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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 436-438



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Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy. By Andro Linklater. New York: Walker, 2002. Pp. 310. $26/$15.

"How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History" is the more accurate subtitle of the paperback edition of this book. In either edition, Measuring America is an intelligent and lively book that deserves a place on the reading list for any undergraduate American history course.

The cover of the cloth edition features young surveyor George Washington casually holding a Gunter's chain while assistants prepare to pound a peg into the ground at the end of the chain. It also shows inset heads of Thomas Jefferson and Ferdinand Hassler, whom Jefferson appointed chief of the first official geodetic survey of the Atlantic coast. Inside, Andro Linklater narrates the connections and tensions among these symbols of nationhood, geographical expansion, and standardization of measures. Gunter's chain is his heroic instrument that made "democracy," or Jefferson's dream of sturdy yeomen working small landholdings, come true. However, he does not explicitly discuss the linkage of property ownership to the right to vote in the new republic.

Linklater's thesis is that the 66-foot-long Gunter's chain, whose hundred standardized links made decimal divisions and multiplications easy yet also yielded traditional measurements in rods and miles, was the common [End Page 436] man's surveying instrument (together with a circumferentor) and a happy solution to the cumbersome English and the pedantic French ways of denoting land measurements. Even trigonometrically challenged surveyors could use it effectively. This allowed rapid surveying to take place in advance of settlement westward, easy subdivision of large square plots into small square plots for sale and resale, and general facilitation of finding and buying land even if you were not wealthy.

Thomas Hutchins, authorized by the Land Ordinance of Congress in May 1785 to survey the public lands of the United States, began doing so on 30 September that year from a convenient "Point of Beginning" on the west bank of the Ohio River, now in East Liverpool (p. 77). Over years the rectangles of the grid spread out like a quilt across the national terrain, which we now admire from airplanes on trips west of Pennsylvania. Lands settled earlier, on the nonsystem of "metes and bounds," by marking out one's own boundaries before registering them, usually followed topography better, but made for chronic conflicts over who owned what.

Who had the right to sell it in the first place? Before independence from Great Britain, monarchs granted ownership of large tracts of land to proprietors, and colonists made their own arrangements—peacefully or otherwise—with local Indians. Colonies that became states had to agree, upon uniting, on what territory to cede to the new republic for settlement. The new federation could generate funds for government only from tariffs and sale of public land, so it monopolized the right to buy land from Indians for resale. It also granted land in lieu of devalued currency to reward veterans of wars. Large land speculators variously got rich or went bankrupt; settlers with less capital went west and did the same, pushing Indians off the land.

How to measure the land? In his second chapter ("Precise Confusion"), Linklater takes the reader into a European past in which measurements were not standardized, where the size of bushels depended on what was in them and who was selling to whom, where an acre of poor land was bigger than an acre of good land. Implicitly, prices remained constant and commodities' size varied instead; a loaf of bread did not get more or less expensive, but bigger or smaller. Conventional units of measurement that had stabilized by custom in England carried over into the part of the new world that became the United States. Jefferson, physiocrat and democrat, proposed making people virtuous by working their own land; he also proposed making them use...

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