Title: Marcus-Matalon Lecture on U.S. Law - The US Constitution as the Law of the Land: Maps, Militaries, and the Mississippi - Akhil Reed Amar
Date: Friday, March 21, 2025
Description: Explore U.S. constitutional geography, indivisibility and neighbouring borders in this preview of the book Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920, in this year’s Marcus-Matalon Lecture.
Speakers:
- Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University
- Stephen Marcus, Principal at the Marcus Firm, PLLC
- Mohamed Khimji, David Allgood Professor in Business Law; Professor Queen's Law
Podcast:
Transcript:
[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hi, everyone. Uh uh, my name is Mohammed Khimji and the David Allgood professor in business law at Queen's University.
On behalf of our law school, I want to start by acknowledging that Queen's University is situated on traditional Anishinaabe Haudenosaunee territory.
Are grateful to live and work on these lands. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone, uh, to the third annual Markus Match Long lecture in US law.
Uh, our speaker is Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of law and political science at Yale University.
The title of his talk is the US Constitution and the law of the land.
Nash ministries, uh. And the Mississippi.
Uh, in a moment, I'm going to turn it over to Stephen to introduce Professor Amar.
But before I do, I just wanted to say that this is one of my favourite events, uh, of the year at Queen's.
And it's because, uh, I get that Stephen and Renee have given to the school, have given me opportunities to connect with, uh,
incredible scholars like professor of law who I would otherwise not have the
opportunity to connect with because we work in completely different areas.
Uh, and it's a real pleasure to work with Stephen and react, uh, to plan this event every year.
And, uh, yeah. So now I'm going to turn it over to Rick transfer on.
Um, Renee and I want to thank Queen's Law School for hosting the Marcus Madison Lecture series on US law.
We also want to thank you, Professor Khimji, organising the lecture.
If you structures would not be possible without you. And it's a pleasure to work with you.
Um. This lecture series is intended to help Queen's Law students develop a basic understanding of the US.
The tutorial system, which may be useful to you when you become practising lawyers working in a transnational legal environment.
Um, I'm very pleased to introduce our speaker today, Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School.
Professor Amar is a college, uh, Yale University, excuse me.
And Yale Law School.
He became a professor of law at Yale Law School in 1985, and is a Sterling Professor of Law and political science at Yale University.
He teaches constitutional law at Yale Law School and at Yale College.
Professor Maher has been cited by the US by US Supreme Court justices.
In four dozen cases. It's an extraordinary accomplishment.
Um, and as written articles appearing in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, time Magazine, and The Atlantic.
He's the author of over 100 law review articles and several books on US constitutional law,
including, most recently, The Words That Made Us America's Constitutional Conversation, 1762 1840.
Um, as Professor Kinsey said, Professor Amar's lecture today is titled the US Constitution as the law of the land, maps,
military and the Mississippi, and one aspect of the lecture will be international borders between the United States and its neighbours.
Professor Amar, thank you for travelling across an international border between Canada and the
United States to Kingston to give us today's lecture and welcome to Queensland.
Right. Thank you Steve. Thank you Renee. Thank you Mohammed. Thank you, madam Dean.
Thank you all for coming. Um, this is my first time here.
And, uh, Kingston, uh, I walked over such a beautiful campus that you have, uh, a lovely city.
And everyone has been just so darn friendly to me.
And I am very grateful. I when I crossed the border, I actually made a slight mistake.
And approaching the gate. And the woman was very kind and friendly and didn't throw me in solitary confinement.
Um, and then. And the signage here has been great.
As I'm coming into the outskirts of, uh, Kingston, there's this, you know, very friendly sign for me that I can, uh, buy cannabis here.
Um, and, you know, um, uh, let the.
Thank you very much. Um, uh, let let the record reflect, um, that I did not accept the offer that, uh, mercy be unto the men.
Uh, so, um, thank you so much for inviting me.
This is an excerpt of a forthcoming book.
And the book is the middle in a series that I'm trying to write that aims to be, you know, bluntly, I'm an ambitious person.
I'm a kind of, uh, the American Blackstone. I'm trying to offer a definitive account of the American constitutional experience.
I've tried to write a series of books that, um, are holistic, um, one which came out in 22,005.
America's Constitution a biography walks you, the reader, through the written Constitution of the United States from start to finish.
The preamble, article 1 to 3, all the way through to article seven in the amendments.
So that tries to be textually holistic.
Um, this new project, um, tries to look at the Constitution once again, holistically, but in a chronological way,
telling you the story of an intergenerational you, the reader, the story of an intergenerational project,
a volume one, um, the fellowship of the ring, uh, so to speak, um, tells the story about how,
um, America becomes America, um, how we, the people, the United States become a we.
The words that made us. It's a pan, uh, us um, and that tells the story from 1760 to 1840.
And at the beginning of that story, America isn't a thing.
It's, um, and assortment. Um, but by the end of volume one, America has become a thing.
Uh, this is the, um, I'm going to beat you. An excerpt from volume two is coming out in September.
Um, and it's entitled Born Equal Remaking America's Constitution, 1840 to 1920.
So we begin, um, this book with, um, uh, uh, slavery.
