We can scarcely be warranted in supposing that all the productive powers of [the earth’s] surface can be made subservient to the use of man,…that all the elements and combinations of elements in the earth, the atmosphere, the water…could be withdrawn from that general destination, and appropriated to the exclusive support and increase of the human part of the creation.1
More than any other factor, the way that Americans relate to their land has determined the course of their collective history. This is especially true of the early national period, when the basic spatial organization of the older settlements was codified and extended into vast new territories1, and a rich diversity of land use practices was gradually replaced with a monolithic order based on private property and the intensive exploitation of resources. It was during this period that the American nation as we know it began to take shape, and it was through the use or abuse of land that its predominating values were expressed.
It is surprising then, that scholarly interest in this subject has been so slow to take off. The influence of physical space on the formation of American identity, and vice versa, has remained on the fringe of mainstream historiography, even as its relevance to present day environmental issues becomes more acute. The handful of studies that have been done—including, among others, Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, Richard Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment, Myra Jehlen’s American Incarnation, Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth, and Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination—are in many ways congruent, which makes it all the more unusual that so few scholars have attempted a greater synthesis.
This essay will take a brief look at the above-mentioned studies, and suggest how one book in particular, Martin Bruckner’s The Geographic Revolution in Early America lays the groundwork for a more comprehensive approach to the question of Americans’ relation to land in the early national period and beyond.
In his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Leo Marx was the first to put a finger on the “pastoral ideal” as a defining feature of American culture, and his formulation of it has remained a crucial point of departure for later historians. For Marx, the American pastoral ideal is actually a modern variation on an ancient theme; that is, the perennial imagining of a “middle state” between art and nature. What distinguishes the American version is that it locates this ideal not in a mythical Arcadia, but in the physical space of the republic as an attainable condition, and in fact the most desirable condition. Virgil’s learned shepard becomes Jefferson’s yeoman farmer; “an actual social type in an actual society” whose identity is enlarged and renewed by his connectedness to the land.”2
In the early national period, this pastoral ideal was entering into a dialectical relationship with the forces of “progress”—in particular the new applications of steam power and the intensification of manufacturing. By the 1830s and 40s, the result was “a powerful metaphor of contradiction” that expressed “the national preference for having it both ways”; that is, the avowed “pursuit of rural happiness” alongside a devotion to “productivity, wealth, and power.”3
Marx distinguishes between two kinds of pastoralism: the one is “popular/sentimental” and manifests itself as a distanced, shallow, and reflexive good feeling for nature; the other is “imaginative/complex,” and its predominant theme is “the conflict between art and nature.”4
In the latter kind, there is typically a counterforce (whether it be the whistle of a locomotive, a steamboat, or a death’s head) that “brings a world which is more ‘real’ into juxtaposition with an idyllic vision.”. As a literary device, he traces its origins back to Virgil’s Eclogue I, in which Tityrus the shepard’s idyllic flute song is interrupted by his friend Meliboeus, who announces that soldiers have stolen his land.5
By the 1840s, this Virgilian symbol of interruption was migrating to the realm of American literature in the form of the machine. Marx discovers one of the first instances of this in the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne: in one passage, the author’s long, bucolic description of Concord’s woods is suddenly broken: “But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony”. The machine becomes an “industrial counterforce” that “recurs everywhere in our literature.” Not surprisingly, from the 1840s to the 1860s, its most frequent incarnation was the locomotive in the woods.6
Marx points to Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia as an early intimation of the art and nature dialectic. Jefferson believed ardently in the small farm of the yeoman as the basis of a stable republican society—it was the “middle state” between the two extremes of untamed wilderness and over-civilized metropolis, a place where society reaches a happy stasis and thereby overcomes the historical cycle of growth and decay. Paradoxically, Jefferson was an advocate of “technological” progress and commercial growth, and took for granted the need for “manufactures.” In England in 1777, he could visit the site of a grist mill powered by Boulton and Watt engines and excitedly recommend its adoption by Americans.7
As Marx argues, “The controlling principle of Jefferson’s politics is not to be found in any fixed image of society. Rather it is dialectical. It lies in his recognition of the constant need to redefine the ‘middle landscape’ ideal, pushing it ahead, so to speak, into an unknown future to adjust it to ever-changing circumstances.”8
By the war of 1812, Jefferson had seen his republic moving decidedly away from an agrarian ethic of permanence, and towards an ambivalent future of commercial prosperity. Against the unforeseeable changes wrought by the demands of production, the middle state was losing ground: “Our enemy has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from Paradise: from a peacable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and manufacturing one.”9
Others perceived in an inchoate industrialism the fulfillment of the ideal of the middle landscape. Tench Coxe was the one of the most compelling of these figures. As Hamilton’s assistant to the Treasury, Coxe helped to smuggle machines and inventors from Europe and argued for the importation of the factory system to America.
