Because Jefferson was most especially proud of having created the University of Virginia, the tree cutters and spy-hole makers have managed to frame its great rotunda, which Jefferson did not live to see finished, in the dead center of the view. Behind, though, are the soft, wood-smothered hills, with the sinuous curves of the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway marking their summit lines. These are hills with a special significance in American history and in the story of the eventual unification of the country. For in Jefferson’s time these hills toward which he gazed marked the outer limits, the western edge, the border of the pale of properly settled America. They were a line of hills which Jefferson never managed to cross but which intrigued him, pulled at him, and nagged at him all his life.
There are a great many aspects of Jefferson’s character that led him to play so crucial a part in the physical creation of the eventual transcontinental republic. It is a commonplace to repeat that he was a man of contradictions. He was a scientist, first and foremost, as well as a learned aesthete and a slave-owning aristocrat with apparently profound feelings for the furtherance of human decency, kindness, and civilization. At thirty-two years old, he was described by the überbiographer James Parton as “a gentleman … who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet and play the violin.”
There was something else though. Thomas Jefferson may well have been a sophisticated foreign traveler—he had been minister to France, after all, and later for four years was the US secretary of state—but his travels within the republic were limited indeed. And yet for most of his life, he was quite enthralled by the concept of the American West. He suffered from a bewildering, almost uncanny, and romantic fascination with the continental Occident. He was obsessively interested in particular in just how its immense and generally unknown acreage could and should eventually be apportioned among his country’s fast-growing citizenry.
To know its geography was a first imperative. As far back as 1783, while he was a Virginia member of the Continental Congress, he had formally suggested the mounting of a private expedition to the Pacific. “I have always had,” he declared, “a peculiar confidence in men from the western side of the mountains.”
But Jefferson did not mean by this the grand crystal crags of the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada (of which he, in common with most, knew precious little). Rather he meant the relatively modest ripples of the Appalachians, of which the Blue Ridge hills that he could see from Monticello were the easternmost. For these endless ridges of Devonian rock that rose out of the coastal plains from South Carolina up to New York essentially marked the edge of the United States proper, in Jefferson’s time. Beyond them, America was barely known.
Five million people (a fifth of them black, mostly enslaved) lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean, hemmed in by these confusing swaths of mountains. Only four dirt roads pierced the passes between the hundreds of miles of ranges. Poor weather, frequent rockfalls and mudslides, or else the occasional understandable hostility of the Creek, the Iroquois, or the Cherokee who once owned these lands (to the extent the ownership of land was a concept recognized by indigenous Americans) increased the difficulty for settlers wishing to travel across the hills, between South Carolina and Kentucky, say, or from Tennessee to Pennsylvania. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, it could still take nine days of fitful journeying by railroad, canal, riverboat, and stage line to get from New York across to Pittsburgh, because these Appalachian ranges were so ruggedly impenetrable. In Jefferson’s time, travel across them was for the fainthearted all but impossible.
Those scattered few who then lived permanently beyond this cordillera, those whose homes were south of the Great Lakes and down in the Ohio Valley, turned out to be so decisively cut off from the American mainstream that there was serious talk of secession, though in the end it came to little more than campfire grumblings. Meanwhile those who lived farther out still, in the wilds beyond the Ohio River and in the American-possessed (but hitherto Indian-reserved) lands that were then designated as the Northwest Territories, were as scarce as they were brave. They may have enjoyed Jefferson’s “peculiar confidence,” but they were initially outnumbered ten to one by Native Americans; they had extremely limited opportunity for work, mainly in the fur trade; they were protected, but only somewhat, by outpost contingents of American soldiers; and they lived under a scrappily benign version of martial law. It was only when their numbers reached five thousand—in 1798, two years before Jefferson became president—that they were given a representative government with a proper little parliament sited in the first instance in Marietta, the tiny town that was their territorial capital.
It was these doughty western settlers who were to become, however, the eventual first beneficiaries of one of the greatest and most revolutionary ideas put forward by Jefferson, as the territory in which they eked out their rugged existences became its initial testing ground. Jefferson’s great notion was that Americans could and should have the right to do something that was hitherto quite unimaginable to the Indian tribes: they should be able to own the land of which their territory was made.
Land ownership was an unfamiliar and almost alien concept. Bands of the Iroquois, the Creek, the Shawnee, the Delaware, the Miami, and their native kin had certainly passed through these lands for hundreds of years, had hunted it, settled it, raised families on it. But they had never imagined it as something that could be possessed. It was much the same for the early white settlers: they may not have had the same nomadic urges as the Shawnee and the Iroquois, but land ownership was conceptually well beyond their ken also. It might have seemed possible and reasonable for a settler to own a canoe or a cow or a cottage—or back in those unenlightened times in the Americas, even a slave. But land, an immovable part of the eternal fabric of our celestial body—that seemed somehow to be an entity beyond ownership, the possession of it lying perhaps within the divine prerogatives of kings but certainly not ever in the name of ordinary citizens.
Thomas Jefferson thought quite otherwise. He had developed this thinking long before completing his work on the Declaration of Independence. It is spelled out in a sulfurous pamphlet, published in 1774, in which he denounced King George III’s plan that American colonists on the far side of the Appalachians should live in a feudal arrangement, with the king owning the land and his tenants obliged to pay their feu to his court.
The thirty-one-year-old Jefferson denounced this as a barbarism. It was a formula for studied inequity, based on a fiction of kingly and ecclesiastical privilege that had been developed in Britain a thousand years before by the Norman conquerors and believed by many in the homeland ever since. Jefferson declared that such a concept—that only kings, churches, and the aristocratic mighty could own land—would not be allowed to infect the vast tracts of real estate that he suspected lay on the far side of his new country’s mountain ranges. All men should have, in his opinion, the right to own land there as they see fit—to buy, sell, or borrow against its value and to hand it down over the generations. And to pay taxes on it, moreover, from which good governance might be purchased and paid for.
This belief had helped propel Jefferson into his seat in the Continental Congress. And his unwavering devotion to its principles led to his sponsorship, a decade later, of a new law, the practical effect of which can be seen nowadays in just about every American town and city beyond the East Coast and on just about every field west of the Ohio River. This was Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785—An Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing of Lands in the Western Territory—a piece of legislation that laid down the rules for how the immense tracts of new American countryside, at the time neither owned nor properly known, were to be described, divided, and eventually distributed.
Though a dreamy Jeffersonian idealism lay at the legislation’s heart, this prescient and profoundly significant piece of legislation not only provided land for those who wished to own it,