Uh, uh, in many parts of the United States, uh, millions of, of people in chains and, uh, we travel through, uh,
Civil War and a series of constitutional amendments that will end slavery,
promised birthright American citizenship, um, equal voting rights eventually for um, blacks and women.
So. So we end with women's suffrage in 1920.
And that and the main theme of this middle, um, uh, book in the series that The Two Towers,
so to speak, if you're talking and as me is birth equality.
And then the third volume, which I'm, uh, I've begun, um, will take the story from 1920 to the present moment,
and it's tentatively entitled Earth's Best Hope America's Constitution, 1920 to the present.
Now, I wrote these passages long ago, um, before the most recent election.
But you may there may be certain, um, parts that, uh, that seem eerily prescient to.
We'll see. Um, so, as you've heard, uh, from my friend Mohammed, um, uh,
the title of this is the US Constitution as the law of the land maps, military and the Mississippi.
From California to the New York Island. In redwood forests and by Gulf Stream waters, amid diamond deserts and along waving wheat fields,
millions of 20th century and 21st century Americans have proudly sung that this land was made for you and me.
That's a Woody Guthrie song. When and how was it made legally, politically, militarily and diplomatically?
Who made this land and why?
In particular, why did founding era, an antebellum era statesman, tightly bundle modern day South Carolina, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts,
Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Montana, Washington, California, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and almost all places in between.
Into one indivisible nation. One land.
To answer these questions, we shall begin in the spirit of Woody Guthrie's iconic folk song like Pondering This Land itself,
its overall size and shape, its proximity to and distance from other land to adjoining oceans, its beaches,
bays and borders, its mountains, valleys and plains, its forests, fields and deserts, its soil, stones and precious metals,
its temperature and rainfall, its watersheds and drainage basins, and its highways and waterways, both natural and manmade.
This land called America did not always have the basic legal and political shape that it now does.
As historical maps dramatise the nation's boundaries in the 1830, used for the 1850s were especially fluid,
deeply contestable, and in fact sharply contested legally, politically, morally, diplomatically, and militarily.
The current shape of the United States was thus far from predestined, much less manifestly predestined.
So we can just give you a sneak preview of some of the maps. And I'll tell you a little bit more about each of them on this one.
The top line is, um, 1830. Um, this is um, uh, 1839 is historical maps.
This one's 1851. Um.
This one's 1856. Um, and this one is same period, but it's about, um, it shows you, um, watersheds rather than, um, uh, manmade borders.
So that's what we're going to talk about today. How the basic shape of the American landmass emerged as late as 1844.
America looked remarkably different than it does today. Okay, so that's the case.
So that's basically, um, 1839 to, um, I pulled up other places where weren't here.
Uh, yeah, I played through it. So, um, that's America circa 1839, but also circa that, um, 1844.
It is contours back then were workable, militarily defensible, diplomatically supportable,
democratically sustainable, um uh, demographically practicable and commercially viable.
The population centres now known as Houston and Austin,
where no part of this 1844 America rather these then villages where pieces of the independent Lone Star,
Republic of Texas, today's San Francisco Bay area, Big Sur, Yosemite Valley, and Mount Shasta.
Glittering jewels of modern California likewise lay beyond the boundaries of the United States.
These and countless other gems belonged to Mexico.
Then came an extraordinary concatenation of ironic and far from inevitable developments over the course of a quarter century,
led by a slaveholding expansionist, James Capel. Americans forcibly shove the nation's boundaries outward, borders outward.
Though they failed to get the frontiers that Polk and many other expansions truly wanted.
They lasted for Tampico in the Sierra madre, but had to settle for Taos and the Sierra Nevada.
United States of America began as a military arrangement and geography driven alliance of
convenience among 13 smallish and previously separate mainland British colonies in 1776.
These 13 provinces are, though legally distinct and culturally dissimilar, especially on slavery related issues.
Had to join or die. And there's a famous, um, cartoon by, um, Benjamin Franklin and was sort of divided steak.
And it's the world's first cartoon, political cartoon and first viral meme.
Three words join or die. Uh, only um,
united military and diplomatic effort could defeat America's British overlords and win
independence for all 13 whose combined free population amounted to roughly a sixth,
and Greater Britain's, including Ireland, in the 18th, in 1787 to 88.
Americans retooled their fledgling union and commit themselves to a legally indivisible continental system.
Once again, geography and military necessity compelled them to unite this time far more tightly and permanently via a legal merger.
Marriage. If you prefer, prohibiting any subsequent unilateral dissolution during a year long experience in
which Americans up and down the continent intensely debated the proposed constitution,
no leading federalist and no state ratifying convention, not one ever embraced any legal right of unilateral secession.
Rather, continental lists such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton,
and James Madison loudly and repeatedly insisted the document drafted in Philadelphia meant what it said once ratified the Constitution would be,
in the words of the documents, emphatic supremacy Clause.
That's article six, quote, the supreme law of the land, unquote, regardless of anything that an individual state might later try to say or do.
The word land in this key clause was revealing for the deep logic underlying the Constitution's Supremacy Clause,
and underlying the Constitution more generally was geographic.
Each of the 13 original states shared a land border with at least one other state.