Coxe’s case for industrialization, as Marx argues, rested on the idea that the same laws inhere in art as in nature—behind the seductive power of the steamboat or the structural elegance of the Constitution lies “the same ‘mechanism’ to which we respond, aesthetically, in the presence of the natural landscape.”10 In other words, nature is all.
Something happens in the late 1820s; the assumption of a harmony between the mill and the waterfall, the steam boat and the river is replaced by the realization of a tension between “the machine” and nature. For the enthusiasts of industry and its objectors alike, it meant a war between man and his environment, in which man seizes the power of the elements for his own designs. The image of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods becomes a cliché of the times, and the belief in “progress” becomes so widespread that “it seldom required precise formulation.” 11 On the frontier, meanwhile, this virile national mood gave sanction to new levels of violence.
In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin places “the Frontier Myth” at the center of “all that is genuinely exceptional in American history.” It includes an assumption that society must be perennially renewed by “a physical movement outward from the Metropolis” and into a Frontier wilderness where material riches and personal tranformations await. Slotkin argues forcefully that the Frontier Myth is essentially a way of effacing “the perilous consequences of capitalist development” by placing the locus of social conflict outside of the core society and “into the world of myth.” (And by positing the existence of endless horizons, the myth also provides a justification for the waste and abandonment of land in the older settlements.)12
The pioneers in this frontier project endure a temporary “regression” of conditions, but in the end their labors serve to renew and extend the basis of civilization. In most versions of the myth, those who live on the fringe (like Crévecouer’s frontiersman) are transitional figures; they prepare the way for civilization, but with a “taint of the savage,” they become a threat to the established order once their work is done.
In the early nineteenth century, Slotkin argues, two variations on the Frontier myth were most influential: the ideology of Jeffersonian agrarianism and the literary legacy of Fenimore Cooper. The former sees cultivation as “the real action of history” while understating the role of war and conquest; the latter dramatizes racial violence as a critical part of the redemption-through-expansion process. Both assume the eventual triumph of civilization over the wilderness and its inhabitants.13
Slotkin suggests that Jefferson was “a representative philosopher of the operative ideology of American capitalism,” who assumed that expansion was the surest path to social stability. The difference between his vision and that of John Filson or Fenimore Cooper is that Jefferson imagined a peaceful conversion of the Indians from hunters to farmers (in reality, they had always been both) as an alternative to genocide. Either that or their decimation was linked to natural processes “like the growth and decay of plants or the rise and fall of contending animal species.”14
The agrarian vision is one of expansion without violence. Thus, “Crévoecouer’s geopolitical map is an allegorical tableau, stable and relatively free of catastrophic change.” But in the hands of Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, the map becomes “active, with lines that break and shift as human actors cross the boundaries in both directions, pursuing a struggle that will end only when one people and one geographical realm has been eliminated from the map.” Corresponding to Cooper’s apocalyptic vision was a general anxiety in the culture at large about the nation’s future. For a people accustomed to equating “all progressive or desirable change…with a physical movement outward,” the filling up of Western lands portended disaster. 15
In the period of 1820-45, Americans believed that they had reached a “last frontier” on the verge of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Of course, the greatest wave of expansion was yet to come, but it would require “the rudiments of an industrial system” and a concomitant change in social values.16 .
