The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West
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The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West
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Overview
Achenbach captures a Washington rarely seen: rugged frontiersman, real estate speculator, shrewd businessman. Even after his death, Washington's grand ambition inspired heroic engineering feats, including an audacious attempt to build a canal across the mountains to the Ohio River. But the country needed more than commercial arteries to hold together, and in the Civil War, the general's beloved river became a battlefield between North and South.
Like such classics as Undaunted Courage and Founding Brothers, Achenbach's riveting portrait of a great man and his grand plan captures the imagination of the new country, the passions of an ambitious people, and the seemingly endless beauty of the American landscape.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743263009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2005 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 298,180 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 2: The Race to the West
When Washington looked at a map, he saw that the major rivers between Virginia and New England were like the splayed fingers of his right hand, turned palm-down. The Connecticut and the Hudson and the Delaware and the Susquehanna ran generally north-south, in parallel — but the Potomac was down here, on the left, low on his hand, a curved thumb jutting toward the western frontier. He couldn't miss the obvious message: The Potomac wasn't just a southern river, it was a western river.
The seaboard of the mid-Atlantic states didn't run north-south, after all, but rather from northeast to southwest. Georgetown, at the fall line of the Potomac, could claim to be the westernmost port on any of these rivers. Washington had spent his life taking the measure of things, and he could easily see that the village of Pittsburgh, at the Forks of the Ohio — the Gateway to the West — was closer to Georgetown on the Potomac than it was to Philadelphia. In a logical and orderly world, the Potomac would unquestionably become the highway between the Atlantic and the Ohio River watershed.
For Washington and many others of his generation, geography was destiny. To know the future you had to study maps. You had to look at the land, follow the rivers in their courses, gauge the difficulty of the mountains and the possibilities of portage. You had to know not only distances and elevations, but also the soils, the annual rainfall, the drainage, the predominant trees, the availability of forage and game, the presence of minerals, the proximity of salt, the date when a river would close with ice and when it would open in the spring — all the practical data embedded in the environment. The enterprising American had to abide faithfully by the commandment of John Adams: "Really there ought not to be a state, a city, a promontory, a river, a harbor, an inlet or a mountain in all America, but what should be intimately known to every youth who has any pretensions to liberal education."
The Potomac's rivals among American rivers had some geographical virtues of their own. The Susquehanna, marred by falls and rapids near its mouth, was nonetheless the largest river system along the seaboard, with a watershed extending from upstate New York to the Chesapeake. The hazardous lower reaches could be circumvented by roads, in theory. The western branch of the Susquehanna, like the Potomac, emerged from deep within the Alleghenies.
The Hudson loomed as an even more formidable competitor. The Hudson is a fjord, splitting the mountains, and carrying the pulse of tide all the way to Albany, 150 miles from New York Harbor. From the west the Hudson is joined by the Mohawk. A traveler moving up the Mohawk would discover some falls and rapids and difficult portages, but no mountains, for the Alleghenies were off to the south and the Adirondacks off to the north. There was a broad gap in the Appalachians, screaming for a commercial artery to the west.
The St. Lawrence River, far to the north, provided another western passage, for it flowed from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic behind the Appalachian chain. It gave the French the perfect entry to the fur-rich continental interior in the early seventeenth century. The glaciers that gouged the Great Lakes left only a modest berm along the southern shore of the lakes, and the Indians taught the French how easily they could portage to the rivers flowing into the Ohio and Mississippi.
The Potomac had another competitor on its southern flank, the James, running east-west through central Virginia. Some Virginians had envisioned a link between the James and the New, the river known downstream as the Great Kanawha. The New flows across the mountains in the opposite direction from the other transappalachian rivers, almost as if providing a Newtonian counter-reaction to the flow of the Potomac. But the New is an ornery, vicious mountain river that runs through impassable gorges. Washington gave lip service to the James and the New only to keep his southern Virginia friends happy.
One final river entered the picture, and it was a monster: the Mississippi. Compared with the Mississippi, the Potomac was just a millrace. The Mississippi clearly had the potential to be the major artery of commerce in the West, but for the moment, it wasn't open for business. Spain controlled the Lower Mississippi, including New Orleans, and in 1784 closed the river to American commerce. That move created no distress for Washington, who didn't want Spain to lure the western settlers into its orbit. Keep the Mississippi closed, Washington thought, until we have time to bind the westerners to the East.