Each state also occupied a stretch of Atlantic coastline, except perhaps Pennsylvania, whose crown jewel,
Philadelphia was a major Atlantic seaport just a few miles upriver from the shoreline,
where any state to retain a legal right to secede in the future,
it could at any moment lawfully opt to open its coast and ports to Britain's military or to the military of any other powerful European monarchy,
for that matter. This foreign military could then use the seceding state as a land base for
potentially devastating armed aggression against the Union remaining states.
Such aggression could, quite amazingly, culminate in the complete destruction of America as an independent, self-governing land.
By agreeing to the Constitution,
the people of each ratifying state relinquished any future legal right to do such a murderous and reprehensible thing.
Once these 13 unconditional and interlocking relinquishment snapped into place,
the Union government could henceforth and confidently fortify each state against
a potential European attack short of Benedict Arnold style treason by locals,
which will in fact occur in the 1860s, the Union's outward facing guns in any given state could never be swivelled around and pointed at the bellies.
Hello there. Americans no fought in any American state could ever lawfully become a base of European aggression against Americans in nearby states.
The father of the new nation. Okay. Who's the father of the Constitution? Who were you taught?
James Madison, right? Ridiculous. James Madison is five foot four, and no one's ever heard of him.
Okay. The father of the United States Constitution is, of course, George Washington.
And that's to fans of the great length and about the words that made this.
But you can you could confirm this in five seconds with the Google machine.
Um, if you just looked at historic American newspapers and just put in the phrase father of the Constitution,
and before 1820, it would always be George Washington, never James Madison, the father of the new nation.
George Washington was himself a surveyor, planter, real estate investor, land developer,
battlefield general, and continental commander in chief with a strong feel for geography and geo strategy.
He spent much of his life making and poring over maps,
maps one of the main tools with which Washington and many other Americans at his time saw their world and made sense of it.
Maps of Europe, Asia and Africa told a remarkable story.
Throughout the late 18th century, only two advanced nations outside the Americas,
Switzerland and Britain, could claim extant and enduring regimes of freedom and robust self-government.
Why these two? Because, as Publius noted in key Federalist essays, these two had defensible borders.
Switzerland has inherited, or so it appeared, a God given rampart, the Great Wall of the Alps.
Britain had seemingly left upon a natural moat, the English Channel.
Early American leaders could not replicate the Alps, but if Americans formed a more perfect and indissoluble union,
they could create a kind of island nation reminiscent of Britain.
Indeed, they could better written the America's moat.
The 3000 mile wide Atlantic Ocean would hinder potential European naval invasions far more powerfully than could Britain's moat,
the 20 mile wide English Channel. In fact, Britain's moat was not mere luck.
It was neither purely God-Given nor entirely natural.
Rather, it was made,
or at least legally perfected and edified by flesh and blood politicians and legalists who in the 1700s purposely forged a perfect union.
That's a quote between the formerly separate land bordering kingdoms of England and Scotland before the 1707 Act of Union.
Yeah, that was a different act of union. Um, uh, life in England was less free, less self-governing, more monarchical, more militarised, militarised,
and more precarious given the chronic possibility of invasion from Scotland, aided perhaps by France.
But once a legally perfect, perfect British union was fashioned, that is made.
Britain's north and south could rely primarily on a functional navy.
It could rule the oceanic waves encircling the British island.
Unlike Old England and Old Scotland post union,
Britain no longer had internal land borders that need defence via an intimidating army standing along a fraught frontier.
Crucially, Publius and other shrewd 18th century observers saw professional navies as less threatening to liberty than professional armies.
Navies posed no direct and existential threat to peaceful, self-governing republican folk in the hinterlands at worst.
And then any ship could pound the coastline and its key ports.
Large armies, by contrast, threaten liberty wherever soldiers stood and wherever they could march, killing, raping and pillaging as they went.
As maps of Europe made clear to American revolutionaries.
And just think of Ukraine today, um, as maps of Europe made clear to American revolutionaries,
countries with land borders, especially long land borders without a natural barrier to invasion, tended toward despotism.
Land borders often required large standing armies to guard the frontier,
and dictatorial military leaders could easily use these standing armies to kill and cow civilian subjects and threaten domestic liberty.
A close reading of America's Constitution and Key Fabulous Essays confirms the centrality of these interrelated ideas about land,
water, armies, navies, liberty, England and Scotland.
Article one frowned on the standing army while smiling on the standing navy.
Only the former required a fresh congressional vote every two years.
The Second amendments owed to the militia likewise reflected anxiety about professional armies, but not professional navies.
The Federalist number eight, Alexander Hamilton, writing,
has proved this stress that Britain remained free because it was an island protected by a navy.
America should emulate Britain, said Publius. And in the fabulous Number Five, John Jay, also posing as Publius,
reminded readers that Britain's island nation had in fact been made politically via a conscious legal process in the early 1700s that it created,
quote, an entire and perfect union, unquote, between England and Scotland.
This language set the stage for the Constitution's preamble, whose more perfect union?
That's a quote. Language aims to do much the same thing and for much the same reasons in America.
The 17. Now you're sort of running well. What about to the north?
I know you're thinking that. Okay. Hang on the 1787 American.
You could never perfectly replicate the 1707 British Union,
because land borders of some sort seemed unavoidable on America's northern and southern and western Questionmark flanks.