In the meantime, some of the nation’s expansionist energies were deflected to the metropolis in the form of intensified development. As a result, the promise of land for all was replaced in part by a greater valuation of monetary wealth; the yeoman morphed into the entrepreneur as “the agrarian imagery of a republic of smallholder citizens …was energized—and implicitly undone—by the ethic of high productivity and profitablility that went with belief in democracy-through-mobility.” In effect, the “Jacksonian farmer” was more likely to think of his land as liquid asset than as permanent estate, and the frontiersman was recast as a self-interested speculator. 17
In the frontier literature of the 1830s and 40s, the land becomes a great antagonist, or as Washington Irving describes it, “an irreclaimable wilderness…where there is nothing to tempt the cupidity of the white man.” Irving’s West is “far too arid, wild, savage, and intractable a place for agrarian settlement by yeoman farmers.” His heroes (John Jacob Astor, Captain Bonneville) are commercial entrepreneurs who strike out not in search of a homestead, but only to make a profit off of the furs of the dwindling wild beasts. Instead of a place where nature awaits improvement, the new West is fated to abandonment or total destruction. In the writings of James Hall and Robert M. Bird, the Indian is conversely depicted as “visceral, unreasoning,” and unredeemable; so that every trace of the noble savage paradigm is lost.18
Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth is a study of the nineteenth century proto-conservationist movement among wealthy farmers of the South and Northeast, who saw westward expansion as a destabilizing influence on society, and offered “a contrary vision of progress” that consisted of “gradual settlement…in a limited space.”19
As early as the 1790s, it had become apparent that land in the old states was overworked and exhausted. In 1795, Englishman William Strickland could stand on the eastern foot of Jefferson’s beloved Blue Ridge Mountains and remark that “Land in America…[is] continually affording less…Virginia is in rapid decline.” John Beale Bordley of Maryland, George Washington of Virginia, and George Jeffreys of North Carolina voiced the same concerns. They decried the “skin and scratch method of cultivation, by which high short-term yields were generated with minimal effort at the expense of long-term sustainability.20
During the Panic of 1819, cheap cotton from India pushed the U.S. variety out of British markets, and the ensuing crisis provoked a rethinking of Americans’ farming practices. The conservationist movement gained a growing number of adherents, especially through agricultural journals like Nile’s Register, The American Farmer, and DeBow’s Review; and elite clubs like the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, whose members included Tench Coxe, Henry Clay, and Noah Webster.21
“Improving” farmers like Taylor, Jesse Buel, and John Lorain sought to rehabilitate land in the older states and institute farming practices that would ensure its perpetual productivity. In striking contrast to the predominant myth of eternal abundance, they argued that “if the nation pursues a system of lessening the food of the earth, the earth injustice will revenge or starve the nation.”22
Their commitment to improved husbandry was occasioned by self interest; “it offered, among other things, an intensified production to offset the declining value of commodities.” However, as Stoll argues, “commercial opportunity explains none of the fervor behind improvement.” Rather, it was an ethic of permanence and stability with roots in pre-Revolutionary culture, re-energized in the face of an imperiled landscape.23
In American Incarnation Myra Jehlen explores the connection between American identity and physical space through literature. Like Bruckner, she traces it back to the colonial era, when English subjects acquired a sense of entitlement to “a natal estate in nature” as a path to personal freedom and even existential wholeness; “No longer defined primarily by family or class, a man molded himself, then the world, in his image.”24
Jehlen argues that from this “idealist self-definition” follows a distinctly modern sense of “personal alienation”—because while the possession of land remains the measure of one’s worth, the land continues to be something other than one’s self.25
For society at large, it means that every new generation requires virgin land, and expansion becomes an imperative.
