Read Online The Fabric of America by Andro Linklater - Free Book Online

the face of such hardship, the axmen grew rebellious, but like commanders of a ship at sea, the commissioners could not afford to show weakness. “This evening we discovered a mutiny among our People,” Ellicott wrote on June 7, “but for prudential reasons did not give any intimation of the discovery.” Ellicott had appointed his younger brother Joseph as surveyor, a position that made him responsible for the axmen. Although both Joseph and Benjamin, the youngest brother, had been trained by Andrew in the use of sextant and chronometer, and could make satisfactory telescopes and compasses, neither had their eldest sibling’s flair. Throughout his life,however, Joseph Ellicott enjoyed a reputation as a man who drank and worked hard, and he took no prisoners in such a situation. “Early this morning, one Brown who was the soul of the Mutiny received a severe cudgelling,” Ellicott noted in his journal, “and several others [were] discharged—we then went with the remaining hands and began work.”
    Approaching the Ohio Valley, where the population of settlers and squatters was rapidly growing, they recruited more axmen, and the work accelerated. On August 24, Ellicott wrote to his wife, “We now lie encamped on the Banks of the Ohio and intend Crossing it Tomorrow. The Boundary Line between the States of Virginia and Pennsylvania was compleated on the 23rd Day of this Month. It makes a most beautiful appearance from the Hills being between 60 and 70 Miles due North and cut very wide and perfectly streight.”
    The result of their grueling work was dramatic. Ever since Fort Pitt had been erected in 1759 on the fork of the Ohio and Monongahela rivers, the entire surrounding territory had been regarded as belonging to Virginia. Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of the colony, had garrisoned the fort with Virginia militia, and settlers registered their claims with the Virginia Land Office and paid Virginia taxes. The beautiful, straight line cut by Ellicott and Rittenhouse changed all that. It crossed the Ohio River almost thirty miles downstream from Pittsburgh, opposite the modern city of East Liverpool, thereby transfering thousands of settlers and several hundred square miles of territory to Pennsylvania.
    This was more than an administrative adjustment. For both government and governed, the establishment of a secure border had a profound impact. For Pennsylvania, it marked the start of a process of definition that would free it from claims to its territory by Virginia, New York, and Connecticut and see its area grow by about fifteen million acres, approximately 20 percent larger than its size as a colony. As the limits of its jurisdiction were defined, the state would behave like its colonial predecessors, surveying territory, establishing new counties, taxing inhabitants, and selling unoccupied land to pay its debts. In the gilded drawing rooms of Philadelphia where politicians and financiers gathered, this would appear to be a highly desirable outcome.
    In the Ohio Valley, the new boundary took on a different aspect. Although it changed nothing in the crumpled landscape or the harsh living conditions, it radically altered the lives of frontier families by placing them within Pennsylvania’s jurisdiction. The new state’s taxes were higher than Virginia’s, and the burden of them much harsher because Pennsylvania, unlike Virginia, was short of hard currency with which to pay. On the frontier, people were accustomed to grow or hunt most of what they needed and to barter for the rest. But taxes had to be paid in cash, and lack of coins and bills forced many to sell the livestock and tools on which they depended for survival. “ Very few in this Town can procure Money to go to market ,” a Pittsburgh merchant complained in 1786. “And as to pay… a Debt, it is out of the question.”
    Yet if they failed to pay, county courts issued orders to seize