*Amir Alexander* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes Descartes and Leibniz had believed in the plenum - a filled space. Newton championed the idea of empty space. He was the first to use x and y coordinates extensively. Locke pushed Newton's ideas, saying empty space allowed men to pursue freedom. He advocated for these ideas to be implemented in the British colonies. Thomas Jefferson was an accomplished mathematician. He took Locke's ideas and ran with them. The authored both the Great American Grid and the Declaration of Independence. 3 events that rocked the Catholic Christian world: - discovery of the new world (how could the masters and authorities never have known about this?) - Copernicus - Martin Luther (spawned a plethora of diverse voices, eg Calvin) ## 2 - Life, Liberty and Infinite Space Catawba deerskin map shows the difference between European and Native American perspectives. It shows the entanglement of human relationships and geography, and is meant to be looked at from different sides and perspectives. The Great Western Grid imposed a blank mathematical space on 1.4 billion acres of the North American continent. Nothing like it exists in Europe or elsewhere. In 1851, the Lakota rejected the demand to grid their territory, saying it would be "to suddenly stop being what they were." Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, was one of the most accomplished land surveyors and cartographers in the American colonies. In 1752, Peter Jefferson published the most accurate map of the Virignia and Maryland colonies – the Fry-Jefferson Map. Towards the end of his life, he organized the Loyal Land Company, whose purpose was to map and sell plots of land to settlers. International treaties recognised all territories west of the Appalachian Mountains as belonging to the French. But in the 1750s, the French only numbered tens of thousands; British colonies had over a million. In 1754, when the English and French went to war, the native tribes had to choose sides. On 10 February, 1763, Britain and France signed the Treaty of Paris, which ended French claims to North America. For the British settlers, this meant they were free to settle the land. George III was worried that the British colonies would start competing with Britian. He also didn't want to alienate the native tribes that had been British allies. On October 7, 1763, a mere months after signing the peace treaty in Paris, George III issued a proclamation: “It is just and reasonable,” the king declared, “and essential to our Interest, and the Security of our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as . . . are reserved to them.” Consequently, he continued, we “declare it to be our Royal Will and Pleasure that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our Colonies . . . do presume, upon any Pretence whatever . . . to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West, or upon any Lands whatever, which . . . are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.” The colonists ignored the proclamation, believing that it was unenforceable and would be repealed eventually. The Mississippi Company, with George Washington as one of the founders, was formed in 1768 to settle the land along the river. > Washington’s attitude was no doubt typical. In 1767, he wrote to a fellow Virginia planter encouraging him to join in “attempting to secure some of the most valuable Lands in the King’s part, which I think may be accomplished after a while notwithstanding the Proclamation that restrains it at present and prohibits the Settling of them at all.” The reason, he continued, is that “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light . . . than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians.” It would not last, he assured his friend, “but must fall of course in a few years,” and it was therefore essential that they take action now. “Any person therefore who neglects the present opportunity,” he warned, “will never regain it.” To avoid complications, however, Washington asked that his friend “keep this whole matter a profound Secret . . . because I might be censurd for the opinion I have given in respect to the King’s Proclamation.” However, the line in the Appalachian Mountains held, as most investors were too worried about the illegality of purchasing western lands. Tensions rose, and in December 1773, members of a secret society called the Sons of Liberty boarded the ships of the East India Company in Boston Harbor and dumped their cargo of tea into the bay. This became known as the Boston Tea Party. In September 1774, all of the colonies except Georgia sent representatives to a Continental Congress in Philadelphia to form a common strategy to fight the British crown. It was the first time the colonies acted as a single body. Since the 16th century, when Queen Elizabeth granted Walter Raleigh all "the Newfound land of Virginia", it was never questioned that the British sovereign had ultimate ownership rights over America. This continued for over two hundred years, until Thomas Jefferson wrote an influential tract rejecting this ("A Summary View of the Rights of British America", 1774). He argued that the feudal system had been introduced in England by William the Conquerer in 1066, perpetuated by Norman lawyers for generations, and eventually imposed on the American colonies. Being farmers and not lawyers, the