In chapter 2 of her study, “The Mammoth Land,” Jehlen mines the writings of American intellectuals from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Thomas Jefferson, Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, Charles Brockden Brown, William Bartram, John Lorian, Jared Eliot, and John Spurrier) for evidence of the unspoken assumption that “the ethos of liberal individualism inheres in the continent,” and compares these with European writings of roughly the same period (Georges-Louis Le-clerc de Buffon, Abbé Reynal, J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur). What she finds is a peculiar difference between European and American notions of exactly where the agency of civilization resides; for the former, it is man acting against nature to subdue it and replace it. For the latter, “their individualist civilization seemed of the land,” and hence, man acts as nature’s partner to bring about its unrealized potential.26
With this implicit understanding, Benjamin Rush described the continent before settlement as “pure and healthy,” and charged that the persistence of fevers was not the result of a harsh climate (as Europeans had suggested), but of the clearing of forests that once absorbed “the gaseous emanations of bogs and swamps.” Charles Brockden Brown complained that it was Americans’ “vicious habits,” especially their adoption of “the dress and diet of Europe” that was to blame for the high incidence of disease. For Webster, it was the growth of crowded cities and the over-consumption of meat (supposedly learned from the Indians). And as Jehlen points out, the way forward was to be a rejection of both the European and the Indian influence in pursuit of an agrarian middle state, “a civilization that is the human dimension of nature.” John Lorain’s work on sustainable farming, “Nature and Reason Harmonized in the Practice of Husbandry” (1825) develops this concept even further by seeing the advancement of civilization as an adjustment of human needs to the supreme “economy of nature.”27
In the writings of Emerson, to which Jehlen’s devotes an entire chapter, the merging of man and nature reaches the level of a philosophical system based on an “unlimited individualism whereby the self transcends its mortal limits by taking total possession of the actual world.” It is a veneration of nature that leads not to pastoral stasis but to dynamic action that is already latent in the “craving” land: “Build, therefore, your own world…A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.” For Emerson, therefore, the advances of industry and invention do not represent a triumph of human will over the elements, but only the enhancement of an all-poweful, inescapable Nature. Thus, the locomotive is likened to “an eagle or swallow,” and as Jehlen observes, “From the past to the future, man moves not from nature to civilization but from history to nature.”28
The problem with Emerson’s scheme, Jehlen argues, is that it casts human institutions as organic expressions of the cosmic order, and thus proscribes all “manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.” As she interprets it, the utopian future that Emerson describes will “emerge of itself from itself,” so that “deeds and revolutions…are forbidden” and even “doomed to failure.” In other words, the conflation of society with nature renders the notion of political alternatives unthinkable.29
Buell’s study is larger in scope than any of the others here considered: he traces the workings of the “environmental imagination” from the eighteenth century to the present (without much regard for chronology), and he relies heavily on cross-cultural comparisons to demonstrate that American models of the human-nature relationship are not all that exceptional. Nonetheless, his treatment of the early national period does expand upon the work of other scholars like Marx and Jehlen in interesting ways.
Buell argues that with some exceptions, the American literary canon is thoroughly homocentric. The physical environment is thus most often a silent receptor for projected meanings, rather than a living “presence”. And as Buell points out, those meanings have changed over time: at first, the land represented the fulfillment of “old world desire,” then American “cultural nationalism,” and later “American exceptionalism;” so that “the territorial facticity of America has always been both blatant and opaque.”30
However, unlike Jehlen and to some extent Marx, Buell does not see the writings of the foremost American naturists (Thoreau, Wordsworth) as purely immanentistic, with nature serving as “the screen for something else.” Instead, he argues against reductionism to allow for the interplay of both human projections and true engagement with the world “out there.”31
Thus, while Buell agrees with revisionist historians that Jeffersonian agrarianism was a “hegemonic” force rather than an alternative to the dominant order, he also stresses its “ideological multivalence.” Depending on who owns it, the ethic of the middle state can suggest imperialism or stasis, “land killing” or sustainable farming.