And that's where the Potomac came in. It showed a way through the mountains. It blasted through stone. With a little improvement the Potomac would make those westerners forget about the Mississippi and the Hudson and the Susquehanna and every other competing route.
Washington's idea about the natural superiority of the Potomac had grown into something like a faith. He was prepared to gamble a great deal on this river — his time, his money, his reputation. He had bought large tracts of land along the Potomac and Ohio river corridors, and that itself was a gamble, a wager that this was the right strip of America for a rich man's investment. The Potomac route wasn't an abstract issue for him. He'd bet the farm.
Washington didn't have to rely entirely on his own geographical analysis. He had a crucial ally, a fellow Revolutionary, geographer, surveyor, Virginia planter, and thinker of big ideas: Thomas Jefferson.
The Potomac brought them together in a way that the Revolution itself (and the War of Independence — which was not quite the same thing, as Jefferson and John Adams pointed out in their old age) never could. Though Washington and Jefferson could both boast of being Revolutionaries in a formal sense, Jefferson had made his greatest contribution with his pen. He had camped comfortably by the hearth of Monticello while Washington and his men gnashed their teeth at Valley Forge.
Jefferson and Washington began corresponding about the Potomac in the spring of 1784. In their individual ways, both had spent many years thinking about the West, and now their interests converged. The two men had recently spent time together at Annapolis — Washington's final address to Congress, explaining his decision to retire, may have been partially scripted by the younger Virginian. (When a person needs a speechwriter in a pinch, it's always nice to hear that Thomas Jefferson is in the building.)
They had certain traits in common. Both men knew their dirt. To be a planter in Virginia required an intimate understanding of soil, climate, pests, weeds, and as their land grew barren under the harshness of tobacco cultivation, they kept searching for new ground to cultivate. Jefferson owned 10,000 acres, including a tract at a separate plantation called Poplar Forest, though he was never in the same league as Washington, who by the end of his life would be among the largest landowners in the country. They each had a natural engineering impulse, always thinking of ways to improve their farms and the tools for wringing food from the soil. Washington had his fishing nets, distillery, barns, and fine breed of jackasses; Jefferson invented a new kind of plow.
Jefferson brought to the discussion an Olympian certitude about what was right and wrong in the race to the West. This is the way it must be done, he would say. This is the course that nature dictates. This is what an enlightened and rational person should think.
"[T]he Ohio, and it's branches which head up against the Patowmac," Jefferson wrote fellow Virginian James Madison, another Potomac promoter, "affords the shortest water communication by 500. miles of any which can ever be got between the Western waters and Atlantic, and of course" — exact science now giving way to a blunt provincialism — "promises us almost a monopoly of the Western and Indian trade."
Jefferson didn't think Virginia could afford to dawdle. Pennsylvania and New York would seize the trade if Virginia hesitated in the slightest. The resources of the West staggered the mind: inexhaustible minerals, endless trees, dark soil begging for the plow, furs beyond imagination. If those resources could be sent to the world through Alexandria, the port on the Potomac could become a fabulous entrepôt, perhaps the commercial center of the nation — bigger than New York.
Jefferson told Madison that the Pennsylvanians were plotting to build a canal connecting Philadelphia with the Susquehanna, and that the project would cost only 200,000 pounds. "What an example this is! If we do not push this matter immediately," Jefferson wrote Madison, "they will be beforehand with us and get possession of the commerce...."
Jefferson added that the Potomac navigation project would be a fine hobby for General Washington in his old age: "Genl. Washington has that of the Patowmac much at heart. The superintendance of it would be a noble amusement in his retirement and leave a monument of him as long as the waters should flow."
Washington and Jefferson were not friends, exactly, but they found each other useful, at least for the moment, and fed off each other's enthusiasm. They shared a fascination with scientific agriculture. They had no patience with religious pieties and, though not atheists, increasingly steered clear of the church. Both perceived their historical significance and took great care to preserve their personal papers. Jefferson had a more facile brain and far greater eloquence, and he noted the disparity many years later in a rather cold assessment of Washington: "His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order...when called for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed."
On March 15, 1784, a few weeks after writing to Madison, Jefferson sent a long letter to Washington that laid out the geographic and economic reasons why Washington should pursue the Potomac navigation project. Although Jefferson idealized the simple life of farming, he acknowledged that the world was changing, that people craved manufactured goods, that they would not be content to wear homespun clothes and eat only the fruits of their own labors:
All the world is becoming commercial. Was it practical to keep our new empire separated from them we might indulge ourselves in speculating whether commerce contributes to the happiness of mankind. But we cannot separate ourselves from them. Our citizens have had too full a taste of the comforts furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them. We must then in our own defence endeavor to share as large a portion as we can of this modern source of wealth and power. That offered to us from the Western country is under a competition between the Hudson, the Patomac and the Missisipi itself.