But so long as these borders live far from America's main population centres, concentrated as these centres were along the Atlantic coast,
such borders could accommodate a Britain emulating and liberty loving republican regime,
relying on professional sailors and local amateur militias for homeland security while disdaining large standing armies.
America's 1776 footprint worked well here.
Strategically, dense forests guarded the northern and eastern edges of Massachusetts's Rural District of Maine, which bordered British Nova Scotia.
British armies could not easily sweep across this rugged terrain to threaten coastal hubs such as Falmouth, modern day Portland, Portsmouth or Boston.
Rather, seafaring British warships would need to set sail from Halifax, the West Indies or London.
Likewise, Georgia's southern marshes and forests shielded America from land based invasion from
the sparsely populated British provinces of East and west Florida further south.
Nor could. Okay, here's what you're especially interested in.
Nor could Britain easily threaten America's coastal strongholds from the Newnes nations, nor the northwestern back country.
So that would be Kingston.
Any any Quebec based, Kingston based or Ontario based invading army would need to slog hundreds of miles through woods and wetlands.
Thin and stretched British supply lines would offer American America's train soldiers, bolstered by local militias, in support of Patriot homesteads,
tempting targets for a counter attack as dramatised by the rebels first big victories in the 1777 Battles of Saratoga in upstate New York.
Not that far from here. 2 or 3 hours. These dramatic victories, alongside diplomat Benjamin Franklin's prestige and charm in Paris,
induced France in 1778 to recognise American sovereignty and independence and to back the colonists with massive infusions,
infusions of money and material.
With this French backing, Americans decisively defeated the British on land and sea at Yorktown in 1781, and the British relented.
The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war by recognising American independence and redrawing the world map.
These two things were inextricably intertwined.
Independence was all about maps. Independent America was now a recognised sovereign over a carefully delineated part of the globe.
The official borders that Franklin negotiated, aided by John Jay and John Adams,
recognised America's claims all the way to the Mississippi River as part of a comprehensive
settlement with various world powers as it jumped into the American conflict as it unfolded.
England also relinquished East and West Florida to Spain,
which had entered the war in 1779 alongside France that had not allied directly with America.
The Floridas were Spain's consolation prize, and its unrealised dream was the return of Gibraltar,
which Britain had wrenched from it in the 1713 piece of wood tract ending war.
Spanish Succession.
In The Federalist number two, Publius suggestively described independent America as a mini Britain of sorts, surrounded by an aqueous circle.
Here's a quote A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together.
As we think about the Saint Lawrence and then the Mississippi, the Great Lakes and and the Mississippi,
but as and then the Atlantic and the Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico.
Um, but I don't see that in the book. Um, but but j but as Jay knew better than anyone, his alleged alleged chain had a missing, crucial missing link.
America did not control the mouth of the Mississippi River,
nor did Americans have an ironclad right to transfer cargo from riverboats to seafaring ships, or vice versa.
At the Spanish controlled mouth, New Orleans and a province then known as West Florida.
In 1786, diplomat J had rashly offered Spain a deal in which trans Appalachian Americans
would forego navigation to and through the Mississippi's mouth for 25 years.
The deal ultimately collapsed, but nonetheless enraged back country folk, especially in Kentucky and Franklin, just part of modern day Tennessee.
It was called Franklin. Back then. The river was frontier, America's lifeline.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson made J.
Publius an honest man in retrospect by completing the water chain and purchasing the lower Mississippi all the way to the ocean from France.
Spain had recently transferred this region to Napoleon, who needed money to finance his vast armies and aggressive land wars in Europe.
Jefferson saw that New Orleans was the key to the continent.
This is a quote there is on the globe.
He wrote in 1802 to his minister of France, one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.
It is New Orleans through which the produce of 3/8 of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility,
well before long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants.
As Lincoln not yet born, might have humorously put the point.
Jefferson in 1802 was in effect saying that he he hoped to have gone on his side, but he must have New Orleans.
Napoleon, in turn, had to have money to finance his bloated European armies and deadly wars of conquest.
The continental European strongmen thus proved willing to sell off not just the key port city at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi,
and not just the historic province of which was a part West Florida,
but also all of France's remaining Louisiana lands, encompassing the river's western watershed,
stretching as far as the north as modern day Canada, and as far west as the crest of the Rocky Mountains.
With one magnificent land and water deal, Jefferson had doubled the size of this land.
He had also secured, as he well understood, vast tracts of especially fertile bottomland.
That's it. That's this is a this is a long quote, um, whose warm and rich soils contrasted with the cold,
stony ground of New England and the tobacco depleted dirt of Old Virginia.
Then came Andrew Jackson, following the footsteps of Washington and Jefferson, first in the spirit of Washington's 1781 victory at Yorktown.
Jackson decisively beat the British in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, then, in the spirit of Jefferson's 1803 purchase of Louisiana,
Jackson pried East Florida from old Europe, wresting control of the peninsula in 1816.
Three years later, President James Monroe and Senate and the Senate diplomatically codified this land grab via the 1819 Adams owner's
treaty with Spain and accord negotiated by Monroe's hard working Secretary of State and eventual successor,
John Quincy Adams.
As Independent America celebrated its 50th birthday in July 1826, the Declaration's project seemed a smashing success in many respects.
The 13 original colonies remained free and independent states,
and we're now reaping substantial benefits from a tight juridical and geostrategic system.
