How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [36]
Likewise, what others wrote about Banneker reveals how one’s true feelings about race could be just as difficult to know then as they often are today. The same year that the bullet was fired into Banneker’s home, The Time Piece & Literary Companion published a satiric article, purporting to be the last will and testament of one Peter Porcupine. It included the curious-to-decipher bequest, “Should the said Thomas Jefferson survive Banneker, the almanac maker, I request he will get the brains of the said philomath carefully dissected, to satisfy the world in what respects they differ from a white man.”
Benjamin Banneker could not satisfy the world. But he could cope with it. And prevail.
OHIO, INDIANA, MICHIGAN, ILLINOIS, WISCONSIN, MINNESOTA
JESSE HAWLEY
The Erie Canal and the Gush of Redrawn Lines
The common purpose of government is protection. But can it not be made to do more?… To the cultivation of the arts of peace, we have to ask our government to adopt another principle: that of a nation’s wealth … is best promoted by applying the surplus revenue of the state to internal improvements, roads, canals, &c.
—JESSE HAWLEY1
Jesse Hawley contributed to the location of more state lines than any other individual except Stephen A. Douglas. But Hawley did it from jail. In 1807 he published a book-length series of fourteen newspaper essays while cooling his financially overextended heels in debtors’ prison in Canandaigua, New York. The essays detailed the means by which the Great Lakes could be connected to the Hudson River and, via the Hudson, to the Atlantic. Doing so would have an incredible result, according to Hawley, who predicted with astonishing accuracy that “the trade of almost all the lakes in North America … would center at New York.… In a century its island would be covered with the buildings and population of its city.”2
Hawley was not the first to speculate on a waterway connecting the hinterland to the Hudson. As early as 1724, surveyor Cadwallader Colden wrote of the potential for waterways connecting New York’s Mohawk River, which flows into the Hudson, to the Great Lakes:
Many of the branches of the river Mississippi come so near to the branches of several of the rivers which empty themselves into the Great Lakes, that in several places there is but a short land-carriage from one to the other.… If one considers the [Mohawk] river and its numerous branches, he must say that, by means of this river and the lakes, there is opened to view such a scene of inland navigation as cannot be paralleled in any other part of the world.3
In addition to the extraordinary commercial advantages of connecting the Hudson to the Great Lakes, Colden also emphasized its national security value—from the point of view of England before the Revolutionary War. He argued that the French, who had come to control the vast swath surrounding the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes, and the St. Lawrence River, “plainly showed their intention of enclosing the British settlements.”
National security remained an important element when Hawley published his 1807 essays, but from a substantially changed perspective. The St. Lawrence still belonged to another nation, but now that nation was England, which had conquered French Canada in 1763. And while the Mississippi River was now entirely within the United States, owing to the Louisiana Purchase, that same purchase triggered a growing fear that someday the lower half of the Mississippi might also be part of another nation composed of the American slave states.
Between Colden’s report to the colonial governor of New York and Hawley’s newspaper series, numerous others had discussed aspects