Rock which was inscribed in 1813 and included the border with South Carolina. This inscription reads LAT 35AD 1813 NC + SC.
It’s now called the “tri-point” and the placement of a rock known as Ellicott’s Rock which is also a placement for the 8000 plus acres of Ellicott’s Wilderness. Three states come together at this “tri-point”albeit the results did not favor Georgia by 18 miles.
There’s some disputing to this day as to accuracy but standing on or near Commissioner’s Rock means a hiker could be standing in North Carolina but moving a bit to the left that same hiker could be in South Carolina and a short shift again to the left could be in Georgia.
Why should we care about this?
Well, again the new nation needed to be surveyed and then resurveyed and likely needed regulation which led to the creation of the Public Land Survey System which led to the “platted lands” in the Northwest Territory.
America taking shape by territory but not yet states platted out of the territories.
It turns out that after the United States was formed the same Andrew Ellicott was commissioned to survey and establish an international boundary at the 31st parallel between, then, the new United States and Spanish West Florida which meant marking the boundary between two countries.
And there’s a stone there with inscriptions on both sides; on the north side is chiseled “U. S. Lat. 31, 1799” and on the south side is “Dominio de Sm M. Carlos IC, Lat 31, 1799.”
Here it might be possible to expand a bit on the word “survey,” and to determine why the word is also a metaphor, and a darned good one at that.
As it turns out the survey was part of political negotiations with Spain which led to the Treaty of San Lorenzo also known as Pinckey’s Treaty which established at that time the western and southern borders between Spain’s geographical holdings and the United States which may not look to be a big deal but as a result of the treaty the U. S. border now extended to the Mississippi River while also settling claims to the southern territories which would one day become southern states, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi in particular.
So what?
It’s an historical inflection point in which the “shape” of America takes form although still in infancy. And it points to the influence surveyors had in “shaping” America from a wilderness so immense. From that southern 31st parallel, for example, with Georgia to the east and the Mississippi River to the west was a “territory,” the Mississippi Territory.
Survey this for a bit, however:
After the Pinckney Treaty, the U. S. Congress created the Mississippi Territory in 1798 from lands once claimed by the “colony” of Georgia. If that had not happened, well, presumably the state of Georgia could have been much larger bordering to the west and the Mississippi River.
So, why was the territory divided leaving three states and why should we care?
Noting for the moment that the division did not create states but two territories with a surveyed dividing line between the two. It’s a straight line, running north and south which essentially halved the original territory which when studied seems to suggests that the two new territories were about equal in size to Georgia which became in time two states with Mississippi in 1817 and Alabama in 1819.
I kid you Solomon-Like not.
So, Georgia loses Alabama and Mississippi but in an interesting twist of fate under pressure from white southern planters two new slave states emerge. Better, then, to enter the union as two more slave states than one large Georgia slave state.
Equally to the point is that after this surveying occurred, well, these two states rapidly evolved from a sparsely inhabited frontier region to become a dynamic part of the union but assuming an interesting maturity and polity as the heart of the deep south albeit economically, socially, and politically dependent upon slavery with enslaved people eventually outnumbering white folks.
So I’ve Gone To Carolina
The point being here that before the War for Independence and during the 17th and into the 18th century all lands were held by the King who granted lands as a prerogative. At one time, and under charter, what was known as Carolina existed as a land grant to eight of Charles II faithful supporters who became, then, proprietors of Carolina. This in 1663. And then this: In 1712 the two territories separated, a separation that was finalized in 1729 but with a generally shared border The final border was established in 1813.
But there was a huge amount of territory west of the Chattooga River that was ceded by South Carolina to become part of the Georgia and Mississippi Territory.
In other words, the Carolinas existed collectively until 1729.
The problem?
With the “revolution” one might think that the feudal commitments would have been dissolved which brings into focus claims to private ownership of land. We know that one solution was for small farmers before the war leasing parcels of land but then arguing that the revolution had dissolved those feudal commitments which meant that “settlers,” a sanitized version of “squatters,” could lay claim to an un-platted portion of land in the western far reaches and through labor “improve” a tract of land.
Settlers filtered into the Carolinas and into sparsely settled areas which were even more sparsely administered. One rule of thumb was an annual payment of monies which could be paid by a “freeman” to gain title to tracts of land, usually for a hundred acres and sixty acres more for each dependent; such was called a “quit rent.”
Sparsely administered, however, and sparsely settled led to squatters and a debate as to squatters rights, e.g. adverse possession which is a legal doctrine in which someone can claim ownership by occupying and using a piece of land usually for ten years which becomes legal only when the the real owner doesn’t take action to eject the squatter within that statutory period.
Oh, squatters cannot obtain title to land owned by the government.
Also, there are town plats which usually describe a town owning a rectangular shape and then within this boundary smaller plats were made showing all the individual building lots as well as commercial properties.
So these are historical inflection points in which the “shape” of America took form although still in infancy. And it points to the influence surveyors had in “shaping” America.
Have You Reckoned A Thousand Acres Much? The Agrarian Eden They Sought In The American Landscape
The phrase you can’t go home again is true especially when the home you might wish to go to no longer exists.
I made the journey back to southwestern Minnesota a pair of years ago. I visited my college and then my home town now so small and so vacant it’s about to be blown away by the first strong wind. The water tower which surveyed all for a few miles in each direction is gone and the grade school, the junior high school, and the senior high school, both local grocery stores, and my understanding is that the two local churches have no resident preachers but borrow from afar.
I drove the six miles south then turned right on what is now called 350th Street. Gravel and a bit worn. I stopped where I knew the family home place once stood, now gone.
I traced in my mind’s eye the property lines of what was our family farm, that agrarian eden farmed by my grandfather and my father and our family up to the 1960s. What I could see was a vastness to the west, the east, the north and the south all running together into what I knew was a very large part of a corporate farm worked by a high school friend who told me he farmed over 2000 acres.
There were no trees anymore except for some sparse pines around large grain elevators and machine shops and a house all way to the south which did not seem to be a home.
The time was October and harvest was in full swing. Huge combines followed along by grain semi-trucks which scurried down the gravel roads leaving trails of dust.
Becky the Dog and I walked about a quarter mile into a large combined field on the south without having to cross a fence or descend into a ditch since the land was farmed right to the edge of the road which meant that when the corn was at its tallest it was like driving down a corn tunnel.
We turned and walked east and stepped across 380th Avenue and onto the church property, Amo Lutheran Church; it’s the one with the pale green steeple that can be seen for miles.
It’s there still….
Neither my grandfather nor my father reckoned a thousand acres but they did reckon four hundred acres. I suspect they did not reckon that this agrarian dream would one day become morphed into a corporate 2000 acres.
I suspect also that in our own reckoning and surveying we will not see their like again.
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Note:
[*]Anthologies suffer from inclusiveness, what to keep, what not to keep or reduce, what to add. The question gains interest when it could be argued that a sub-selection is “segregated” from the larger mainstream of American Literature or for that matter, regional Southern American Literature.
The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay. The image of Mason-Dixon Line marker at the south end of Pennsylvania Route 2007 and the north end of Maryland Route 418 (Midvale Road-Ringgold Pike) on the border of Franklin County, Pennsylvania and Washington County, Maryland, uploaded by Famartin, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image of the Surveying chain owned by Henry David Thoreau, uploaded by Daderot, is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image of the Louisiana Purchase, uploaded by William Morris, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Other images are courtesy of the author.