Washington's constitution, they said,
brilliantly preserved and strengthened America's continental freedom and independence from Old World monarchs and militaries.
The 1787 88 making of a more perfect union that's a quote had enabled a common defence.
That's another preamble quote, which in turn had secured the blessings of liberty.
That's yet another preamble quote for a free non-tribal we the people.
That's another preamble quote. And they're free, non enslaved posterity.
That's another preamble, quote, precisely as promised by the Constitution's preamble.
So you know, here's what it's all about. Just one sentence, the preamble.
But it's about. And just to repeat, um, a more perfect union that's going to create common defence and lead to the blessings of liberty, um,
for we the people, um, and our posterity and certain folks are excluded from people, um, the First Nations and, um, enslaved, um, uh, blacks.
Thuggish armies, military dictatorships, hereditary autocracies, wars, coups, imperial authoritarianism, terror, bloodshed, bloodshed, chaos,
censorship and or religious absolutism plagued or would soon plague much of Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia and Europe.
By contrast, America was generally peaceful and prosperous, free and self-governing.
It was a land of regular elections, broad political participation including jury service, peaceful transfer of power, orderly courtrooms,
unrivalled newspaper circulation, robust entrepreneurship risk, technological innovation,
burgeoning centres of learning, and considerable religious freedom.
It had no large standing armies in peacetime.
Relatively few Americans other than Revolutionary War loyalists had fled their native country for greener pastures abroad.
That would be here. But you know, I when I saw Loyalist Highway, I noticed these things as I, you know, I drove in in the other direction.
Free folks from around the globe were starting to stream into the United States.
In his first half century independent, America's free non-tribal population more than quadrupled.
11 new states joined the Union on an equal footing with the 13 originals.
Many more future states gridded the horizon. Thanks especially to the 1781 Battle of Yorktown, the 1783 Treaty of Paris,
the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers which defeated the Native Americans um, the 1795 treaty with England.
The 1796 Pinckney Treaty with Spain. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France.
The 1813 battle of the Thames. That's a little closer to home here.
The 1815 Battle of New Orleans and the 18 1970 treaty.
These military and diplomatic triumphs owed a special debt to the five best known members of the Second Continental Congress,
which had birthed the declaration back in 1776.
Consider first George Washington, one of the Second Congress's two most famous attendees, alongside Benjamin Franklin.
Although the congressionally deputised general had neither drafted nor signed the declaration,
he had immediately ordered that its terse text be read aloud to his troops so that the men would know what they,
his men, would know what they were fighting for.
He then risked his life alongside them, and thus for the declaration at every turn more than anyone else.
He won the war and achieved the Declaration's primary and a valid goal.
American independence later.
Oh, did we need. We need to. We are.
Well, all set for now. If you want to go back to some of these, um, images.
Yeah. We'll do it soon enough, okay?
We don't need to do it for a while. Okay. Thanks.
Um. Uh. More than anyone else.
Washington won the War in Chief during avowed goal American independence.
Later, as America's first president, he opened up the West to American settlement,
first by defeating Britain's Indian allies at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in modern day Ohio,
and then by striking pacifying treaties with both the British James Treaty and the Spanish Pygmies.
Treaty.
Pinckney Street Treaty tasted particularly sweet, guaranteeing a strongly united America navigation access to and through the Mississippi's mouth,
including a right of cargo deposit in New Orleans. The very things the diplomat J.
And a weekly United America had failed to win before Washington's constitution clicked into place.
More than anyone else,
Washington's famed colleague Benjamin Franklin won the peace and back country land of plenty at the diplomatic bargaining table in Paris,
as John Trumbull would later highlight one of his four US Capitol rotunda tableau.
Franklin had helped draft the declaration in the summer of 1776, so John Adams,
who later flanked Franklin at Paris, um, to push for the best deal possible of the treaty table.
In the late 1790s, Adams as America's present backed Haitian slave rebels against Haiti's French overlords.
This slave revolt chastened Napoleon, prompting him to cut his New World losses by,
um, selling off his remaining North American holdings to Jefferson.
Another declaration list, who closed the deal with the assistance of yet another man,
front and centre and in trembles rotunda tableau, Robert R Livingston.
In July 1776, New York's Livingston was one of the five members of the Key Declaration Drafting Committee,
alongside Virginia's Jefferson, Massachusetts's Adams, and Pennsylvania's Franklin.
Um. Connecticut's Roger Sherman gave New Haven's mayor, by the way, and was the fifth member um, in 1802 1803,
Livingston was Jefferson's main man in Paris, inking the Louisiana Purchase in tandem, then America's great founders and great founding documents.
The declaration of 1776. The Constitution of 1787 were ageing well at the declaration's mid-century mark, that is, 1826.
Slavery was the enormous exception. To young Americans otherwise strong performance,
true states north of the Mason-Dixon line had either had either ended slavery outright or put it on a guaranteed path of elimination.
Uh, and by the way, they did so way before Canada. Um, but, um, the proto Canada, um, uh uh uh,
and these states had done so in harmony with northern state constitutions that in general
closely tracked the declaration's soaring language of birth equality and inalienable rights.
So should the North is getting rid of slavery immediately, beginning in 1776.
