"MEASURING AMERICA, How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History."
by Andro Linklater Plume/Penguin, 2002, paperback.
A booknote:
This book about our system(s) of weights and measures traces the origin and meaning of the legal concept and term 'property' as used popularly and by the founding fathers in the Constitution, and shows the role the thirst for property played in the westward movement of the colonials and later.
The author, Andro Linklater, traces the idea of property to "the greatest land sale in history," referring to Henry VIII's dissolution of some 400 Catholic monasteries, with title reverting to him as the feudal overlord. He sold the land for cash, to pay for England's defenses.
A new way of thinking about land resulted, for no longer was its value in the number of people it could support but in how much cash it cost, would produce, and would bring when sold. So long as land was held in exchange for (feudal) services the number of people it could feed and make available to perform those services were more important than its exact area.
Land that could be sold was now property. Essential to land sale and mortgage was a means of defining boundaries with precision. Land had been (and continues to be in large areas) described for legal purposes by a written system stating where one's parcel met various identifiable features which bounded it, hence the system of description called "Metes and Bounds."
Linklater says that if a single date is wanted for when the "idea of private property can be said to have taken hold," it is 1538, the year Sir Richard Benese published a book 'showing the manner of measuring all manner of land,' in which he described how to calculate the area of a field or estate, essentially by subdividing it into measurable parcels and aggregating the result in acres, with the aid of a 16 1/2' staff, rod or cord, and describing the results in words and a sketch.
Prominent purchasers of monastery land included sheep-raisers who had been enclosing land and throwing off villeins and tenants. One such family, Winthrop, produced a grandson, John, who emigrated to America in 1630 as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Estates that had been worked as widely separate rigs and shares of common land would become more valuable when consolidated into fields, which required measuring.
The great breakthrough in measuring was the invention of the surveyor's chain by Edmund Gunter, a mathematician, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London, and instrument maker. He had devised for student use an early slide rule, a quadrant and a cross-staff. The slide rule enabled surveyors to calculate (without walking off) distance from known data, trigonometrically, after the Dutch mathematician Frisius (1533).
In his instruction books for the instruments, Gunter described, in Latin, a precisely made iron chain 22 yards in length consisting of 100 links. He produced a translation to English at the request of surveyors and sailors who were using his techniques for measuring land and sailing.
Because Gunter's iron chain had 100 links, it could be used decimally to state measurements. Even more simply, it was useful in laying out plots based on doubling the chain and redoubling it, or halving or quartering it as needed.
Gunter's chain became the basis for western U.S. land measurement, with the "Point of Beginning" being established in 1785 at the request of Congress by Thomas Hutchins, the first Geographer of the U.S., appointed by Washington, at East Liverpool, Ohio, on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh.
Here began the grid that eventually covered the U.S.
When the U.S. was established, several of the colonies, now states, owned western land, which became the Northwest Territory, western states beyond the Appalachians, the Yazoo in the Southwest (Alabama and Mississippi) of Fletcher v. Peck fame, the Louisiana Purchase, and later still railroad land to the coast.
This was all surveyed using Gunter's Chain (and other instruments such as the theodolite) in a system of square plots along North-South and East-West lines called Township and Range, far different from the metes and bounds system of England and the coastal colonies.
The plotting of the land gave each parcel an identifiable map address, allowing it to be sold, unviewed, in distant financial centers such as New York (1787, based on Hutchins's survey) and Philadelphia, by speculators.
This enabled the U.S. government, after it acquired this western land from the former colonies, to sell it to finance itself beyond tariffs.
The thirst for land, and not just land to live on, but land as 'property' that could be bought and sold, is what drove the expansion of the country. It's what made Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, rich. It's what drove Washington, the surveyor to Lord Fairfax, to invest in land to the west, and Thomas Jefferson's father, Peter, and the Marshall family and other justices (Wilson) to invest in western (beyond the Appalachians) land.
The significance of Fletcher v. Peck is not just that that the Supreme Court assumed power to overrule state legislative acts (repeal of a land grant), but that the decision protected the (more or less) bona fide purchasers' legal and economic interests in maintaining their property in land.
Fletcher made the title of a BFP as certain as it could get against other claimants, and thus fueled the westward expansion of the country through protected purchase of property from the government and takers from the government, much as Marshall's other nationalizing decisions paved the way for expansion of commerce (Gibbons) and use of corporations (Dartmouth) as investment and finance vehicles.