The “multivalence” of the pastoral is intensified in the early national period, when the European legacy of equating the new world with Arcadian dreamscape is interposed with Americans’ growing awareness of its physicality. In Crévecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer (1782), Buell says, “We witness American culture and writing at the moment of being dreamed by the European mind”; and it was a dream upon which later pastoralisms would be founded.32
In America as elsewhere, national identity was defined in European terms, specifically the “equation of old world is to new world as town is to country.” Americans readily accepted this role, and discovered that what they lacked in cultural legacy was made up for in the vastness of their territory and its raw beauty. The continent itself became the pre-eminent national symbol.33
In The Geographic Revolution, Martin Bruckner suggests that, in his own words, “the construction of the American subject was grounded in the textual experience of geography.” As geographic knowledge evolved and spread among eighteenth and early nineteenth century white Americans, he argues, it deeply informed their sense of identity and made possible the invention of a national character.34
For most of the seventeenth century, colonists delineated the boundaries of their properties according to natural landmarks such as streams, rocks, or trees. Beginning in 1690, however, the practice of “platting” the land was adopted; that is, to draw the boundaries of one’s properties according to a grid plan. On the one hand, the plats portended an age in which land would be abstracted and commodified; on the other, the art of platting allowed colonists “to take visual and textual possession” of their personal space. Both of these implications would prove critical to the later formulation of national identity, and the relationship of post-revolutionary society to the land.35
In his second chapter, Bruckner describes how revolutionary rhetoric was embedded with a growing awareness of America as a continent, whereas previously it was represented as a series of islands, or worse, “a fragmented elusive territory.” Patriots like James Otis and Thomas Paine emphasized the vastness of the continent, and the absurdity of its subordination to a small and distant island.36
Chapter three examines the power of maps to visually convey the formerly inconceivable idea of a unified American nation. In the post-revolutionary era, maps could be found in public offices, taverns, schools and homes. Moreover, a “structural nexus” between alphabetic and map literacy was deepened, as educators like Noah Webster and Jedediah Morse sought to inspire in students an “attachment” to their nation’s “interests” through geographic studies. This was also the age in which, significantly, national boundaries were represented on maps by darker lines than state boundaries. In other words, for the first time, the shape of the states united was visually “privileged”, becoming a kind of logo that “erases local knowledge, regional claims” and Indian possession of western territories.37
Chapter four examines early American geographic instruction and its inclusion in nearly all school curricula. The popularity of geographic writing at the time was outdone only by bibles and spelling books and Bruckner argues that the ever-present map helped to foster an imperial consciousness among ordinary whites, while locating their sense of self more firmly within a national rather than local space.
Chapter five explores the profound influence of geographic awareness on early American novelists, including Royall Tyler, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown (all of whom ended their literary careers in favor of geographic writing). In their prose, Bruckner locates an American subject that is fundamentally shaped by a mapped-out world.
Chapter six is a novel analysis of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Bruckner argues that the official expeditionary map and the men’s journals constitute a textual record of “confrontation” between “two epistemologically different modes of geographic representation”: the European versus the AmerIndian mode, as Lewis and Clark relied entirely on their Indian guides for descriptions of unknown lands.38
In chapter seven, Bruckner argues that the spread of geographic literacy in the post-revolutionary era served to consolidate a national identity, and eventually prepared Americans for the bloody politics of imperialism. As he shows through contemporary sources including textbooks and editorials, by the 1820s many Americans saw the need for westward expansion as an aesthetic issue. Writers complained of the “irregular figure” of the nation as it appeared on the map, and longed for the more “beautiful picture” of a transcontinental republic. Therefore, he argues, the will to expansion (and the extermination of those beyond the map) cannot be explained by federal land policy or media endorsement alone. Rather, it was the “applied expression” of a “culture of geographic letters.”39
Bruckner’s study lays the groundwork for a synthetic approach to the subject of Americans’ relationship to the land in the early national period and beyond. His greatest contribution to this debate is his rediscovery of a retrospectively self-evident fact: namely, that geography is a communicative system, an interface, and as such it has the ability to reorder the human world. With this in mind, a second reading of the works of Buell, Jehlen, Slotkin, Stoll and Marx might reveal a whole new set of hidden connections and point to new fields of further study.
For one, the homocentric tendencies of American literature that Buell explores could be in part explained in part by Bruckner’s thesis that “The textbook, and not the world, was the epistemological habitat in which the fictional characters of the early national period were supposed to make themselves comfortable.”40
Similarly, Jehlen’s observation that early Americans imagine a deep connection between themselves and the continent, even while feeling a strong sense of “personal alienation,” is clarified by the truism that they experience the world as “an inherently empty” construct through a geographic language “based on substitutive representation.”41
Slotkin’s study of the Frontier Myth could be greatly amplified by a greater attention to the increase of geographical literacy in the early nineteenth century and its effect on the American imagination. Bruckner’s argument that the will to expansion was the “applied expression” of a “culture of geographic letters” goes a long way to demystify the frontier ethos in a way that Slotkin’s psycho-literary approach could not.