colonists had been taken advantage of. Instead, the American colonists should follow the earlier Saxon laws of possession, under which the land belonged fully to the people who worked it. ^58a956 > If Jefferson was to be believed, the very basis of land ownership in America, which had been in effect since the first colonists had settled in Jamestown, was null and void. It was nothing but a fraud concocted and perpetuated by the king and his lawyers to take advantage of the hardworking but naive settlers of the New World. Jefferson was not asking the king to correct misguided land policies. He was flatly denying the king’s power to put in place any policies at all and calling him out as a power-hungry fraudster. Jefferson didn't just rely on a historical argument, since this could easily be refuted. After all, before the Saxons invaded England, it had been ruled by the Romans. So he based a second argument on the laws of nature, which gives all men the right to seek new habitations and establish new societies. Once someone has settled down and marked a territory for their use, the land became theirs by universal natural law. This meant that the settlers were free from interference not just from the king, but from anyone. In 1803, Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris to purchase New Orleans, because he wanted a port for goods traveling down the Mississippi. Napoleon's foreign minister, Talleyrand, proposed to sell the whole of Louisiana for $15 million. This was $5 million more than Monroe was authorized to spend, but he agreed to the deal. The Louisiana Purchase added 883,000 square miles to the United States territories, thus doubling it. In May 1804, Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on an expedition to map and survey the territory. They went up the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and went down the Columbia River to the Pacific Coast. By September 1806, they had made the return journey. The expedition inspired settlers with visions of vast and empty land waiting to be occupied. Jefferson wrote to Monroe of his vision that the settlers would eventually occupy the entire Northern continent, as well as the Southern. This was decades before the term "manifest destiny" was coined. He also believed that it should be a uniform space. > The entire continent, Jefferson wrote hopefully to Monroe in 1801, would be covered by “a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms & by similar laws.” Diversity, which he called “a blot or mixture on that surface,” would not be allowed. There was, however, the inconvenient fact that the lands were not uninhabited, but populated by native Indians. Jefferson believed that they were a dying race, and that their best chance for survival was to be absorbed into the white settler society. Once they adopted farming, they would need less land to survive, and would willingly surrender it to the Europeans, who would need more of it for their increasing numbers. Jefferson thought of this as a "coincidence of interests" that was "for the good of both". If the Indians were slow to accomodate, then another strategy would be to draw them into trade relationships that indebted them and placed economic pressure to sell their land. Or they could be driven across the Mississippi. Or finally, there was simple extermination. > As a bloody history of war over several centuries attests, the threat of using violence to uproot and kill lurked just beneath the surface of Europeans’ dealings with Native Americans. And Jefferson, in this regard, was no exception. Already during the Revolutionary War, as governor of Virginia, he had suggested extreme measures for dealing with recalcitrant Indians. If you choose to move against “these Indians,” he wrote western commander George Rogers Clark, “the end proposed should be their extermination, or removal beyond the lakes or Illinois river.” > Decades later, the drumbeat continued. In 1803, now president Jefferson wrote Governor Harrison, “Should any tribe be fool-hardy enough to take up the hatchet . . . the seizing of the whole country of that tribe & driving them across the Mississippi . . . would be an example to others.” In 1807, faced with the pan-tribal movement led by Shawnee war leader Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa, Jefferson warned “that if ever we were constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,” and in the midst of professing his friendship to the Indian nations in 1809, he also reminded them that “the tribe which shall begin an unprovoked war against us, we will extirpate from the Earth, or drive to such distance that they shall never again be able to strike us.” “In war,” he conceded to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, “they will kill some of us,” but “we shall destroy all of them.” Jefferson believed in rural virtue, and thought of farmers as "the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, & they are tied to their country & wedded to it’s liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” Just as Newton believed that empty space gave God freedom to create, so did Jefferson believe that the vacant West gave the settlers freedom "to write what we pleased". Europeans, by contrast, lived in a full "Cartesian" world, and were constrained by history and tradition. America was a place of unconstrained freedom. # Quotes # References