But states south of Pennsylvania had yet to follow this lead,
and the Constitution had myopically failed to induce or oblige slavery's ultimate extinction.
Against this background. Then let us ponder a standard map of America circa 1836.
And that's the first. Let's just go back to that.
It's the top one. That's 1830. America's 1830 footprint was remarkably different from its modern day outline.
There was no Texas and California and nothing in between the two.
Yet the 1830 map reflected a workable set of legal partitions.
America's land borders were defensible, and the juridical lines governing North America's main waterways likewise made good sense.
19th century land travel could be excruciatingly difficult and expensive cargo and people could often move most easily and cheaply by floating,
sailing across an ocean or down a river, or even towering up a river or canal in the bay,
or as paddles, poles, ropes, towpaths, mules, lock sails, wind and steam.
In 1830, America controlled virtually the entire watershed of the Mississippi from its mouth to its sources in every direction.
The most strategically important exception lay in a thin sliver of northern Texas that drained into the Red River,
which formed the border between the United States and Mexico. So see the bottom plate here?
Um, and you see how it corresponds pretty darn well to the map of 1830 America.
If you want to take a look at. The bottom line is modern water flows.
Um, uh, um, and when I look at watersheds, um, this is a watershed map.
Um, there's only one teeny, teeny tiny sliver of the Mississippi watershed that in the United States, sits above modern day Montana.
This little, um, little bit of, uh, rectangle out there, and just that would be, you know, a up or something.
Um, so, um, but that's it. Um, but, uh, the entire watershed of the mighty Mississippi.
Um. So. Um, but a little bit of modern day Texas.
So we have this below the watershed. And, uh, so that's going to be a bit of an issue.
Um. The watershed boundary.
Um. The Mississippi River and its tributaries were antebellum America's life sustaining arterial system.
Let me go back to CC just how important Mississippi is, and this history should be deeply comforting to you because it's not in Canada.
And, you know, we're perfectly fine. You know, that Canadian that.
But we but we must have environments. It's safe. Okay.
The Mississippi River and its tributaries were antebellum America's life sustaining arterial system,
the nation's essential transportation spine, the indispensable conduit of commerce and communication in the heartland.
I love this quote. In 1829, President Jackson told then secretary of state and future its future handpicked successor.
Um, uh, um, uh, Martin Van Buren.
That quote, the God of the universe had intended this great valley to belong to one nation, unquote.
In 1830. Americans thus had enough good land and enough good water, and in the right places,
and with no worrisome internal impediments or looming external threats.
Americans east of the Appalachians had excellent access to the Atlantic.
Americans west of the Appalachians had good access to the Mississippi and its major tributaries in all directions,
threading through the Mohawk Valley Gap in the Appalachian Range between the Catskills and the Adirondacks.
The recently completed Erie Canal nicely linked American's eastern and western water systems,
enabling people and cargo to float inland from Manhattan to Albany to Buffalo to Chicago to New Orleans, or vice versa.
True a few frontiers. Circa 1830, needed tidying up and would in fact soon be tidied up by a pair of Anglo-American treaties.
The northern Maine border was unclear,
and Britain and America had not yet agreed how to partition a large and sparsely populated Pacific Northwest region,
but the two nations were then jointly occupied. So you see, you know that.
And you know that the red that extends into modern day B.C.
Um. Okay. Uh.
Um. In 1842, the Webster Ashburton Treaty would settle the main line,
and in 1846 American Britain would divide the northwest by extending to the Pacific the
existing 49th parallel border between the United States and British North America.
On America's southern flank. The international borders in place in 1830,
closely tracked a relatively clean division between America's main waterways on the one hand and northwest Mexico's on the other.
And that's why you compare these two colour plates.
And there the similarities just seem too remarkable to me.
Some of the kind of watersheds division, the similarities between these two schemes are striking.
Okay. From sound, from source to mouth, America generally controlled the rivers feeding into the Gulf.
So I just I wrote this a long time ago. I just said the Gulf. I didn't think of what.
Okay. America generally controlled the river's feeding into into o Gulf and Atlantic harbours from New Orleans through New England,
plus most of the Columbia Snake River watershed in the Pacific Northwest, flowing past modern day Portland to the seaside settlement of Astoria.
Jefferson and other utopians had once dreamed of a Mississippi Missouri that the Mississippi, Missouri, and the Columbia, uh,
snake River systems might easily connect via a Northwest Passage portage route that explorers
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were sent to discover and map in the early 1800s.
But it turns out it's not so easy to connect those two river systems.
In turn, Mexico in 1830 generally control the Colorado River watershed and various river systems south of the Red River,
an important waterway that today forms the border between Oklahoma and Texas.
American, 1830 did not imperiously need Texas or California for that matter.
I grew up in California, both of which were then comfortably part of northern Mexico.
So what happened? Why did America's southern and western border shifts so dramatically between 1830 and 1855?
I'm gonna skip a whole bunch. Right. Tell you why that happened. Slavery turns out to be part of a story.
Oh, and there's gold in California. So, you know, you put together, you know, slavery and gold and things happen.
So you have to read the book for the details. Um.
Uh, so, uh, here's a second section from the book in early 18th, back to maps.