Stoll’s study is a bit of a foil: his evidence for a vibrant “conservationist” movement among the eastern and southern elite in the 1820s belies any broad cultural consensus behind a “Frontier Myth”, and even Bruckner’s argument for imperialism as the basis for American nationalism runs up against its limits on the old farm estates.
As for Marx, I would like to suggest a more subtle connection between his pastoral ideal thesis and Bruckner’s “discovery” of geography as a world-ordering language.
Marx discussed the enlightenment era notion that everything in the cosmos is driven by the same mechanism or mechanistic principle:
“…celestial mechanics, the orrery, the new engines of production, even the factory system—all embody the same ultimate laws of nature. What is more, and this is perhaps the most difficult to grasp in retrospect, it is the same ‘mechanism’ to which we respond, aesthetically, in the presence of the natural landscape.”42
Thus, many Americans embraced industrial technology as a specialized branch of nature, rather than an unnatural human contrivance, and one that would contribute to the middle state once wrested from the “dark Satanic mills” of Europe.43
At first glance, it is an elegant vision of cosmic harmony—art and nature reconciled. But the very elegance of the affirmation serves to conceal its most important premises: that the universe is a machine, the world is a commodity, and thus the individual’s relationship to it is purely one of subject versus dead object. And like a machine, nature though unliving is the possessor of “certain great… powers” that remain “inactive and useless” until seized by human hands.44
Jefferson’s pastoral ideal is bound by this logic just as much as the religion of progress that followed it. His imagined middle landscape is a vision of inanimate nature given meaning and value through human occupation, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, or again a machine. The same logic is behind Tench Coxe’s statement that unaltered land is ‘vacant’—a ‘waste’.”45
Perhaps the counterforce that Marx describes represents ambivalence not only about the raw power of industrial technology, but also and more basically about the worldview of a society that makes the seizure of that power both possible and desirable. Because after all, to seize power from nature means to destroy it. To achieve the middle landscape (or whatever manscape), “the savage [must] be expelled; the panther, the wolf, and the bear…be exterminated; the forest…be razed.”.46 Maybe the man in the woods who loses composure when he hears the train, is struck by the savagery of a people (his people) who march across the world as if their interest is “the only legitimate interest.” 47
All of this is to say that the counterforce as a symbol is about more than the urban-rural dialectic—in fact, it might be about something altogether different. In at least some of the literature (Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth?), it might be a dimly sensed aversion to the entire project of civilization, and its conversion of the living world into a commodity.
The middle landscape is just as much a product of this ideology as the metropolis. It is no surprise then that Hawthorne is in the woods of Concord, not in the adjacent farmstead, when he is struck by the “harshness” of the train’s whistle. Because like the frontier, the woods are in some sense outside of the space-time matrix of civilization, where nature still persists in its pre-commodified form. The arrival of the locomotive on this scene could be read as a symbolic reenactment of the history of white colonization.