The Ohio trade, Jefferson informed Washington, was nearer to Alexandria than to New York by 730 miles (Washington later questioned his math) and was interrupted by only one portage.
Nature then has declared in favour of the Patowmac, and through that channel offers to pour into our lap the whole commerce of the Western world....This is the moment in which the trade of the West will begin to get into motion and to take it's direction. It behoves us then to open our doors to it.
Nature had chosen the Potomac. This was a powerful idea. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and their allies had a duty, not only as Virginians, but as men who thought about the dictates of nature and the imperatives of geography, to support nature's decision. Jefferson's words carried weight with Washington, but not so much because they offered new insight — the younger man was telling the older man a lot of things he already knew (indeed there is almost an element of impertinence in Jefferson offering advice to the country's leading Potomac expert). What really struck Washington was that Jefferson had no direct stake in the scheme, that he owned no land along the Potomac or the Ohio. Jefferson lived a full two days' ride on a swift horse south of the Potomac, near the Rivanna River, a tributary of the James. Jefferson's sanction seemed pure.
Washington touched on this directly, and with admirable frankness, when he wrote back to Jefferson: "I am not so disinterested in this matter as you are, but I am made very happy to find that a man of discernment and liberality, who has no particular interest in the plan, thinks as I do, who have lands in the country, the value of which would be enhanced by the adoption of such a measure."
Jefferson had cleared Washington's conscience. A man who wouldn't take a salary as commander in chief certainly wouldn't push a river-navigation scheme to enhance the value of his lands. With Jefferson's affirmation of nature's intent, Washington could persuade himself that this was not primarily a personal project, that he had national interests in mind, and the interests of Virginia and Maryland, of Alexandria and Georgetown. He would be tidying up a geological feature already selected for national significance by the Master Designer of the Universe. He could plausibly say, This isn't about me.
Washington told Jefferson that local rivalries had stopped his own efforts in the past to put public funds behind Potomac improvements. The Baltimoreans had looked askance at the situation. They worried that the Potomac would draw commerce away from their city. Congress, meanwhile, had been ineffectual in domestic matters — stymied by what Washington called, using a wonderful if rather obsolete term, "inertitude." He warned Jefferson that one group of northern rivals was not wasting time: "I know the Yorkers will delay no time to remove every obstacle in the way of the other communication" (via the Hudson). The general had spent a lot of time with the entrepreneurial Yorkers, and knew they were eager to exploit the western trade through the Hudson-Mohawk route. But Washington and Jefferson persuaded themselves that the Hudson and Susquehanna rivers were too far north and too far east. As northern rivers, they would be closed by ice much longer than would the Potomac. And as eastern rivers, they were remote from the Forks of the Ohio and the vast western territory.
If someone wanted to go east from the West, why would they take the long way around?
Potomac navigation had interested Washington for decades. The river had caught his fancy as a young man, even before the French and Indian War. Between 1749 and 1753, he spent much of his time tromping around the Potomac backcountry, surveying for Lord Fairfax and putting together his initial landholdings in the Potomac Valley. When he was twenty-two years old, Washington canoed from Patterson's Creek, 13 miles below Cumberland, downriver to Harpers Ferry, a distance of 122 miles in which, as he told a friend, "there is no other obstacle than the shallowness of the water to prevent Craft from passing." The shallowness of the water would turn out, many decades later, to be a significant issue, but his basic point was correct — the river has no falls for that entire distance, flowing smoothly, if sometimes with great swiftness, through what geologists call the Ridge and Valley Province. At Harpers Ferry the river tumbles through a series of rapids, through narrow chutes and over rocky ledges, but Washington believed that these cataracts might be "improved" with a little labor. And in any case, Washington knew from his own adventures over the years that an intrepid boatman with a little guile and brio could simply shoot the rapids.
In 1758, during the campaign against the French, Washington became a vehement Potomac partisan, objecting to Brigadier General John Forbes's plan to construct a road across Pennsylvania to Fort Duquesne at the Forks of the Ohio. Washington argued that a good road already existed, the one traveled by Braddock and his men during the disastrous march three years earlier. To build another road for the assault on the French stronghold would be a waste of time, Washington argued, but what seems to have animated him particularly was his fear that a new road would take commerce from the Potomac Valley. In a letter to the treasurer of the Virginia Colony, Washington cursed "the luckless Fate of poor Virginia to fall a Victum to the views of her Crafty Neighbours."