In early 1837, shortly before handing Martin Van Buren,
President Andrew Jackson announced the United States now recognised the Texas Republic's declaration as pretences to be a free,
sovereign and independent Westphalian nation state. So basically, the northern province of Texas, um, breaks away from uh, um,
or purports to declare independence from, uh, Mexico, um, and purports to create the Lone Star Republic.
Um, and it's a slave holding regime, these American expatriates, um, uh,
who are pro-slavery and they write their own little Declaration of Independence in 1836.
Um, uh, one of the people doing that is a man named Thomas Jefferson Rusk.
So it's it's it's an interesting document in between the 1776 declaration and the confederate of,
uh, and the Confederate declarations, um, in the Southland in, in 1861.
So they purport to be their own independent regime.
Um, and in 1837, on his way out, Andrew Jackson recognises them as, uh, an independent Westphalian sovereign.
This, um, quick action by Andrew Jackson, a close ally, a fellow Tennessean and now Texan, Sam Houston, was a slap in Mexico's face.
Its government still claimed sovereignty over the Texas province and its rebellious residents.
No major European power had yet accepted Texas's declaration.
Britain, in particular, seethed at the notion that, independent of an independent Texas having just ended slavery in 1833,
um, uh, at great expense to themselves and the nearby Caribbean,
Britons hated to see Texas racing in the opposite direction,
proudly reintroducing slavery into a professed republic after the Mexican government had formerly,
if imperfectly, abolished this peculiar institution.
So Mexico has ended slavery, Texans revolt and can reinstitute slavery.
Britain has gotten rid of slavery in the Caribbean.
It still has it in the Indian subcontinent. Okay.
Salon. Um, and if modern day in Sri Lanka, um, and if Texas slave plantations.
Okay. Uh. Hang on. Um. And if Texas slave plantations in future years ended up producing cotton on a mass scale for
a world market more cheaply than British Caribbean manors could using only free labour,
this market advantage would add economic insult to moral injury.
Jackson's prompt recognition contrasted dramatically with America's treatment of another self-proclaimed New World republic,
southeast of Texas, and a ferociously bloody slave revolt.
Black Haitians had won their de facto independence from France no later than 1804.
France itself recognised the black led republican government of Haiti in 1825.
Britain did the same in 1833, but no American president followed suit, and none would do so until Lincoln in 1862.
By 1840, American maps, the New World shifted.
It's now been absolutely certain leading up here. A sizeable chunk of the North American continent.
A quadrant west of the Sabine River and north of the racist River was now no longer depicted as northeast Mexico.
See some here. Just to remind you, it's northeast Mexico.
And now that was 1830. 1840.
Um, it's this separate thing. Um.
Uh, rather. Now it's Texas, a new country with its own map colour wedged between the United States and Mexico.
The best maps of the late antebellum era were extraordinary technological achievements and educational instruments.
A good school teacher could and did use a great atlas to teach pupils not merely geography,
but also history, lore, math, astronomy, anthropology, and more.
Let us then carefully consider the extraordinary map as shown in this colour plate.
Much of Mitchell's um. Uh, school.
Um. Atlas. That's what this is from Mitchell School Atlas, published in Philadelphia in 1839.
Um, uh um, uh, so this map is, uh, is more than a stunning work of art and science, though surely that was also a political,
legal and diplomatic document of sorts that awarded sovereign status to Texas as an all caps
in conformity with the formal juridical stance of the United States in the late 1830s,
even though most of the other world powers had yet to recognise Texas as a true nation state.
The map likewise awarded in its colour scheme at least all of the northwest region jointly held by Britain in the United States to, well, us.
This is written for an American audience, so it's giving it to the US and is upon us and us.
Americans seeing the world. The lens of this map would likely be more inclined to holler 5440 or fight in the years ahead.
And if the map were shaded differently, Americans would eventually settle for much less than the Oregon Treaty of 1846,
which drew the border at the 49th parallel, nearly 400 miles shy of the 5440 line.
Though this accord gave President Polk with less than he had hoped for, um, and that his loudest expansionist backers had clamoured for it,
freed him to concentrate his energies and his military on Mexico without fear of becoming embroiled in a two front war against multiple enemies.
The 1839 Mitchell Map included the names and locations of various Native American tribes,
but not in capital letters, which the map reserved for full sovereigns as depicted here.
Tribes such as the Sioux and the Pawnee.
If you look at carefully, you'll see the words that when Pawnee had no formal international law borders, no distinct international law colours.
Though many tribes were treaty partners of the United States, America generally forbade these tribes from treating with any other Westphalian nation,
and in turn, the other major Westphalian nations generally abided by this American edict.
Thus, America's indigenous tribes. We're not in 1840, nor would they later become full Westphalian sovereigns.
So they don't sit in the United Nations today, for example.
The historical facts mattered hugely in 1840 American history, and we matter even more hugely in ensuing decades.
No 1840s reader saw the world through a map such as this.
One could miss the significance of international frontiers.
These frontiers literally shaped the world, or at least shaped how mapmakers and map readers imagined and experienced the world.
Consider also how Mitchell's 1839 map depicted and analysed land and water of various sorts in both drawing, in both his drawing and its legend.
Explanatory notes. And I'm almost done here, by the way, the Atlas proudly stressed the astonishing length of the Mississippi.
You'll see there's all sorts of information here about the length of the Mississippi and other things,
as at more than 4000 miles was one of the world's longest riparian systems.