Linklater, while describing the history of measurement, limns the conflicting attitudes of Hamilton (Mr. Wall Street - an early lawyer, capitalist, and speculator, he lived on and helped make Wall Street - and Jefferson, whose ideal was the yeoman farmer of the Anglo-Saxon period before the Norman conquest, and Jefferson's hatred of the speculator, such as the quintessential example, Robert Morris, who bought Continental paper at twenty-percent of face value and redeemed it from the government for land at face.
Parenthetically (not described in Linklater's book), behind Jefferson's hatred of the speculator was the idea that concentrated wealth concentrated power. Traders in stocks and bonds built banks that became power centers that could control legislatures and perhaps presidents.
This attitude shapes the country in the form of Jefferson-Jackson Democracy. Jackson killed the Second Bank of the U.S. (whose constitutionality was upheld in McCulloch v. Maryland) by having his Treasury Secretary Roger B. Taney withdraw all U.S. cash and putting it in local state banks.
Hamilton's contrasting view held that a nation needed concentrated wealth in a small elite class, a la the British model of a wealth aristocracy of landed aristocracy and gentry. "The rich and the well-born" needed protection against the great unwashed masses.
Hence no votes for the landless.
America was characterized by land fever from the git. Apprentices, indentured-servants, freed or escaped slaves, knew exactly what to do. Head for the hills and grab land. Land was gold. You could live on it, it would feed you, and you could get it cheap, then sell it.
Jefferson's attitude favoring the yeoman farmer was based on the idea that the existence of millions of small farmers meant that there could be NO concentration of wealth and power in a small aristocratic class. He was a de-centralizer while Hamilton was a centralizer, of wealth and power.
The founding fathers knew their history, including what they took for a fact: That every nation heretofore found itself ruled eventually by a privileged class, whether it be priestly (Egypt), military, inherited royalty (people who didn't pay taxes, they collected them), landed (barons and earls, Britain, France, the Continent), or paper wealth, the Dutch.
Jefferson hated the idea of transplanting systems such as those to America.
Hamilton thought that fuzzy-headed and admired the British system.
That opened the door for Jefferson's supporters to call Hamilton, and his like-minded colleague, John Adams, budding monarchists in a republican land. "Republican" means the opposite of monarchy. Republican virtue is opposed to kings.
Andrew Jackson, in removing all U.S. funds from the hands of Mr. Biddle's 2d Bank of the U.S. in Philadelphia (the building still stands, along with the First B.U.S. set up by Hamilton around the corner), was seen by Daniel Webster and the remnants, mostly in New England, of the old Federalist party of Hamilton, Adams, Washington and Marshall, as conducting a coup d'etat, making himself King of America.
What do Americans do when we see a king?
Tear him down.
King Andrew the First, his opponents called Jackson.
They formed a new party, since the Federalists had been in bad odor since the prosecutions under the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798. Plus the War of 1812 had been conducted badly under Pres. James Madison, who, with misgivings authorized the 2d BUS. The new party was named after the one that deposed the power of the king in England, the Whigs.
Thus formed the American Whig Party that lasted until the election before the Civil War, which began in 1860 with the Inauguration of Lincoln. Lincoln was a Whig, at first, but the party was too limited and weak. Forming a greater coalition resulted in the formation of the Republican party, the party of Lincoln, and eventually, today's GOP. Started with the Whigs, opposed to King Andrew.
Both the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians feared each other gaining irremovable power, centralized as to the former, decentralized as to the latter. Marshall was a centralizer. His view of a strong national or central government is based on the idea, gained from nearly starving at Valley Forge with Washington's troops, that a powerful nation could protect itself, while a weak, decentralized one could not.
Returning to Linklater's book, of interest to me as a constitutiona law teacher are the ideas and circumstances behind the doctrines that find their way into the Constitution, and constitutional law, particularly where a paradigm shift occurs relatively slowly over a period of time, such as that described between the demise of the communal feudal land tenure system over to the more modern, and individualistic, capitalistic land system.
Accompanied by considerable dislocation, this was a constitutional change in any sense of the word, and lays the foundation for where we stand today.
I was pleased to see the idea of property (and measurement) explained and developed so well in historical context. "Measuring America" has received excellent reviews.
rs
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