As Washington amassed huge tracts of western land in the late 1760s, he also began to see clearly the disadvantages of living in the colony of a distant Mother Country. In 1763 the British, believing they could not afford more warfare with the western Indians, had closed the territory west of the Alleghenies to white settlement. The Proclamation of 1763 confounded land speculators such as Washington. He assumed the proclamation would be a temporary measure, and continued to acquire western land by every available means. But the interference from the Crown drove him to reassess the future of the colonies. Until this point, historian John Ferling has pointed out, Washington had been a rather low-key figure in the Virginia House of Burgesses, hardly a revolutionary, and a bit tongue-tied around Jefferson and all the other college-educated lawyers. But by 1769, Washington was chomping at the bit, in part because his western investments would be worthless if the Appalachians continued to serve as an impermeable wall. Thoughts about western land, Potomac navigation, and independence from Great Britain swirled through his brain, and Washington started supporting anti-British measures in the Burgesses.
In 1770, Washington urged Thomas Johnson, who would become Maryland's first governor seven years later, to make the Potomac a channel of commerce "between Great Britain and that immense territory, a tract of country which is unfolding to our view, the advantages of which are too great and too obvious." Washington's efforts inspired the Burgesses to pass a Potomac navigation bill, but a peculiar jurisdictional problem reared itself. Under the original charter of Maryland, carving the colony out of Virginia, the entire Potomac, from bank to bank, belonged to Maryland. Maryland didn't go along with the Potomac navigation plan of Virginia because of the obstreperous Baltimoreans.
Another early Potomac visionary, John Ballendine, took direct action to improve navigation. He lived at Little Falls, where he built a house, grist mill, and bakery, and where sometime around 1770 he constructed a dam and the first primitive canal skirting the falls. (Little Falls is a picturesque set of rapids, roughly half a mile in length, just upstream from Georgetown. Near the beginning of the cataract, a strikingly tall island, appropriately named High Island, rises near the Maryland bank as though it were an anchored cruise ship. Downstream the river narrows, and then narrows yet further, the entire watershed forced to funnel its liquid through a sluice where the river is 70 feet deep.) Ballendine had trouble paying his debts and briefly spent time in jail. He claimed to have reconnoitered the terrain between the Upper Potomac and the Monongahela, but his estimate of the land portage was just "ten or eleven miles," which is hardly the case. He became so taken with the notion of a Potomac Route to the West that he went to England and studied the canals there, and even brought a few engineers back to America to work on Potomac improvements. But he's a forgotten figure, by and large, because his project was subsumed into the dream of a much more powerful figure.
The Revolution soon put all river projects on hold. Washington went to war, and, though he continued to keep track of his western lands via correspondence with various land agents, he had more pressing concerns for eight and a half years.
In the spring of 1784, Thomas Jefferson hadn't yet become an icon, hadn't yet earned the title of Sage of Monticello. He was forty-two and living in an unfinished house on his little mountain near Charlottesville, surrounded by children, relatives, and more than a hundred slaves, yet fundamentally alone, a widower, and a damaged man.
Though his fellow Revolutionaries had recognized his genius and availed themselves of his masterly pen, his authorship of the Declaration of Independence hadn't yet generated a global reputation for greatness. He was still some months away from his momentous voyage to France to serve as the American envoy. His reputation had taken some blows during the war, for as governor of Virginia he had failed to muster much resistance to British invaders. The legislature investigated his actions, including his notorious, last-second, pell-mell flight from Monticello as the British neared. Technically, his term as governor had expired when he scrambled to safety, but for some critics the incident had the odor of an abdication, and even cowardice. The investigation officially cleared him of wrongdoing, but for years thereafter his political enemies and some war veterans continued to question whether this alleged Revolutionary lacked the courage of his convictions.
After that debacle, Jefferson retired from public life, using the same kind of vine-and-fig-tree sentiment as the general. ("I have taken my final leave of everything of that nature, have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate me.") Then his world collapsed. His wife, Martha, died soon after giving birth to their second daughter. Jefferson disintegrated. He went into isolation and for many weeks could barely speak. For months it appeared the country had lost forever the talents of one of its most brilliant citizens.