Unlike the Nile and the Amazon, the Mississippi lay almost entirely within the boundaries of a single nation.
Building on the Mississippi River nationalism of Democrats Andrew Jackson and Stephen Douglas, and Whig Daniel Webster, among many others.
Republican Abraham Lincoln, which repeatedly emphasised the key Mississippi,
this key Mississippi River fact and explaining his resolute rejection of attempted secession.
Whereas the Mississippi River's long liquid spine.
In America's heartland was a great national boon. So to the Atlas thing was a short land neck far from America's southern border.
Only 36 miles separated the Atlantic and Pacific.
Yes. The Savannah. Yeah. Let's point to everything. Might this in that becomes important in future years.
If you look right here, you know, in the map that actually says get out of here.
I mean, whatever the problem. Yeah. Yes.
So right here this is 36 miles okay.
So they're right there actually the. There is six months to.
So you're thinking about this stuff. Remember I wrote this a long time ago.
About 30 years ago. When Congress assembled.
Okay. So and they asked just might this of course, volume three I'm going to tell you about, you know, all sorts of stuff in the modern era.
Okay. Last little segment. This is the flash forward again.
And this now we're in the middle of the Civil War, when Congress assembled on December 1st, 1862,
to commence a new annual session, President Abraham Lincoln had much to communicate to his fellow citizens in the legislature.
Most of the message elaborated those ideas about secession and slavery and secession.
He reiterated verbatim his inaugural address language that how, unlike an unhappily married couple,
the North and the South could not physically separate, but of course bored.
So he says, like we're stuck with each other. We gotta, you know, be one nation.
But of course, borders between separate countries punctuated the planet.
If Lincoln could abide a border between the United States and British lands to the north, and I assure you he could.
Okay. And a border between the United States and Mexico could be found.
And I assure you, we could. Then why not a border between, say, Illinois and Kentucky?
Between Kentucky and Tennessee? Part of Lincoln's answer had always been originalist.
He was an original. He believed in original intent stuff. Um.
Um, and remains the Americans in all the states in the founding had agreed.
In the Constitution to an indivisible union. Canada and Mexico had never agreed to join this project.
The Lone Star Republic, Texas, for its part, had agreed to join the project in the 1840s with full knowledge of the U.S. indivisibility.
So there's that. As a young man, Abe had travelled down the Mississippi River to its mouth in Louisiana and then back up to Illinois.
It also travelled along some of its major Eastern and Western theatres.
By the way he comes from, he understands this better than anyone, as he comes from that part of the world where all the in this together.
This is the Tennessee River. This is the Cumberland River.
Um, this is the Ohio, um, uh, River.
Um, this is the Wabash, the Illinois, the upper Missouri, the upper Mississippi, Missouri.
They all come together basically in central and southern Illinois, which is where it was from.
Um, and it's also from Kentucky on the other side. So that's where you come from and where the confluence of these great, um, rivers combined.
Come together. Um. Um.
He had also travelled along some of his major eastern Western theatres. Indelibly shaped by these early experiences,
he now added a powerful geographic twist to his initial presidential pronouncements a grand meditation on the law of the land.
Moving beyond this more abstract inaugural address.
He placed explicit and extended emphasis on his own home base in the Midwest and its arterial lifeline, the Mississippi River.
This is his quote. That portion of the Earth's surface, which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States,
is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more.
The great Interior region, bounded east by the Alleghenies, north by the British Dominions that would be long.
West by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets,
and which includes part of Virginia, part of Tennessee, all of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois,
Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and the territories of Dakota, Nebraska,
and part of Colorado already has above 10 million people and will have 50 million within 50 years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake.
It contains more than a third of the country owned by the United States.
Certainly more than a million square acres, a few million square miles.
And yet this region has no seacoast taxes, no ocean anywhere.
As part of one nation, its people now find and may forever find their way to Europe, by New York, to South America.
And that's, you know, the Erie Canal and Chicago, the Great Lakes, um, down the Niagara and, um, uh, the Erie Canal.
Um, to South America and Africa by New Orleans as the Mississippi and to Asia by San Francisco.
Remember, he's building a transcontinental railroad but separate our common country into two nations.
Um. And every man in this great interior region is thereby cut off from some one or more of these outlets,
not perhaps by a physical barrier, but by embarrassing and owner's trade regulations.
That would be tariffs.
These outlets east, west and south are indispensable to the well-being of the people inhabiting and to inhabit this vast interior region.
True to themselves, they will never ask where a line of separation shall be, but will avow rather that it shall be no such line.
Last paragraph. Strikingly, in Lincoln's prose, America's land itself becomes metaphorically a human actor with its own needs and demands.
Quote. Our national strife springs not from the land we inhabit.
Not from our national homestead.
There is no possible severing of this land, but would multiply and not mitigate evils among us in all its adaptations and aptitudes.
It now is the land itself, both to man's union and a porous separation.
In fact, it is. The land would ere long for reunion.
However much blood and treasure the separation might have cost.
Now remember I wrote all this long time ago, but these are little and, uh, sneak previews of the new book, and I'm happy to.
And I'm very grateful that you invited me here. And I'm happy to, to talk with you about what we've just seen and heard.
Thank you.