One speculator, Robert Morris, acquired one and a half million acres of western Virginia, while another, Alexander Walcott, secured a million acres. On top of these claims, the Virginia legislature allowed speculators to benefit from any inaccuracies in the survey up to 5 per cent of the total – thereby adding a free bonus of seventy-five thousand acres to Morris’s allocation – and then generously added a clause permitting purchasers to keep anything more than that which might inadvertently have been included as a result of the ‘ignorance, negligence or fraud of the surveyors’.
As a dry run for Jefferson’s far more spectacular experiment involving the territory west of the Appalachians, this was a humiliating failure. Yet it was less wounding than a weakness of temperament that was exposed by the War of Independence – in moments of crisis, it became clear, emotion was liable to overcome Jefferson. In 1779 he was elected Governor of Virginia, but when the British army moved into the state in 1780, instead of calling out the militia he evidently froze, leaving the decision to be taken by others and allowing the state capital, Richmond, to be overrun. The inquiry launched into Jefferson’s conduct he described as ‘a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave’. But evidence that this was not a freak reaction came soon afterwards in a second, more personal crisis.
In the autumn of 1782, Jefferson’s wife Martha died at the age of thirty-three after giving birth to their sixth child. They had been married for less than eleven years, and in that time Martha had been almost constantly pregnant, with six live children born, although only two survived beyond infancy, and three other pregnancies which ended in miscarriages. At her death, Jefferson was prostrated by a grief so consuming that for a month he could not face anyone and stayed secluded in a room where, his daughter recalled, he wept and groaned, emerging at last only to go for long, solitary horseback rides in the mountains. There may have been an element of guilt in this – the risk of repeated pregnancies to the health of delicate women was well understood – but whatever the source of his emotions it was obvious that the force of them made it impossible for Jefferson to function. In retreat from the pain of grief, he threw himself into work which absorbed all his energies and attention.
One year earlier, in October 1781, Lord Cornwallis and his British army, hemmed in by Washington on land and by the French fleet at sea, had surrendered, and American negotiators were now in Paris deciding the terms of the peace. At home the Continental Congress, which represented the nearest thing to a central government that the thirteen states could agree on, was attempting to work out the new nation’s future government and how to pay off the mountain of debt accumulated in paying for Washington’s continental army. Its single asset, if the negotiators could prise it from Britain’s grasp and the states were prepared to give up their own claims to it, was the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.
‘There are at present many great objects before Congress,’ wrote the Rhode Island delegate, David Howell, early in 1784, ‘but none of more importance or which engage my attention more than that of the Western Country.’
It might be sold to pay the country’s debts, it might be divided up to create new states, it might be administered on a new model, it might be made over to the pre-revolutionary land companies. The course decided upon would help to determine the relationship of the central government to the states.
In June 1783 Jefferson was elected a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress, and immersed himself in the many great objects before it, above all in the question of the western lands. Preserved in the Library of Congress are pages of his comments on proposed legislation, and draft bills whose margins are filled with his detailed annotations. In the space of less than a year, from June 1783 to May 1784, this escape into mental work produced numerous contributions to United States law, and three measures so substantial that they were to permeate every aspect of American life: the invention of the dollar, the procedure for creating new states from the Western Territory, and the means of surveying that territory. Had Jefferson had his way, there would have been a fourth: the invention of a new set of weights and measures. It indicates the cohesion of his thinking that all four formed part of a single logical structure.
GENERAL RUFUS PUTNAM had had a good war in every sense. His rank was a reward for the sterling service he had rendered Washington both at the siege of Boston and during the fighting in New York. When the continental army’s strategic retreat in 1776 pulled the focus of the war further south, Rufus had returned home to command the 5th Massachusetts Regiment in defence of his own state. There he had found time to father three more children, two in the dark days of defeat, and a third to celebrate the approach of victory – not for nothing were there rampant boars on the Putnam coat of arms – and to acquire the fine estate of Rutland that formerly belonged to a wealthy loyalist. But he was not content to rest on his laurels. With the return of peace, he was impatient to stretch his surveyor’s chain across the wide-open spaces beyond the Ohio river.
In April 1783, Timothy Pickering, a delegate to the Continental Congress, reported that ‘there is a plan for the forming of a new State Westward of the Ohio. Some of the principal officers of the Army are heartily engaged in it. The propositions respecting it are in the hands of General Huntington and General Putnam, the total exclusion of slavery from the State to form an essential and irrevocable part of the Constitution.’
Rufus was not a speculator – his stand against slavery, effectively ruling out land sales to Southern planters, was evidence of that – but he was proposing to acquire as much land as any of the pre-revolutionary companies, almost eighteen million acres from the Ohio to Lake Erie. Nevertheless, he wanted to divide this land up into ‘756 townships of six miles square’, because, as he told his former commander George Washington, ‘I am much opposed to the monopoly of lands and wish to guard against large patents being granted to individuals … it throws too much power in the hands of a few.’ Instead, he hoped to see the entire area settled by veterans of the continental army who could acquire land either by using the warrants issued on completion of service or by paying a fixed, small price. This would have the double benefit of settling a part of the United States vulnerable to British invasion from Canada with reliable soldiers, and of reviving the value of the military warrants, whose worth was ‘no more than 3/6 & 4/- on the pound [i.e. less than 20 per cent of the face value] [but] which in all probability might double if not more, the moment it was known that Government would receive them for lands in the Ohio Country’. Rufus petitioned Congress to grant him the land, and when it did not respond he wrote again to George Washington in April 1784 to ask, as was his habit, what should be done.
‘The Settlement of the Ohio Country, Sir, ingrosses many of my thoughts and much of my time since I left Camp,’ he wrote, and the delay was making the veterans impatient. ‘Many of them are unable to lie long on their oars waiting the decition [sic] of Congress on our petition.’
Washington, who had retired from command of his victorious troops and returned to his estates, was no less impatient for Congress to reach some decision about the land beyond the mountains. Throughout the war a stream of settlers had moved into Tennessee and Kentucky, and the increase in their numbers after the fighting was over prompted Washington to warn the Congress that without some policy, ‘the settling, or rather overspreading of the Western Country will take place by a parcel of Banditti who will bid defiance to all Authority’. The thorny pre-revolutionary conflict between settlers and squatters, proprietors and Goths, had not gone away.
Yet nothing could be done until the states agreed to give up individual claims to territory that they had all won from the British. Virginia, for example, as the original colony, had some rights to all the land from Lake Erie west to modern-day