His friends persuaded him to accept election as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and slowly he emerged from his grief, crafting a portentous plan for the West. Virginia had ceded an immense swath of territory to the general government, hundreds of millions of acres northwest of the Ohio River. Congress lacked the power to levy taxes, but it could pay off some of the nation's war debts by selling the western lands. Jefferson proposed to turn the western territories, over time, into ten separate states (or fourteen in another variant of the plan), and envisioned them not as colonies of the original states but as equal members of the Union. Moreover, they would be free states, barring slavery. Jefferson, mining the more exotic realms of his brain, where Indian names and geological terms swished freely about, went so far as to jot down some possible names for the new states: Cherronesus, Metropotamia, Saratoga, Pelisipia, Polypotamia, Illinoia, Assenisipia, Michigania, Sylvania and, finally, Washington. (The reaction to the suggested names was, as you'd expect, widespread bewilderment and vicious mockery.) Jefferson also conceived a surveying scheme in which the entire region would be sectioned off in rectangular townships and counties. He turned the wilderness into a grid. His plan led to the classic heartland patchwork seen today by airline passengers.
Jefferson came into the world at the western edge of white settlement. In 1746, when he was three years old, his father, Peter, surveyed the western boundary of Lord Fairfax's domain, a task that took him deep into the mountains to the seep that spawns the North Branch of the Potomac. In 1751, Peter Jefferson and Joshua Fry completed the Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia, Containing the Whole Province of Maryland..., which, with some emendations, remained the best map of Virginia and the Upper Potomac for several decades. Jefferson grew up with maps in his head, and they remained there his entire life and into his presidency, when he began filling in the blank spaces, sending Lewis and Clark up the Missouri. He understood that rivers not only provide an avenue for exploration, and define political boundaries, but their headsprings are geographical markers even prior to their discovery — reference points in the blank spaces of the map. The precise location of a headspring may be unknown, but it definitely exists out there somewhere, as opposed to, say, a hypothetical volcano.
In his spare moments in the early 1780s, Jefferson wrote and revised Notes on the State of Virginia, which included a discussion of the major rivers of the United States. Jefferson used Notes to refute the notion that colonialism led to mental and physical degradation. The French naturalist Comte de Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc) had argued that animals in the New World were smaller and less varied because the two continents "remained longer than the rest of the globe under the waters of the sea." This was Buffon's way of smearing the entire American populace, of arguing for a kind of intrinsic, geologically enforced degeneracy of everything and everyone in the Americas. Buffon blamed the humidity for much of the New World's inferiority. The place was just too damp. Jefferson could not let such a ridiculous notion go unchallenged. He plotted to send Buffon the hide of a moose, a classic that-ought-to-shut-him-up gesture. Jefferson had his own scientifically flimsy notions, including his suspicion that somewhere in the uncharted regions of the continent mammoths still might be found. He could see no theoretical justification for the disappearance of a species.
Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia features a singularly evocative description of the American landscape — specifically, the Potomac's passage through the Blue Ridge. In 1783 he visited Harpers Ferry, and after a short walk through town climbed onto a rock with a spectacular view of the rivers and the mountains. (The crumbling "Jefferson Rock" is still there, a few paces from the Appalachian Trail. The rock is of a kind of shale that erodes rapidly, and so it has been propped up on steel beams, enabling tourists to enjoy more or less the same view that Jefferson had.) He wrote:
The passage of the Patowmac through the Blue ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature. You stand on a very high point of land. On your right comes up the Shenandoah, having ranged along the foot of the mountain an hundred miles to seek a vent. On your left approaches the Patowmac, in quest of a passage also. In the moment of their junction they rush together against the mountain, rend it asunder, and pass off to the sea.
Jefferson offers his theory of how the rivers pass through the mountains, imagining that an ocean formed behind the Blue Ridge, then burst through, creating the passage. He then describes the scene in the distance, contrasting it with the violence in the foreground:
It is as placid and delightful, as that is wild and tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below. Here the eye ultimately composes itself; and that way too the road happens actually to lead....This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.
Jefferson is being promotional: Come to America, spend your tourist dollars here, he is saying. But he's also extending a kind of animism to geology. The land is an actor, the mountains and rivers shape our lives, the smooth blue horizon beckons. The calm land in the distance, no doubt blessed with a fertile, loamy soil, invites us to pull up stakes and seek a new and better life far away. The landscape is fraught with raw energy and compels us to move.
