The Fabric of America by Andro Linklater Read Free Book Online Page B

in Maskelyne’s
Nautical Almanac
, but checking the sightings and adjusting the values for Baltimore required the exact observation and meticulous mathematics of a genuine astronomer. Apart from Patterson’s initial instruction, his expertise was self-taught.
    Readers of the
United States Almanack
were also given a recipe for pickling ham, a forecast of “hard thunder” on June 13, an indispensable money-changing table for converting the different currencies of Pennsylvania, New-Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, and a prophecy that “[Britain] will be forced to acknowledge this year, in the fullest manner, the Independence of these United States, which will be recognised by all the powers of Europe.” This was a shrewd prediction, but it was the accuracy of the astronomical predictions that gave the Ellicott almanac its authority. It was sold in cities across the middle states, and by the time that peace came, its compiler’s reputation had spread beyond Maryland, to Philadelphia and to Richmond, Virginia.
    The invitation from James Madison to become one of Virginia’s boundary commissioners reflected the rarity of astronomers in the state. Although Ellicott was also a surveyor—he earned the bulk of his income from the practice—it was his ability to calculate his exact position from the stars that made him indispensable on the frontier in 1784.
    Always careful to the point of anxiety about the accuracy of his work, he had loaded his mules with tents, a chest of clothes, a
Nautical Almanac
, and his instruments—a Dollond telescope, a Hadley’s sextant, and several Ellicott chronometers—everything that he deemed necessary for the job of running the border. But compared with what a real Virginian would have taken, he was traveling light.
    The boundary commissioners’ column that crossed the Monongahela River in July to set up an observatory on the highest mountain in the area might have served a small army. Led by a score of axmen to hack a path through the forest, the four commissioners were accompanied by four surveyors, an indeterminate number of laborers, servants and slaves including a dairymaid, and a line of horses and mules carrying beds, tables, chairs, chinaware, tea, wine, and rum, and some of the finest scientific instruments in the United States wrapped in feather-down quilts, as well as a small herd of cows. This last item was recommended as a prophylactic against scurvy by the medical expert William Buchan, who wrote that “milk alone will frequently do more in that disease than any medicine.” He said nothing about whipping up wine with the milk to make a frothy syllabub, and since theplain-living Pennsylvanians would hardly have entertained such an idea, it must have been another Virginian extravagance.
    Differences of temperament triggered tensions between the restrained Ewing, a stern Presbyterian minister renowned for preaching the virtues of prudence and economy, and the exuberant Madison, soon to be an Episcopalian bishop and notorious for his eagerness to embrace whatever was new in science, economics, and politics. He won plaudits for teaching the first course in political economics in the United States based upon Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations
. But respectable folk like Ewing felt Madison went too far when he celebrated escape from King George’s rule by amending the second sentence of the Lord’s Prayer to read “Thy republic come, thy will be done” and by preaching not about the kingdom of heaven but about “that great republic where there is no distinction of rank and where all men are free and equal.”
    As the days dragged on, and the expense rose, the heads of the two delegations began to quarrel about money—“ The old Gentleman had always too much the Idea of a
good Bargain
about him ,” the outgoing Madison complained of Ewing’s Pennsylvanian stinginess. But nothing could be done