The Fabric of America by Andro Linklater Read Free Book Online

by John Bird, instrument-maker to King George III. On April 5, 1765, accompanied by more than one hundred surveyors, chainmen, axmen, and laborers, Mason and Dixon set out with these instruments from Alexander Bryan’s farm, exactly fifteen miles south of Philadelphia, to run Pennsylvania’s boundary along the line of latitude 39 degrees 43 minutes 18.2 seconds (39° 43′ 18.2″) north of the equator.
    More than two years and 230 miles later, their star-derived line reached another, older boundary high in the Appalachians, the Catawba warpath. This one, established by violence and bloodshed, marked the limit of theinfluence of the Six Nations, who had guaranteed their safety, and the beginning of Delaware and Shawnee territory. On October 9, 1767, Mason noted in his journal that their Six Nations guards “would not proceed one step further westward,” and so, on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River, a mound five feet high was built to mark the end of what would become known as the Mason-Dixon Line.
    The effects of the new boundary were immediately apparent. Both the Penns and the Calverts began to survey and sell land near the border, and squatters already there were forced to buy or rent, and most significantly to pay tax. A principle had been established that would last throughout American history and remains strictly applicable to present-day problems on the border with Mexico—a clear-cut boundary is government’s first weapon in the control of its citizens.
    When delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania met in 1779 under the auspices of the Continental Congress to resolve the problem of their undefined border, they decided to take the Mason-Dixon Line as their starting point. There were practical reasons for the choice—the line already covered about two thirds of what would be the southern boundary of Pennsylvania—but it also recognized that the states were now heirs to many of the colonies’ concerns. They too needed clear-cut borders not just to keep the peace between them, but to enable each to govern efficiently, to register property, to tax citizens, and to enforce law and order. But the colonial governments had been able to call upon the huge scientific resources of Britain built up around the Royal Society since its foundation in 1660, and to make use of the most advanced scientific instruments from London manufacturers who were supported by royal patronage and the demands of the industrial revolution, while the states had to find their own homegrown scientists who were often forced to rely on instruments they had made themselves.
    The long apprenticeship that Andrew Ellicott had served as a clock-maker was essential to his later success as an astronomer. The skills in one field transferred easily to another, and Ellicott’s craftsmanship as an instrument maker is still evident in some beautifully made telescopes that he built and that are now held in the Smithsonian Institution.
    He owed his interest in the subject to the chance arrival in Solebury of an intense young Irishman called Robert Patterson, whose talents led soon after to his appointment as professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. For a brief period, however, he ran a school in the area. In June 1769 when the planet Venus made a transit across the face of the sun, Patterson supervised his fifteen-year-old student’s observation and timing of the event and evidently mixed instruction on the astronomical significance of the occasion—in theory it would allow the distance to the sun to be calculated—with his own political feelings of hostility to the British and affection for his new country.
    â€œ You were in your young days my preceptor ,” Ellicott wrote Patterson much later. “It was under your guidance that my mind was directed to the love of my country and to science. If I have been useful, you are entitled to the credit, if not it has been my own