Washington and Jefferson had vast horizons, but they looked at that western world in different ways. Both saw it as a land of opportunity, but Washington, as the historian Donald Jackson has observed, also saw the West as a series of problems. Washington's "West" extended across the Appalachians to the boundaries of the United States, while Jefferson's "West" kept on going, to the Pacific. Jefferson, more than Washington, seems to have sensed that the Mississippi did not serve as an eternal barrier to the American empire. Jackson notes that, while Jefferson greedily absorbed any information he could about the rivers and settlements of the Far West, Washington in all his letters and documents never mentioned Oregon, the Columbia River, the Rio Grande, the Missouri, the Colorado River, Mexico, the Sandwich Islands, or the mysterious tall mountains rumored to rise far beyond the Mississippi. Though not short-sighted, Washington viewed his country in such a way as to make the Potomac appear a more formidable stream than it would turn out to be just a generation later.
Jefferson had an extraordinary geographic imagination, an ability, as historian John Logan Allen points out, to "view the world at different scales and to work easily up and down the hierarchy from the local to the global and back again." He had to have such an imagination, for in his entire life, he never managed to venture farther west than the Shenandoah Valley. In 1784 he contemplated his own Washingtonesque western tour, a long journey to the Ohio country and back, but he never followed through.
This is one of the enduring Jefferson puzzles: He loved the West, but never saw it. Jefferson knew of the West only from maps, books, travelers' accounts, rumors, and the visions in his head, while Washington, intent on inspecting his world directly, repeatedly rubbed the western soil between his thumb and fingers. Jefferson may have come up with ordinances for the West, but Washington paddled into the heart of that territory, shared meals with Indian chiefs, and paced off individual tracts of forest. Washington knew individual trees — "An ash standing on the upper side of a large run...a Beech and Hiccory standing in the point...Beginning at a large Spanish oak at the Bank of the River..." These were the landmarks of his 1770 survey of the rich bottomland along the Great Kanawha River.
For Jefferson the West existed as an element of a broader theoretical view of the world. His American West would be a kind of Utopia, an agrarian society, unpolluted by urban toxins. He idealized the yeoman farmer. "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue," Jefferson famously declared in Notes. By contrast, "The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body."
Perhaps it was only appropriate that Jefferson and Washington went in opposite directions in the summer of 1784. As Washington prepared for his western journey, Jefferson sailed for Europe to serve as the nation's envoy to France. Washington would be heading into his element as he reached the American backwoods, while Jefferson would take to Paris like a man slipping into a tailored jacket.
Jefferson and Washington believed that if the thirteen states could hang together and overcome any new colonial efforts by the European powers, the nation might someday be a continental power. They did not view this possible expansion as a pure power grab. The American experiment was all about human transformation. They were hastening the emergence of the species from a condition of subservience and degradation. This was Progress. History had an arrow. Enlightened men would lead the human species from barbarism and, in the process, if all went well, turn a tidy profit.
There was one lingering problem, however, that refused to go away. The very people who would lift their brothers to a higher state of existence kept one boot firmly on the neck of an entire race of men. Washington and Jefferson had their own individual ways of discussing or, in some cases, avoiding the topic of slavery, but both genuinely loathed the institution, even as they continued to participate in it intimately. Washington in particular wanted to get out, for both economic and moral reasons. He increasingly saw his slaves as more of a hindrance to his personal fortunes than an asset. He'd also commanded black men during the Revolution, seen their heroism, and perhaps could perceive, as few of his white contemporaries could, that it was not the design of nature that one race should keep another in chains.
Washington and Jefferson spoke at various times of abolition, but couldn't see how it would be possible politically, how there could be any resolution that would not split the Union. They felt powerless before an institution that had surrounded them and supported them their entire lives, that dated almost to the founding of Jamestown, and that continued to grow and expand with the rest of American society. As Roger Wilkins has pointed out, Jefferson's first memory was of being carried on a pillow by a slave. Slavery was not peripheral to America; it was the central conflict.
Freedom, equality, liberty, republican government, democracy — these were lofty ideas that had rarely been tested on the ground, among real people in a real place. The issues that Washington and Jefferson struggled with involved questions that are still asked today:
What kind of republic is this?
What kind of people are we?
Copyright © 2004 by Joel Achenbach
Table of Contents
1. The Surveyor2. The Race to the West
3. Up the River
4. Ridge and Valley
5. Squatters
6. A Darker Wood
7. Skirting the Falls
8. Trial and Tribulation
9. A Capital Idea
10. The Final Measurement
11. The Second American Revolution
12. The Progress of Man
13. A Heroic Age
14. The Border
15. The River Today
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index