American History Revised (56 page)

Washington chose the latter, and when the war was over he sent a bill for $449,291.
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Although the bill was paid promptly, Washington had made the wrong choice.

Here are the facts; you decide:

• He was betting everything that his side would win; had his side lost, he would have had to flee for his life.
  

• The war lasted a lot longer than anyone thought it would—six years. At $500 times 12 months times 6 years, his total earnings would have been $36,000—with no inflation adjustment.
  

• The war’s hardships invoked a bout of hyperinflation, making his $449,291 virtually worthless.
  

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” investors will say. Indeed, Washington should have taken his $36,000 while it still meant something (if you plot $500/month on the graph, you arrive at a total value of almost $1 million). Washington was so short on cash when he was elected president that he had to borrow $2,500 just to get to New York for his inauguration.

An aberration, a sign of poor financial management? Hardly. George Washington was a methodical, shrewd businessman; at least he managed to hang on to Mount Vernon. Most other plantation owners got wiped out. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was constantly in debt, had to sell all his books to pay his living expenses, and at one point tried to sell Monticello—but there were no takers.

1785
It is hard to imagine an obscure Englishman who died in 1609 as the father of the spatial and legal development of the New World landscape. His name was Edmund Gunter. His conceptual mathematics was to determine the
spatial organization of two thirds of the entire United States.

During
the American Revolution, the money used to pay soldiers, called continental scrip, had depreciated to one-tenth of one penny per dollar. By 1780, what had cost $100 in 1776, now cost $7,000. (Graph from Stanley Lebergott
, The Americans: An Economic Record.
W.W. Norton & Company, 1984, p. 42.)

After the Revolutionary War, the American government was so short of funds it had to sell western lands to farmers to avoid bankruptcy. To speed up the process, it passed the Land Ordinance Act of 1785, authorizing the division of the western territories into six-square-mile townships consisting of thirty-six square sections of 640 acres each. Overnight, surveying became a highly sought-after skill, just as computer programming is today.

The convenience of 6/36/640 owed its existence to “Gunter’s Chain,” consisting of one hundred links of 0.66 feet each. Such a chain is twenty-two yards long: ten square chains make an acre, and 640 acres make a square mile. Thus Gunter synthesized the acre, the mile, and the decimal system.

Take out your calculator and try this one:

The advantage of Gunter’s mathematics was that 640 acres was large enough to survey easily, and 640 could be readily divided into small plots to be sold to the poorer farmers—how democratic! Nobody had to worry about titles, boundaries, or lots; a farmer simply told a government land officer he wanted to buy section
x
in township number 4 in range number 2 in the Ohio Territory, and the official accepted the money and issued a deed. No lawyers or hassles. It was all very simple. Thanks to the grid, American westward movement proceeded smoothly.

Why a chain? Because unlike rods, the chain’s links made it flexible enough to easily carry around.

Of all values transformed from Europe to America, none was more important than the absolute, antifeudal ownership of land. Striving to own property was the American dream.

The sale of more than a billion acres of land, made possible by Gunter’s Chain, which enabled government surveyors to stay abreast of settlers and squatters heading west, financed the entire expenditures of the U.S. government for 150 years. It was only when expansion reached the Pacific, and there was no more land to sell, that the U.S. government resorted to income taxes.

But the chain did not die. Every time we watch a football game, there is a moment of high drama every time the referee carries out the ten-yard chain to measure whether the offense team got a first down. Now that we have laser video-beam technology to measure precisely, many people are calling for the abolition of the chain. But football purists demur: the chain has worked well for a hundred years, why change it? Just as most of America’s landscape was determined by the chain, so many a football game’s victory or defeat has rested on the verdict delivered by a chain.

America’s other great national pastime, baseball, is treasured as “a game of inches.” But so, too, is football. National sports reflect a nation’s character and values. There is not a country in the world that has a sport—let alone two sports—so dependent on exactness, precision, and measurement.

1800
There is considerable rhetoric today about the widening gap between the developed countries and the Third World. But this gap is to be expected, just as it happened to Britain and America in the early 1800s. Simple mathematics, says economist Jeffrey Williamson: “Consider two countries, one with income per person of $100, and the other $1,000. Let the poorer of the two grow much faster, 10 percent per year, than the richer, 2 percent per year. The gap widens by $10!”

Indeed, 10 percent of $100 is $10, and 2 percent of $1,000 is $20. Eventually, of course, the gap narrowed and finally collapsed in the early twentieth century as America’s faster economic growth rate enabled it to catch up to and bypass Great Britain. But from the founding of the republic in 1789 to the 1830s, the United States was like most Third World countries today: it was getting poorer and the mother country was getting richer.

1861
When the Civil War started, slaves were a secondary issue: the key issue was union versus secession. On a quiet May night in 1861, near Fort Monroe in Virginia, a small event occurred that was to trigger the eventual enlistment of nearly 200,000 black troops and laborers in the Union Army. This enlistment would strike, in the words of General Ulysses Grant, “the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.” Unforeseen by anyone, it was to prove a critical factor in determining the outcome of the war.

Three slaves, working on a Confederate fortifications project, slipped away and sought refuge behind Union lines commanded by General Benjamin Butler, also a lawyer and politician (later 1864 potential running mate with Lincoln, then governor of Massachusetts). When a Confederate officer sought the return of the runaways based on the Fugitive Slave Law,
Butler refused. His reasoning was twofold: (1) since Virginia had seceded from the Union, the Fugitive Slave Law was inapplicable; and (2) since the slaves had been used for military purposes, they were contraband of war and therefore subject to confiscation.

The Confederate officer went away, dumbfounded. Then Butler went one step further in accelerating history: he hired the slaves to work for the Union Army.

In one fell stroke, says the historian Gabor Boritt, “three slaves and Benjamin Butler had struck a monstrous blow for freedom and the Federal war effort.” Once the secretary of war endorsed Butler’s rationale—which he did promptly—the North progressed from giving military slaves their freedom to hiring them for military purposes, to promoting them from menial service jobs to becoming actual combat troops. As Afro-Americans proved themselves to their suspicious Northern captors to be loyal and diligent workers, they broke down racial stereotypes to the point where Lincoln could gamble on rescuing the flagging war effort by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

History again turned to Butler. At Lincoln’s request, he became the first general to lead ex-slaves into battle, thus paving the way for Afro-Americans to join the Union army en masse. Jefferson Davis was so outraged he issued what must have been the first and only
fatwa
in American history—long before Americans knew what this Islamic term meant. Davis ordered that Butler be executed on the spot, should the Confederates be so lucky as to get their hands on him.