Marx says that in the 1830s the locomotive becomes “a kind of national obsession. It is the embodiment of the age, an instrument of power, speed, noise, fire, iron, smoke—at once a testament to the will of man rising over natural obstacles, and yet, confined by its iron rails to a predetermined path, it suggests a new sort of fate.” He points out how contemporaries saw its effect to be “the annihilation of space and time.” 48
Here is where Bruckner’s work comes in. His study demonstrates that there was a remarkable increase in geographic literacy in the early nineteenth century, and that this “provided the discursive outlet for a new, calculated belief in the agency of human territoriality.” In the literature of the day, I would argue that there is a metaphorical affinity between the symbol of the locomotive and the geodetic grid. The project of creating an American nation indeed required that both space and time “annihilated”, or at least emptied of irregularities—that they be pinned beneath the equidistant lines of the continental grid. Like the iron rails beneath the train, the grid also suggests a “predetermined path” or “a new sort of fate” that will end only with the total replacement of all “pre-historical” ecosystems and human societies with a spatially, temporally, and culturally uniform American nation.49
If there is indeed such a connection between the symbols of the counterforce (in particular the locomotive) and the grid in the literature of the early national period, then a more careful reading of Marx’s sources will reveal it. But on a final note, consider the locus classicus of the urban-rural dialectic; Virgil’s Eclogues. In Eclogue I, Meliboeus is evicted from his land by soldiers returning from war:
These fallows, trimmed so fair / Some brutal soldier will possess these fields / An alien master. Ah! to what a pass / Has civil discord brought our hapless folk!50
In this case the forceful break “between man and not-man” is occasioned by the forfeiture of the shepard’s land to the agents of imperialism. As an archetypal text that is “particularly relevant to American experience”, the Eclogues prefigure not only the rise of the machine, but also the grid’s extension into the real-world Arcadias of the American frontier.51
1: James Madison, “Mr. Madison’s Address,” American Farmer 1 (Aug 20, 27, Sept 3, 1819). In Steven Stoll Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Ninetheenth-century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 37.
2: the trans-Allegheny Front between 1780 and 1800; the Mississippi Valley in 1803; Florida in the 1810s; the Mexican Frontier in the 1820s; and California and Oregon beginning in the 1840s.
3: Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 130.
4: Marx, 4, 140, 226.
5: Ibid., 25.
6: Ibid., 25, 22.
7: Nathaniel Hawthorne in The American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, 1932), pp. 102-5. In Marx, 13; Marx, 16.
8: Marx, 146-7.
9: Ibid., 140.
10: Ibid., 144.
11: Ibid., 162.
12: Ibid., 181.
13: Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Envrionment: the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 34, 41, 47.
14: Ibid., 52.
15: Ibid., 69, 79.
16: Ibid., 88.
17: Ibid., 110-11.
18: Ibid., 139, 113.
19: Ibid., 122, 119, 129.
20: Stoll, Larding, 23.
21: Ibid., 19; William Strickland, Observations on the Agriculture of the United States of America (London: Bulmer and Co., 1801), published as part of Reverend J.E. Strickland, ed., Journal of a Tour of the United States of America, 1794-1795, by William Strickland (New York: New York Historical Society, 1971), in Stoll, 32; Stoll, 35.
22: Stoll, 47.
23: John Taylor, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political, in Sixty-four Numbers, ed. M.E. Bradford (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1977), 317. In Stoll, 73.
24: Stoll, 27, 30.
25: Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 4.
26: Jehlen, 4.
27: Ibid., 43.
28: Ibid., 54, 55, 56, 59; John Lorain, Nature and Reason Harmonized in the Practice of Husbandry (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1825), 176. In Jehlen, 68.
29: Jehlen, 77; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836), in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 48-9. In Jehlen, 88; Jehlen, 95, 93-4.
30: Emerson, “Experience” (1843-44), in Essays and Lectures, In Jehlen, 85; Jehlen, 85, 45.
31: Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5-6.
32: Buell, 11, 13.
33: Ibid., 36, 54, 55.
34: Ibid., 59.
35: Martin Bruckner, The Goegraphic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and Cultural Identity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6.
36: Bruckner, 23, 50.
37: Ibid., 80.
38: Ibid., 103, 113-14, 124-6.
39: Ibid., 209.
40: Ibid., 239.
41: Buell, 184.
42: Jehlen, 4; Bruckner, 229, 71.
43: Marx, 162.
44: A line from William Blake's Jersualem.
45: Marx, 157.
46: Ibid., 156.
47: James Hall, Memoir of the Public Services of William Henry Harrison of Ohio (Philadeliphia: Key and Biddle, 1836, 56-7. In Slotkin, 124.
48: Buell's phrasing, from Environmental Imagination, 7.
49: Marx, 191, 194.
50: Bruckner, 242.
51: Virgil, Eclogue I. Found in the Internet Classics Archive, compiled by Daniel C. Stevenson of MIT for Web Atomics (accessed December 2006); available from http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/eclogue.1.i.html.